Leading businesses through the COVID-19 crisis

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Arthur D. Little Report Reveals Global CEOs’ First Learnings from COVID-19

Global management consultancy Arthur D. Little released first learnings from global CEOs in the telecoms, transport and utility industries who delivered critical infrastructure services in Asia and Italy during the early spread of COVID-19.

The Leading businesses through the COVID-19 crisis: First learnings from Hong Kong, Italy and Singapore Report is available free to help businesses facing the worst of COVID-19 deliver vital goods and services safely.

The report urges companies to put people before short-term profits, avoid step-by-step measures, delegate authorities, intensify employee communications efforts, and work closely with governments, authorities and communities.

“We can learn from one another, build resilience in our economy, and emerge from this crisis ready to innovate and restore,” said Ignacio García Alves, Chairman and CEO of Arthur D. Little. “This report gives CEOs unique peer-to-peer insight from leaders who maintained effective operations through the worst of the pandemic and are now emerging ready to rebuild.”

The report identifies five areas of focus:

  • Move fast, assume the worst, be comprehensive, and secure employee safety first and operational continuity next.
  • Be prepared to spend most of your time on employee communications, focus on positivity and morale, and listen as well as talk.
  • Create separate A and B teams for critical operations, support suppliers and ecosystem partners, and be innovative with cash management.
  • Collaborate with government and authorities, engage with unions, and support local communities.
  • Start realistically planning for recovery now, and take advantage of potential opportunities from the “new normal”.
  • The report also names key priorities for business continuity and risk management, including using digital tools to establish dynamic, sensing risk management systems across internal operations and external supply chains.

Karim Taga, Managing Partner of Arthur D. Little’s Global TIME Practice, said, “Today’s CEOs are being called to lead through this crisis and emerge ready for new opportunities. Companies, governments, and individuals must all focus on protecting public health and defeating this pandemic together.”

Saverio Caldani, Managing Partner of Arthur D. Little Italy and Spain, said, “As we work to support our clients in Italy through the worst of COVID-19, their experiences will help businesses everywhere navigate this new world.”

The report  summarizes the key areas participating organizations encountered unforeseen problems regardless of established crisis management and business continuity plans:

· Getting reliable information and intelligence: Especially in the early stages of a global pandemic, it is difficult to understand and align all parties around real facts and intelligence. Companies often partly relied on media reports. Having reliable data and intelligence is especially important for global companies, whose many local perceptions of the crisis may be very different.

· Velocity of the crisis: Several companies had not planned adequately for the rapid velocity with which the crisis escalated around the world. Companies found that some of the plans they had in place simply took too long to implement and were constantly being overtaken by events.

· Understanding the whole ecosystem: Some businesses found that their plans did not sufficiently consider the impact of the crisis on the suppliers and partners in their ecosystems, which then hit their own operations. This is of growing significance as companies’ operating models increasingly adopt an ecosystem-based approach.

· Coping with uncertainty: Companies traditionally feel comfortable if they can reduce or eliminate uncertainties, but in the COVID-19 crisis this is impossible. Companies have therefore found that agility and flexibility are critical, more so than they had anticipated in their plans.

In the future, it is clear that organizations will have to assess risk and have the ability to deal with crises that are far less predictable than what organizations currently plan for—months and sometimes years ahead. The report concludes with areas where firms can improve:

· More dynamic risk management approach: Risk management needs to be more dynamic in seeing and responding to signals across both internal operations and external supply chains to ensure the business is fully prepared for the threat. Digital tools are a key part of the solution to this.

· Stress-testing of business continuity plans: Those companies that have stress-tested their plans using relevant scenarios, such as pandemic outbreaks, have been able to respond much more effectively. Companies need to ensure that plans are regularly stress-tested to ensure they are fit for purpose in line with their existing operating models. As these models and associated key processes change, so should the plans.

· Better understanding of “risk velocity”: Many companies were caught off guard by the speed at which the pandemic risk impacted organizations. A better understanding of this dimension of risk, supported by a digital approach, would ensure that an organization could become more agile and dynamic in future crises.

· Workforce and supply chain as key risk factors: The crisis has highlighted supply-chain disruption and maintaining an effective, fit-for-purpose workforce as major risk factors.

Many of the leaders involved in the report expected they would need to diversify the supply chain diversification and include options closer to operations to avoid relying on lengthy and complex supply chains.

