Checking your Business Post-COVID 19

If there’s one thing 2020 has taught us, it’s that agility and flexibility are essential in a modern-day work environment. From bush fires to COVID, there are few organisations which haven’t been touched, impacted and changed irrevocably over the course of the past few months.  

Businesses globally scrambled to adapt to a new normal, to wrap their heads around new requirements, fresh processes to meet legislation and how to communicate rapid fire changes to their employees. Employees who themselves were left bewildered, feeling slightly displaced and unsure about the climate and what it meant for them personally.  

Full time office workers were suddenly working from home, many trying to home school equally anxious children. Those who couldn’t work from home, or essential workers were suddenly complicit to social distancing rules, stringent hygiene processes and changed ways of working. IT departments were suddenly charged with helping whole organisations quite literally get online at home, overnight with anything but full access to all systems, unacceptable. Managers looked to technology to replace old fashioned face to face contact, with Zoom or Teams meetings now the order of the day. Momentum had to be maintained, all the while dealing with a hint of anxiety and uncertainty lurking not too deeply below the surface. It’s quite incredible how much teams of professionals achieved when forced to liberally apply agility and flexibility to the current rule book. But with rapid change, comes risk, as we’ve seen with some of the quick win recent Government policies legalised to mitigate the impact of COVID. 

As we stop now to breathe and absorb the change from the past few months, its’s timely to check if and how your company policies and frameworks fit in with your organisation in a post COVID world. Have you properly applied the checks and balances considered so essential to achieving your business objectives? Changed ways of working will bring with it, a different set of requirements both logistically and legally. It’s time to evaluate your HR policies and processes to verify that they support your new ways of working, not contradict them. It’s an opportunity for a fresh start of sorts, to reconfigure and regroup, amend that which is no longer functional and reinvent to match the new world we’re playing in. Digitisation is one area which has exploded since the start of COVID and with employees now more frequently using external conferencing facilities and social media platforms to communicate, policies and controls to protect both company and employees must be reassessed. New insights have likely emerged in terms of trends, road blockers or challenges and must be responded to. It’s an opportunity, a beacon of light at the end of what’s been a long tunnel, to create positive change from a demanding situation. 

There’s little doubt that COVID has permanently altered the working landscape. It’s critical to protect your business with updated policies and procedures to enable your organisation to be well positioned to thrive in a new normal.