What has COVID-19 taught us?

There are two problems with this approach…

1 –

If we strive to return to all our pre pandemic actions and ambitions, then the whole thing has been just a negative impact that has knocked us off course and held us back. If however, we take the perspective of looking at it as an acceleration of change, being forced to confront waste and inefficiency, a chance to innovate and reinvent, a catalyst to embracing technology and new communication methods, then there can be a great deal of positives to take from this awful experience.

2 –

The second, and perhaps greater problem, is that if we don’t learn from events, we will be unprepared for the next one. Whilst we hope it won’t be another health pandemic, we may well see cyber-attacks, increase environmental impacts, technology shifts or even social change that we will need to see, understand and react to.

Some of the issues we have all dealt with are cultural changes, such as a willingness to meet via video links instead of face to face, something few of us were comfortable with in 2019, but which almost every one of us will have experience in the last 18 months to 2 years. Whilst there is no doubt that face to face is still a preference for most people, those that just abandon the video communication option altogether will be missing a trick.

Some issues will be technology changes. Electronic document transfer and signature reduces paper and accelerates timescales. Are you able to deal with contractual issues without printing a document?

We cannot of course ignore the operational aspects of the pandemic impact. Working from home or working in the office will be a difficult choice for some businesses, and no choice for others. Obvious cost savings must be weighed up against customer service impacts, the value of collaboration and knowledge sharing, and the mental wellbeing of people working in increasing isolation. We will share experiences and what others are doing, so that we can learn from the upside and manage the downside of these changes.

This page therefore includes content on a wide range of issues and considers what we may have learned from the Pandemic experience, and what we must strive to do in the future to maintain the momentum for change, innovation and improvement.
We have tried to keep these to obvious specific issues, but at the heart of the issue is the simple choice to learn from challenging experiences and change the way forward, or to seek to revert to old habits as fast as you can.

We perhaps quote Darwin far too often, but his regularly misquoted statement really resonates right now. He is often regarded as talking about the ‘survival of the fittest’, what he actually said was that it is ‘those that are most adaptable to change’ that survive.

So we want to ensure that all the things we learned during the pandemic, and all the ways businesses adapted to the challenges, are not lost as we return to some sense of normality.

A disaster recovery plan outlines scenarios of activities that can impact or halt your business from running. Each scenario is evaluated  with an agreed set f procedures, tools and policies on what to do to quickly resume work. It is then (normally) saved and rarely looked at again (we are generalising here).

What Covid-19 has taught us is that the ability to rapidly adapt impacts how successful you will be when dealing with a challenging time. This is why businesses now need a real time, team of people who can respond quickly.

Watch our video to find out more.

Like every business we have also made changes to adapt during the pandemic. We thought this would be a great opportunity to share with you what we have done and what we are doing now.

Check out our infographic How have we adapted – Infographic

Every business has processes and systems to follow to run a smooth business. It could be a process for customer purchase to delivery or a potential new customer to onboarding. Each one exists for one reason…to serve a purpose.

Has Covid-19 highlighted any issues with your processes or systems? Is it time to reinvent and simplify?

Take a look at our video to learn how Covid-19 has highlighted how now only we could be overwhelmed with process and systems but how some are probably out of date. Watch this three minute video to find out.