Organizations must navigate the financial and operational challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic while promptly addressing the requirements of their employees, customers, and suppliers. This page offers insights into tangible actions that your organization can take to seize this immense opportunity for meaningful change.
Impact on Strategy: The journey to recovery and reinvemtion Continues.
Today’s CEOs are encountering overwhelming challenges and uncharted waters as they continue to navigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many organizations are already taking action to emerge from the pandemic stronger. These leaders face the crisis with a spirit of reinvention—accelerating digital transformation, establishing variable cost structures, and implementing agile operations.
However, the situation has changed, with the pandemic continuing to peak in some markets and returning in others. Amidst this ongoing uncertainty, the steps for reopening and reinvention remain unchanged. However, companies must now consider how the pandemic has shown signs of progress in different geographies impacts their recovery strategies.
Companies must outmaneuver uncertainty by course-correcting, again and again as circumstances change, in that way requiring them to reassess, re-evaluate scenarios and strengthen their ability to sense and respond.
Impact on Customers: Connecting with changing customer habits.
The coronavirus outbreak has compelled companies to re-evaluate how employees deliver relevant customer service experience as they work remotely and how digital channels can provide business stability through the crisis and beyond.
The global pandemic has forever changed our experiences as customers and employees. Our mindset and actions are changing as a result. The crisis profoundly transforms how and what consumers buy and accelerates immense structural variations in the industry.
With these evolving new behaviors, businesses have the opportunity to accelerate the switch to digital commerce by expanding existing offerings and generating new lines of service, such as “contactless” delivery and curbside pick-up services for consumers. Expanding their portfolio to create other revenue streams is also an option. This acceleration will compel organizations to reimagine their digital strategies to capture new marketplace opportunities and digital customer segments.
Impact on Workforce: Paring people with opportunity resilience.
Organizations globally are experiencing unprecedented workforce disruption. Virtually all companies still define how they ought to work in the short- and long term. The community and the workforce try to function and perform while coping with what is happening around them.
Organizations need fit-for-purpose plans today that can evolve as the global health and economic environment changes.
We at GL International are helping businesses play critical roles in establishing a systems-minded approach that promotes shared workforce resilience.
Impact on operations: Restructuring for global resilience.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, fundamental changes in consumer behavior, supply chains, and shipping routes to market are swaying companies off balance. Responses to the current situation have emphasized the need for leaders to fast track the implementation of dexterous ways of working and value chain transformation to help outmaneuver uncertainty.
Firms are looking to quickly adapt and become Intelligent enterprises, which involves moving away from top-down decision-making. Empowering teams guided by purpose, driven by data, and powered by technology for faster rollouts to market. It calls for leveling rigid structures and creating a porous organization with modules that plug and play.
Adopting a globally distributed service model can also help small and large organizations across industries—to diffuse risk.
Now, more than ever, the supply chain is critical. Companies need to develop a rapid response to address current disruptions and repurpose and reshape supply chains for the future.
Impact on Finances: Building the resources to seize new opportunities.
In the face of new challenges due to the COVID-19 crisis, leaders have to act instantly to augment their company’s resilience—rebalancing for risk and liquidity while gauging opportunities for growth. Current and future viability depends on swift action, including near-term actions for stability and strategic moves that will create new opportunities for companies and industries.
Immediate action is essential to address short-term liquidity challenges and to generate funding to invest in new opportunities, including Mergers & acquisitions. Several CEOs are faced with plummeting sales and revenue, all while costs have increased. Interventions to adapt is imperative and may require investments in vital technologies, processes, and people.
These actions taken now can have an immediate impact on the company’s continued existence, how quickly it recovers from the global downturn, and its financial strength and sustainability going forward.
Impact on Technology: Building technology for the strength to suceed.
Even before COVID-19, many organizations faced considerable IT challenges. Now, the pandemic is pushing companies to operate in ways they haven’t performed before rapidly, and IT is being tested.
As businesses cope with a range of new systems priorities and challenges such as business continuity, unexpected changes in volume, real-time decision-making, workforce productivity, and security, Decision-makers must act quickly to address immediate systems resilience issues and lay a foundation for the future.
Once we turn the corner on this pandemic, it will be imperative to establish long-term strategies for greater resilience and to apply lessons learned from the experience to create systems and a road map that better prepares your company for future disruptions.
Impact on Industries: Turning massive challenges in to meaningful change.
Almost every industry has been impacted by the COVID-19 crisis, with varying degrees of severity. Some will adapt quickly and have strong defenses, while others will struggle to return to a constantly shifting, which will result in the “new normal.”
The patterns of Consumer demands are shifting; global supply chains are disrupted and remain under pressure, all while different regions, markets, and governments are responding uniquely to the pandemic. Companies must continuously adapt to these uncertain market conditions.