Have you considered your post pandemic strategy?

By now we all should have moved on from Covid-19 crisis management. It has been all-consuming, where we have been focused on keeping our people safe and our businesses afloat. Now is the time to take a step back and ask ourselves ‘Where do we go from here?’ This is the time to develop a post pandemic strategy to ensure we emerge stronger and in better shape.
Here are some pointers to help formulate a post pandemic roadmap.
  1. Treat the Covid-19 crisis as an opportunity to look at all of the assumptions about your business and question each of them. The decisions you make now will shape your future, so do not be afraid to challenge and question. If it leads to having to make a tough decision, don’t shy away. This is the best time to deal with issues that in the past were brushed under the carpet.
  2. Look back in order to plan ahead. If we look at what history can teach us, we can see how major events changed the way society and businesses operated. Learning from history teaches us that things do not go back to what they were prior to the disaster. We have to formulate and plan our way out for a better future.
  3. Covid-19 will have altered values and changed expectations. We have seen how emphasis is moving from shareholder value to stakeholder value, where the needs of our employees, customers, community and environment are becoming more of a concern. These value shifts are only just getting started and they will continue to evolve rapidly.
  4. Observe how Covid-19 has accelerated certain trends and curtailed others. Working remotely, flexitime, online shopping were trends already in place, but since the pandemic took hold have accelerated at a pace. Conversely, services such as high street retail and hospitality, have all experienced a significant decline.  To stay abreast of these changes, business leaders need to take a step back, share insights, think of the bigger picture and acknowledge these changing expectations.
  5. Innovation and the need to experiment with new business models. Organisations such as Amazon, Peloton and Zoom have taken positive steps to place themselves where they can take advantage of the record demand for their services. Everyone now needs to be innovative, to take time to benchmark what has worked in other industries and adapt ideas that are relevant to our own industries. Innovation is not something you do after you get your work done, it’s how you approach the work you are about to do.
Robert Zelazik is Managing Partner at AC Mole & Sons. He is based in our Taunton office can be contacted on 01823 624450 or by email at robertzelazik@acmole.co.uk