ASUREXE COVID-19 READINESS GUIDE

Asurexe’s team members are ready to help you implement this guide into a detailed action plan that can expedite your readiness and improve your success during COVID-19. This guide covers critical areas of business for returning to operations.

PEOPLE-CENTRIC WORKPLACE STRATEGIES

Every business is being forced to adapt and evolve in order to meet new demands. Are you taking into consideration your people’s comfort level for returning to work? In other words, people need to feel that their health & safety is not being compromised by returning to work and putting themselves at risk of exposure. We believe that empathic, people-centric management and workplace strategies are critical to ensure an effective return-to-work transition. These strategies are aimed at helping you balance your priorities between providing a safe work environment, supporting personal wellbeing and maximizing performance and business results.

1. Optimize Workplace Health & Well-being:
An immediate requirement is to reinforce and provide reminders for adherence to personal hygiene practices and provide up to date Covid-19 information. You can also take the opportunity to educate, empower and create a culture of well-being. Focusing on health prevention and designing a comprehensive ecosystem with simple self-care programs that promote healthy & sustainable lifestyle habits change.

2. Review Relevant HR Policies & Procedures:
There are several HR policies and procedures that we recommend to revisit or create in order to provide clarity and guidance to your staff, such as Working Remotely, Staffing & Planning, Hiring, Layoffs, Leave, Employee Assistance, Shift Work, Flexible/Rotational Work Schedules, Performance Measures & KPIs, PPEs, Anti-Discrimination, Social Media, etc. Also, have you considered what support you will be providing from soft skills to technological tools required to help facilitate the effectiveness and efficiency of the accompanying procedures?

3. Support Stress & Anxiety Management:
Empathize that staff members are maybe experiencing an unprecedented amount of psychological stressor with balancing their health, work and family responsibilities. Consider helping them reduce the emotional, physical and mental stress by providing multi-faceted evidence-based support that aims at recognizing stressors and being able to manage them.

4. Build Personal Resilience:
The uncertainty of these times has accelerated behavioural health issues, so it is critical that you are aware of your employees’ mental health needs. We recommend building emotional resilience by providing effective tools, techniques for building resilience capacity, self-regulation, comfort with ambiguity, and improving personal and professional outcomes.

5. Recalibrate Your People Strategy:
Ensure that your people strategy is aligned to and facilitates the current strategic direction to address both short-term priorities and future requirements. You may need to revisit the strategy and leverage your workforce experience, encourage learning, unlearning and recalibrating of critical skillsets and work ethics.

LEADERSHIP

How can you not just recover, but reinvigorate your organization? In this new world of doing business, leadership will have a fundamental impact on the business today and in the future of this changed state. We are encouraging leaders to continually evolve and develop their skills in all fronts to ensure that their actions and their thought leadership is not only for the current times but for the changed future.

1. EXHIBIT CLEAR AND COHESIVE COMMUNICATION:
Platitudes must be avoided. Internal communication should minimize nuance and clearly outline expectations, goals, and any real or perceived roadblocks. External communication should reassure without providing unrealistic or empty commitments.

2. MAKE ADJUSTMENTS TO EFFECTIVELY MANAGE A HYBRID WORKFORCE:
Do away with assumptions. With remote teams, consistent and meaningful communication is key to productivity. This also means being respectful of set working hours to help reinforce a proper work/life balance.

3. CREATE AND SUSTAIN A MOTIVATING WORK ENVIRONMENT:
Take steps to ensure your team knows they are valued and respected. You achieve this by being personally invested in the goals and successes of each individual and incentivizing them accordingly to bring out their best.

4. LEAD WITH EMPATHY AND EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE:
Now more than ever, being cognizant of the individual challenges facing your team is paramount. Embracing flexibility while understanding everyone’s circumstances are unique will build a stronger resolve and a renewed commitment to excellence.

5. PIVOT FROM THE CRISIS OF UNCERTAINTY TO A CULTURE OF PREPAREDNESS:
Use this situation as an opportunity to fully assess the success metrics for your organization. What policies and processes are obsolete or poorly executed, what infrastructure is critical to daily operations, where are you most exposed to risk; these areas should be your core focus going forward.

6. REACQUAINT YOURSELF WITH THE POWER OF “NO”:
See “no” as the chance to reframe a negotiation, rather than merely a lost opportunity. Customers will be more assured of your ability to provide quality service, and you’ll ensure you can adequately deliver without putting further strain on your organization.

CUSTOMERS

Managing and exceeding customer expectations has become extremely challenging in today’s uncertain environment. There are several different strategies organizations have used in the past few weeks to maintain and manage customer expectations. Based on our internal research, we feel the strategies below are the most important for business leaders to focus on.

1. ESTABLISH PROACTIVE COMMUNICATION CHANNELS WITH THE CUSTOMERS:
Establish proactive communication channels with the customers: It is not only important to communicate day-to-day operational information like business hours, days of operations, etc. but also other critical information like staffing levels, product shortages, capacity limitations etc.

