Reopening Your Business
As if CEOs and business leaders don’t have enough uncertainty to contend with during the current COVID-19 crisis, the issue of business risk and compliance remains a critical area of focus for leaders. With bottom-lines impacted and business lines suffering, companies can ill afford re-opening issues. Compliance, communications and care should be top of mind for your organization when reopening.
Compliance: Tone-from-the-Top
In the world of regulatory compliance, “tone-from-the-top” is an oft used term by regulators, referring to the compliance tone set by leadership of a company. If the tone is compliance oriented, the belief is the company is more likely to have a pro-compliance and ethical environment. Conversely, a leader that is tone deaf to compliance is likely to create a culture that is similarly lacking focus on compliance and ethics. However, in the current COVID environment, tone from the top is more important than ever. Specifically, leaders have to determine what their “due-north” is from an ethics perspective. What matters the most to the organization? What data and metrics will drive the ethics around that due north and the decisions that flow from it? Is the due north of leadership aligned with the current environment, business goals, peoples safety or something else completely? Has there been buy-in by the organization and does it align with the companies values? The due north and tone from the top, in this environment of uncertainties, has significant financial, reputation and employee ramifications, as does getting it wrong.
A more balanced risk-based approach and tone from the top are one that we advise all our clients to consider. We advocate taking into account all elements of risk — not simply that of commercial impact. This helps to keep your organization’s reputation in tact and leads to less risk overall. Every leadership team must have this tone from the top mapped out in this environment. Additionally, it is important to have buy-in from your Board of Directors, management teams, and employees and understand the potential downstream impacts of your actions. Doing otherwise is likely to cause undue risks, alienate employees and impact shareholders in ways that will take far longer to undo. It only takes one compliance and/or ethics misstep to change the reputation of an organization.
Communications: Engaging Families, Not Just Employees
It should be easy to understand that your employees are suffering higher than normal anxiety. The first thought is to hunker down and avoid any unnecessary contact with others. While this is ideal in helping avoid COVID-19 infection, it is highly impractical in many work situations.
When planning to reopen, there is no such thing as over-communicating. Make sure that you provide honest and transparent communications to mentally prepare employees for re-entry into the office and help foster trust with your organization. With that, make sure you provide a feedback loop that serves to empower employees and provide you with insights in how best to safely re-open. Also, keep front of mind that some employees will need more attention than others. This will definitely include employees who have family members who are in high-risk health categories. Going that extra mile to provide exceptions for these employees will not only build trust, but more important, loyalty.
Care: Re-imagining the Office & Putting People First
The old way your office worked is dead. Accept that and the new era will be that much easy a pill to swallow. This does not mean the end of business as you know it…it likely means more opportunity. Do NOT try to solve the reopening question in a single sitting. Take a phased approach. Build out a strategy that allows your organization flexibility, agility, and resiliency. Through all of this, put your people first. Your customers will forgive you for missing delivery timelines, but they will be less likely to forgive you for a careless reopening that leads to a high number of employee infections. Remember: your bottomed-out reputation is much more damaging than hyper-focus on your bottom line.
Your organization’s reopening will define your success for the foreseeable future. So, remember, how you worked before is dead, history starts now. While your costs for re-imagining how your organization will move forward will spike, eventually, they will level off and could even lead to greater profitability. Don’t forget to take advantage of transitioning the organization to digital operations. For those employees who are able to work remotely, organizational cloud operations adoption will lead to greater efficiency and greater profits. There are many more digital transformations that can help push your business along through COVID-19, it will take some time to examine what is available and useful.
Remember, Soteryx has been there and done that when it comes to reopening. Give us a call to let us partner with you to map out your path to successful operations in time COVID.