The full report is here: https://www.adlittle.com/en/COVID19_CEOFirstLearnings

3 Tips for Coping When Covid Closes Your Business

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Melissa Kjolsing and her brother Luke launched Recovree in 2018 with the goal of helping people recover from substance misuse. Recovree was just starting to see momentum when the pandemic hit the U.S. in early March, and business evaporated overnight. 

The company’s customers are primarily employers that offer Recovree’s tech-enabled services, which include peer support and recovery program recommendations delivered through its app, as a benefit to their staffs. In the wake of Covid-19, Recovree lost more than 90 percent of its projected revenue through canceled contracts, Kjolsing says. 

“It was like being cut off at the knees and kicked in the face,” says Kjolsing, CEO of the Minneapolis-based startup that booked $50,000 in revenue last year. “It was a complete devastation to the business.” 

Kjolsing, who will close her business permanently on July 31, is just one of many entrepreneurs who have been forced to shutter operations due to the coronavirus pandemic–and cope with the accompanying psychological effects. 

Economists estimate that more than 100,000 small businesses have closed permanently since March, according to a study in April by economists at the University of Illinois, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, and the University of Chicago. Since closing a startup prompts many painful discussions about employment, debt, and taking care of staff, the experience is extremely emotional for the founders.

“You’re not just selling a product, you’re selling your ability to create that product or company,” says Patrick FitzGerald, a serial entrepreneur, startup adviser, and lecturer at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “If that fails, it’s not that your product didn’t work, but it feels that you didn’t work.” 

For those who have shut down operations–or for those who are considering it–here are three tips from experts on how to cope with the psychological effects.  

1. Take a break.

Entrepreneurs are resilient people, but even they need breaks, says John Gartner, a Baltimore-based psychotherapist who specializes in treating entrepreneurs. If you’ve recently closed your business, consider taking some time off before launching your next idea to give yourself the time and space to grieve, he says. “The entrepreneur whose business is ending does need a second business,” says Gartner, who wrote about founders in his 2005 book The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (a Little) Craziness and (a Lot of) Success in America. “But it can’t be a way to escape the grief of the first one ending.” 

Then, after you’ve processed the grief, use the intermission to talk to people in the field you want to enter next and to study that market. Approaching your next venture systematically–and not impulsively–will ensure your success, he adds. 

2. Know that you’re in demand.

While you may feel like a failure, most people don’t see you in that light, says FitzGerald.  In fact, there are many companies that recruit former entrepreneurs because of their courage, expertise, and ability to start something from nothing, he adds. If you’re not ready to start something new, consider lending your experience and knowledge to another business–at least until you get your next idea. 

3. Share your story. 

You’re not alone in this experience, and it may be beneficial to share your story, says FitzGerald. Consider writing about what you felt and learned on public platforms such as social-media sites, he advises. It will provide some catharsis and the opportunity to connect with other entrepreneurs. 

“You’re doing a greater good by passing that knowledge along,” FitzGerald says. “Put it out there so people can react to it.” 

3 Smart Tips for Successfully Managing Remote Teams

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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

This article was written by Mitchell Terpstra, an Entrepreneur NEXT powered by Assemble expert. If you are looking to take the NEXT step in your business then we encourage you to check out Entrepreneur NEXT powered by Assemble.

Consider for a moment the current nine-to-five, butts-in-seats paradigm of American work life. Where did it come from?

The first wave of the Industrial Revolution took off in the textile factories of Great Britain in the 18th century. Workers were needed to operate looms that would spin cotton, linen or wool on a mass scale into yarn used to make garments, rugs, upholstery, and other products.

Productivity depended on human bodies congregating under one roof and attending to machinery. Human dexterity or decision-making was needed to help the machines generate maximum output while also overseeing quality control. This became the default arrangement for numerous sectors of industry.

Nowadays that script is flipped. Outside the manufacturing sector, most workers no longer need to congregate within the same four walls to attend to big, cumbersome machinery. In fact, today’s digital tools, rather than demanding attendance, largely free employees of the need to be confined under one roof. Welcome to the dispersed workplace.

Prior to COVID-19, around 5 percent of employed Americans worked from home or worked remotely. At the height of the pandemic’s stay-at-home orders, that percentage jumped to 62 percent.

