Examples of Smart Business Adaptations amid COVID-19

Discover how businesses around the world have thrived amidst the pandemic. Explore innovative strategies, digital transformations, and resilience in the face of adversity. Learn from these inspiring examples of smart business adaptations during COVID-19.

The rapid global spread of COVID-19 has quickly eclipsed other recent epidemics in both size and scope. Additionally, to the deadly human toll and therefore, the disruption to many people’s lives, the economic damage is already significant and far-reaching.

In the face of specific challenges and a still-uncertain set of risks, business leaders are rightly concerned about how their companies are going to be affected and what they need to try to next. Within the heat of the instant, there are a variety of lessons from history, which will be applied now.

We’ve pooled the insights of Deloitte leaders in affected areas around the world to supply practical ideas for chief executives and their leadership teams in taking appropriate action.

Design from the heart

An essential focus during a crisis is to acknowledge the impact the uncertainty has on the folks that drive the organization. At such times, emotional intelligence is critical. In everything they are doing during a crisis, resilient leaders express empathy and compassion for the human side of the upheaval—for example, acknowledging how radically their employees’ priorities have shifted far away from work to worrying about family health, accommodating extended school closures, and absorbing the human angst of life-threatening uncertainty.

Resilient leaders also encourage their people to adopt a relaxed and systematic approach to whatever happens next.

The priority should be safeguarding workers, ensuring their immediate health and safety, followed by their economic well-being. A survey of human capital policies and practices in China at the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak, conducted by Deloitte China in January 2020, revealed the following steps companies and not-for-profit organizations were considering in response:

Ninety percent said that it had been an urgent requirement to supply their employees with remote and versatile work options.

Companies in industries facing the most critical constraints on providing flexible and remote working options—such as energy, resources, and industrials—were that specialize in delivering more reliable physical protection within the sort of cleaner and safer work environments and individual protective equipment.

More than half government and public service entities were that specialize in addressing employees’ psychological stress.

Designing for the customer’s heart starts with understanding how that heart may have changed dramatically from what you perceived before. Consider that in crisis, customers often revert down Maslow’s Hierarchy of must basic desires like safety, security, and health.

How does the character and tone of your customer communications and therefore, the sensitivity of your customer experience get to shift within the midst of the COVID-19 crisis? Customers relish an equivalent kindness and beauty toward them that you show your workers—they are struggling through the crisis, too, and expect empathy. Simple things are often big things.

UberEats is asking customers if they need food left at the door instead of gone by hand. Many airlines have emailed customers to explain their enhanced plane decontamination efforts. Some restaurants have encouraged their wait staff to use hand sanitizer to assuage patron concerns visibly.

Yet for the sake of these same employees and customers—as well as creditors and investors—resilient leaders must stay vigilantly focused on protecting financial performance during and thru the crisis … and making hard, fact-based decisions.

Unlocking technology to deliver education

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in educational institutions across the planet being compelled to harness suddenly. It utilizes the suite of available technological tools to make content for remote learning for college kids altogether sectors.

Educators across the planet are experiencing new possibilities to try to things differently and with greater flexibility leading to potential benefits inaccessibility to education for college kids across the globe.

Be patient in securing investments.

Every business needs capital to run, and therefore, the question that crosses the mind of each founder/entrepreneur in these difficult times is from where they’re going to get the capital. Many funds have enough money to deploy for the coming years and that they might not recoil from it.

However, we’d witness a dip in VC/HNI funding within the short run. Investors are going to be more vigilant and should take longer than usual to form funding decisions.

Communicate transparently together with your customers

We are beating this together; therefore, the ideal way is to remain transparent together with your consumers about what your business goes through. Customers can empathize with companies facing a crisis, as long because the communication is seamless. Communicate with customers to know their perception of the product/solution offered by you.

Maintaining a healthy relationship with contracted parties.

Understandably, it’d be challenging to disburse vendors/suppliers during the lockdown. However, it might be helpful to offer your vendors, suppliers, landlords, etc. sufficient notice just in case there’s getting to be any delay in payments so that they will even be prepared and there’s no bitterness during this already difficult time.