The World Health Organization Warned Businesses To Make A Plan. Very Few Listened.

COVID-19 is stretching the limits of business continuity planning

Mike Tyson famously once said, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” For businesses who were expecting 2020 to be another year of surfing a record economy to hit their revenue targets, COVID-19 has thus far been a giant fist to the jaw. Plans have been thrown out the window and instead of looking for growth opportunities, countless businesses are just looking for ways to survive and maintain some semblance of continuity in a strange new world in which their doors are locked, customers have to stay home, and employees need to work remotely.

Interestingly enough, the World Health Organization warned us it might get this bad. In the recent guidelines titled “Getting Your Workforce Ready for COVID-19,” WHO recommended all employers develop a plan to address how to keep a business running even if a significant number of employees, contractors, and suppliers cannot come to their place of business. But with a March 3rd release date – and let’s face it – most business leaders don’t read WHO reports – the recommendation was too little and too late for most companies to seriously adapt. 

Can you plan for what you can’t imagine?

But there’s another reason businesses failed to make actionable continuity plans. Most executives simply had no idea how to plan for something they had never experienced. They also couldn’t fully imagine the scope at which COVID-19 would affect their supply chains, their workforce, their customer base, and the flow of cash in the market. In lieu of an established playbook for continuity planning, the economy became reactive instead of proactive.

So what does a good business continuity plan look like? Let’s take a look at some of the key factors affected by COVID-19 and how leaders can use these to build a plan for this and future disasters. 

Employee Health

One of the most severe ways a business would experience the impact of a pandemic is if it spreads amongst their employees, making them unable to work for weeks at a time. A dashboard of employee availability will help you find alternative allocations while giving sick employees plenty of time to quarantine, rest, and heal. Because most remote teams are run via a patchwork of SaaS solutions, in an ideal world employee availability will be accurately synced across all these tools to automate the rerouting of assignments.

Clear Communications 

The communication between executives, employees, partners, customers, and investors is critical during the time of a crisis. Due to the huge number of communication channels and the speed at which COVID-19 progressed, some businesses struggled to get messaging out the door in a timely manner. Most of us began receiving emails from companies with which we’ve done business in mid-March. By the first week of April, the companies contacting customers about COVID-19 plans for the first time seemed laughably late. 

A business continuity plan should include a checklist of communications items (both internal and external) to make sure none of your key stakeholders are left in the dark about how your company is responding to a crisis. 

Data-driven risk management

In times when speed is critical in decision making, speedy access to real-time data is invaluable. Integrated data channels are essential to business at all times, but in a crisis like COVID-19, it’s even more important that they are available quickly and easily at all levels of a company. Data about sales performance, revenue projections, supply chain disruptions, and workforce productivity will help fuel the decision making your business needs to survive.

Confidence depends on smart leadership

The goal of a plan isn’t just to manage the logistics of keeping a business running. It’s also to maintain the confidence of your team and customers during this situation. COVID-19 is the biggest challenge many of us have faced in our careers. We don’t need to have all the answers, but a strong continuity plan can help us make sure we’re asking all the right questions and not leaving critical tasks by the wayside. Our employees and other stakeholders need to know their leadership is ready for the challenges ahead and have a plan in place to manage them – and hopefully, land on their feet on the other side.