2. ALIGN PRODUCTION/STAFFING PLANS TO ACCOUNT FOR THE UNCERTAINTY IN FUTURE DEMAND:
Determine optimum staffing levels based on a weekly forecast and adjust them based on daily demand.

3. OPTIMIZE YOUR REVENUE STREAMS:
Review your revenue targets, identify streams that are winners, eliminate the losing streams. Involve your top revenue-generating customers in your new forecasts and drive your costs associated with these offerings and align them. Initiate the discussion with your customers that make up the majority of your revenue streams.

4. CONDUCT COSTING & PRICING VALIDATION FOR ALL PRODUCTS/SERVICES:
Thoroughly understand the changes in the raw products/materials cost and make pricing changes accordingly.

5. OFFER FLEXIBILITY WITH PAYMENT TERMS:
Use this situation as an opportunity to assess the success metrics for your organization. What policies and processes are obsolete or poorly executed, what infrastructure is critical to daily operations, where are you most exposed to risk; these areas should be your core focus going forward.

6. RE-EVALUATE SLAs:
Monitor your performance against the current SLAs and revise them as appropriate based on the new environment. Seek alignment with the customers before implementing the new SLAs.

7. CONDUCT A HIGH-LEVEL AUDIT OF KEY CONTRACTUAL TERMS:
Look for contracts that impose penalties on your business, see if they are valid and identify opportunities to trade penalties for other services.

SUPPLIERS

Suppliers play an important role in your business supply chain. Ensuring they are part of your overall strategic plan of going back to business in a successful way will pay dividends in the long term. Now is a great time to ensure you are building a strong relationship with your vendors/suppliers.

1. COLLABORATE WITH YOUR SUPPLIERS:
Monitor the supplier scorecard closely and work with the supply-based to improve performance.

2. EVALUATE YOUR SUPPLIER CONTRACTS:
Reconsider your long-term strategy and look at adjusting for short-term strategy. 6-12 months horizon is a good timeframe to consider.

3. REVIEW YOUR SLAs:
Look for what you can offer your vendor as ease of doing business. Your business may need new or different SLAs.

4. REVIEW THE PAYMENT TERMS AND THE PRICING:
Look for opportunities that can benefit your business and your supplier’s business.

5. AIM FOR A WIN-WIN STRATEGY:
Avoid using aggressive one-sided negotiation strategies instead look for common benefits.

6. RESEARCH NEW OPPORTUNITIES TO WORK ON:
Assess the key changes in your industry and identify new opportunities to do business on.

OPERATION

There has never been a time where operations and all its elements have been more important in business. Execution is the pinnacle of success a business’s future success. We agree that people are an essential part of the operation, and without people, nothing will move forward. We also agree that the need to make sure all areas of operations flow seamlessly. Below are some of the key strategies to look at to avoid any operational hiccups during these challenging times.

1. OVER-COMMUNICATE ACROSS ALL MANAGEMENT LEVELS AT SET FREQUENCIES:
Communication ranks number one in making sure the business is producing what it needs to for current demand future demands.

2. REVIEW THE TARGETS ON THE KEY OPERATIONAL KPIs:
Ensure that targets are reasonable and achievable. Avoid employee burnout at all costs. Revisit your KPIs and introduce new ones that are suitable for your new environment.

3. RIGHT-SIZE YOUR TEAMS:
Ensure you are allocating appropriate resources to the critical tasks.

4. DESIGN A SCALABLE STAFFING PLAN TO MEET FLUCTUATION IN DEMAND/WORK:
Ensure your operation can ramp up with ease and without stressing your team members or frustrate your customers. Be ready when the economy runs at full speed.

5. OFFER FLEXIBLE SHIFT SCHEDULES:
Allow some flexibility to your employees and be accommodating to their personal needs. Move work around shifts based on staffing levels to maintain productivity.

6. ENSURE EMPLOYEE SAFETY:
Provide employees with all the protective wear as outlined by the health officials. Evaluate your work area and safety protocols and review the new required procedures.

7. RE-DESIGN PROCESSES THAT ARE BROKEN:
List all the changes necessary to make and take inventory of the processes that need to be changed to accommodate changes upstream and downstream in your activities.

FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT

These uncertain times require us to look at our financials with a different lens. There are several strategies business leaders can formulate during this downtime to tackle the uphill road ahead. These eight such strategies that we think you need to focus on to achieve financial stability in an effective and structured manner. These strategies are aimed towards increasing your revenue or decreasing your costs.

1. RECALIBRATE YOUR CASH FLOW:
Get a good grip on where your cash flow stands and where it is likely to go in the future. Assess the impact of new tax legislation on cash-flow.

2. LAUNCH A COST-REDUCTION DRIVE IN YOUR COMPANY AT ALL LEVELS:
Identify the cost drivers in your organizations and challenge your teams to reduce or eliminate non-value-added activities.

