Covid-19 is a pandemic and affects the whole world and its economic system. All businesses are affected at least to a certain degree. As brick-and-mortar business owners closed their businesses to curtail the spread of Covid-19, loss of workforce, customers, sales, and profits are some of the unavoidable effects of the virus.
The fear of the unknown also contributes to the negative impact of Corvid-19. For instance, most businesses do not know how this virus will later affect our physical, economic, and mental well-being.
Despite this negative impact and fear of the unknown associated with Covid-19 that is currently affecting businesses, there are ways through which savvy business owners can develop altruistic responses in the face of this crisis.
There are surefire ways through which business owners can overcome the effect of COVID-19 on business operations and here are some of them:
Review Your Workforce
The first step to overcoming the effect of Covid-19 on your business operation is to review your workforce in terms of locations and travel.
You have to establish if any of your staff has been infected, exactly where each staff is, and how many of your workers are resided in vulnerable or affected areas. Does any of your workforce need to be repatriated? Does your business permit that any of your staff work from home?
These are important things you must take note of. If your business involves travel logistics, you may need to review, reschedule, or cancel travel plans as the case may be.
Reviewing your workforce will help you to develop better plans and policies to make your business operation continue in the face of this current crisis. You must also put in place clear policies to address cases of absence due to Covid-19 (isolation, quarantine, or sickness) or caring for infected or sick relatives, travel restrictions, reporting of illness, and the protocol for visitors to your business environment.
In current scenario work from home-office environment is better option if possible in your business. All over the world businesses like IT, Software, Graphic design, web scraping services and many more following work from home concept.
Evaluate Your Supply Chain
Depending on the type of business you operate, you may need to evaluate your supply chain. Your evaluation of your supply chain will help you understand and expose any potential vulnerability.
This means you have to critically consider your most critical raw materials and carefully evaluate your first and second-level suppliers. For instance, if any of your raw materials come from a country with travel restriction and lockdown, you may start to build contingency plans, which involve considering a secondary or even tertiary supplier?
There was a case where a business that has China as its major supplier turned to South Korea as its secondary supplier, only to see that South Korea is quickly becoming infected too.
Get Your Business Communication Right
This is also a very important step to overcome the effect of Covid-19 pandemic on your business operation. At this point in time, it is very important for businesses to keep their workforce well-informed, especially when confusion and disinformation about Covid-19 have spread abroad.
At this critical period, everybody is supposedly conscious about the safety of their health. Hence, your employees, as well as customers, are expecting reassurance of their safety from you. They want to be sure that your business is prepared against the crisis and that they are being protected.
More so, being the business leader, your workforce sees you as a source of truth. Therefore, the accuracy and consistency of messaging, especially those that are related to the safety, protection, and welfare of your workforce are very critical.
Conduct Scenario Analysis
Fine, Covid-19 is an uncertainty and an unplanned event. Nevertheless, businesses must analyze the potential of the impact Covid-19 on every part of their business as well as the likely impact in months to come.
This scenario analysis will help businesses to make plans and test their preparedness for whatever impact Covid-19 may have in the long run. For instance, the impact of the virus on the long run on your working capital, production, or shop/office space rent should in case the lockdown persists.
Consider Other Risks Too
The emergence of Covid-19 had made it appear like Covid-19 is the only risk remaining on earth and this has made most people lose sight of other risks.
Anyway, Covid-19 is not the only threat to humanity on earth and shouldn’t be the only crisis to dominate people’s attention. There are many other risks that aren’t diminished by Covid-19 that business owners can face in times like.
One of them is cyber security and business owners should always have this on the top of their minds.
In addition, consider telecommuting for your business if possible, ask your workers to update and confirm their contact information in the company records, carry out a brief training on Covid-19 on your workers to improve their knowledge and understanding of the pandemic and enhance your workers to respond effectively, and lastly, you need to carry out ongoing monitoring of the situation and provide your workers with regular briefings on any emerging issue or threat relating to Covid-19.