What’s more, three in five said they want to keep working remotely, if possible.

If you’re an entrepreneur who suddenly finds yourself in charge of managing a remote team of employees, here are three areas to focus on to set your team up for success.

1. Communicate, communicate, communicate.

Communication is more than 90 percent of managing remote teams. However, with team members working from outside a common workspace, numerous communication methods are suddenly off the table.

Sticky-note reminders, office doorway chats, phone intercom updates, ad hoc roundtables and dozens of other little in-person communication methods are no longer available options. Without all these options at your disposal, communication may get haphazard or careless at times, allowing assumptions to replace clear direction in your team members’ minds and throwing projects off track.

As your team members shift to working remotely, your communication methods will have to adapt, too. Recognize the importance of streamlining your communications so that the transmission of important info is as efficient as possible, team members stay up-to-date on projects, and everyone feels accountable without becoming completely overwhelmed by a deluge of calls, emails, chats, and so on.

Relatedly, many managers often frustrate team members by choosing an inappropriate communication method. We’ve all heard the “meeting that could’ve been an email” complaint. Avoid being that team leader by considering, is this mostly a passing-off of information that’s self-explanatory? Go with email. Or is there important back and forth needed to generate ideas and build consensus? Better go with a conference call or video chat. One specific advantage of video chat is the ability for team members to pick up on the many non-verbal cues that are absent from written communication.

On the other hand, one advantage of email is the ability to archive important messages, search by keywords and retrieve when needed. However, free apps like Otter are bringing this functionality to conference calls as well. Otter can record your team’s voice conversations and provide automated transcripts based on those recordings, giving your team members a searchable document for retrieving key info later when they need it.

2. Make sure your team is properly resourced.

At your company, how much of new employee’s first day or week is typically spent introducing them to all the resources, equipment, and helpful personnel? From ergonomic office chairs to help-yourself snack bars, the first few workdays have the excited aura of an elementary school show-and-tell session.

Yet all that resource-thinking tends to go out the window with remote workers. Granted, part of the advantage of remote workers is cutting costs, including on office space and related resources. And, of course, this isn’t to suggest you need to ship an expensive espresso machine to every one of your remote workers. But their obstacles to success are your obstacles. Part of your check-ins with team members should be making sure they have all the tools they need to facilitate workflow and achieve the best work they’re capable of. Asking them to be reflective about their workflow and identify hangups to productivity may make it clear what resources may be in order.

It’s also important to consider there may be a difference between your more seasoned remote workers and team members who have been thrown into remote work for the first time due to COVID-19. The latter may not be accustomed to thinking about structuring their own workspace for comfort, productivity, and workflow.

It may not be getting them set up with a standing desk of their own. It might just be as simple as setting their computer on top of a stack of books. Even small enhancements, like a WiFi booster, noise-cancelling headphones or a better camera if they’re presenting to clients on your behalf, may make a huge difference.

3. Foster team spirit.

Let’s face it: people want to belong. Particularly for Americans, work is one of the leading ways by which we choose to define ourselves and where we seek a sense of belonging. Many psychologists have pointed out that employees tend to keep working for companies when they have positive relationships with their coworkers, and productivity often increases as well.

That sense of belonging gets complicated when coworkers are dispersed and meaningful face-to-face interactions are minimized. Even the workplace’s cheesier moments—the obligatory birthday celebrations, watercooler pow-wows, the rush to snag free donuts in the breakroom, etc.—are powerful contributors to making people feel they belong.

Without these possibilities for connection, remote working adds to the likelihood that team members may feel isolated from one another and less aligned with the mission of the organization. In fact, according to Buffer’s “State of the Remote Report,” loneliness was the second most-cited answer from respondents when asked about their struggles with working remotely.

To keep that sense of camaraderie alive that helps teams work well together, team leaders should create opportunities for team members to bring their fuller selves into remote workplace interactions. Remote workplace interactions often fail prey to being all work, all the time.

Team leaders should create channels where coworkers can interact on a more personal level, perhaps for sharing common interests, establishing helpful mentor-mentee relationships or celebrating milestones.

If the workforce is split between office and remote workers, keep in mind that remote workers might feel like second-class employees, only there to submit completed tasks. Consider giving them more leadership roles to balance out that perceived, even if inaccurate, sense of importance in the organization’s eyes.

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