3. OPTIMIZE YOUR REVENUE STREAMS:
Review your revenue targets, identify streams that are winners, eliminate the losing streams. Involve your top revenue-generating customers in your new forecasts and drive your costs associated with these offerings and align them.

4. RE-ALIGN YOUR MARKETING EFFORTS:
Build strategies that involve your sales and marketing teams to focus on most value-added activities in your business offerings.

5. FOCUS ON YOUR UNIQUE VALUE PROPOSITION (USP):
Identify your target customer base, identify the products that differentiate your company and invest your resources and energy on what you are best known for.

6. RATIONALIZE YOUR PRODUCTS & SERVICES:
Shed off some of the nice to compete in products & services; these areas are probably costing you more than you think.

7. RE-EVALUATE YOUR SHORT AND LONG-TERM STRATEGIES:
Re-align your five-year strategy and shrink it to three-year increments. Depending on your industry, you may only be able to look that far ahead.

8. INNOVATE AGGRESSIVELY:
Fast forward to 2030 and look at how your business will still be operating and what new services and products you will be able to offer.

BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN (BCP)

Whether you have formalized or not a Business Continuity Plan, during the pandemic, you have managed an unformalized business crisis for your company. Attempting to resume your activity and returned to normal, it is time to retrospect on what happened, capitalize on the experience to build a robust plan for future events or similar types of risks you may encounter. Many areas of business risk require expert advice to ensure you are addressing all aspects of business risks.

1. HAVE YOU IDENTIFIED CRITICAL OR MOST ESSENTIAL ACTIVITIES TO MAINTAIN DURING CRISES:
Can you list processes or tasks from most critical to less critical?

2. HAVE YOU ASSEMBLED A CRISIS MANAGEMENT TEAM?:
How did you distribute roles to manage a crisis? Was it efficient for decision making and for execution? Was the communication efficient with internal and external entities?

3. HOW DID YOU DECIDED TO RETURN TO NORMAL?:
Was it abrupt or a step by step approach following different phases?

4. WERE YOU PREPARED FOR A REMOTE WORK STRATEGY:
as a solution for a pandemic scenario, did you test this strategy? Did you have problems with capacity when adding more remote workers?

5. ARE YOU PREPARED FOR OTHER DISASTER SCENARIOS?:
Including a cybersecurity attack, have you prepared other strategies for business recovery?

6. HAVE YOU THOUGHT OF LINKING YOUR BCP TO RISK MANAGEMENT PROGRAM?:
liking your security, IT SLAs and risk indicators?

7. DO YOU HAVE A FORMALIZED SECURITY AND BUSINESS CONTINUITY POLICY:
Review policies and plans to make sure they are up to date.

FACILITY MANAGEMENT

Employers will need to make their own determinations as to whether and when they will reopen their physical workplaces, keeping in mind their duties to their employees and stakeholders. Having a rational and documented plan in place for reopening will be necessary to ensure a smooth transition back to work. This guide outlines the key considerations for employers in putting together such plans.

1. LIMITING THE NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES IN THE WORKPLACE:
Encouraging employees to continue working from home if they are able. Allowing only a minimum amount of staff to return to the physical workplace. Implementing staggered or rotating returns to reduce the number of employees present at the workplace at any one time.

2. ENCOURAGING PHYSICAL DISTANCING AT WORK:
Limiting entrance and exit points. Consider whether emergency evacuation plans need to be updated to address changes to access points. Rearranging workspaces and floor plans, including increasing separation between desks, workstations, and furniture or fixtures in common areas such as lunchrooms, meeting rooms, waiting rooms, and washrooms.

3. LIMITING PHYSICAL CONTACT AND MINIMIZING INTERPERSONAL INTERACTIONS:
Installing physical barriers between workers or between workers and third parties. Removing all communal items that cannot be easily cleaned, such as newspapers, magazines, and candy bowls. Reducing or eliminating the sharing of tools and equipment (such as keyboards, pens and other tools) between employees or if sharing is required, providing a solution for employees to disinfect tools and equipment between uses.

4. WORKER AND WORKPLACE HYGIENE:
Promoting regular and thorough hand-washing and good hygiene by employees and other individuals present in the workplace.

5. PREVENTING SICK EMPLOYEES FROM BEING AT WORK:
Preventing symptomatic employees from attending the workplace by developing written policies and procedures employees must follow if they are sick or suspect they have come into contact with someone diagnosed with COVID-19. This could involve requiring employees to complete a daily “fit for work” questionnaire or COVID-19 self-assessment prior to attending the workplace.

6. IMPLEMENTING APPROPRIATE POLICIES:
Limit nonessential travel to other locations or worksites. Ensure that policies are kept up to date and being followed, for example, through regular audits to ensure employees are maintaining an appropriate physical distance.

7. EVALUATE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES REGULARLY:
Review policies, practices and procedures regularly and assess whether they are achieving the desired outcome.

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