It's Time to Move Beyond Pandemic Excuses

I live in a small and idyllic New England town. I usually get my prescriptions at my local grocery store. It’s a regional chain called Hannaford owned by Delhaize Company, a $14 billion Belgian supermarket conglomerate. The service at the pharmacy had been excellent until the last three months.

Now, it regularly takes a week to get a simple prescription filled. It’s common for refills to fall through the cracks completely, and the pharmacy employees are always frazzled and defensive. I didn’t quite understand what was driving the terrible customer experience until I stopped into the pharmacy one day and just listened and watched.

A throng of impatient people were queued up at the counter to pick up prescriptions or purchase Covid tests. Plus, there were people waiting for Covid booster vaccines. There were four people working in the pharmacy that day including the pharmacist. Only one person was servicing customers at the counter, and it appeared she was immersed in completing paperwork for administering the Covid booster vaccines.

Understandably, everyone (customers and employees) looked miserable. More importantly, nobody addressed the customers waiting in line for over 30 minutes. I’m sure if you asked the grocery store’s executives, they’d offer up the same tired excuses:

We can’t find enough people to work.

The turnover in pharmacy tech positions is too high.

Filling prescriptions, administering vaccinations and Covid testing is a crushing workload for the pharmacy team.

These are all valid excuses. But instead of complaining about them and shrugging our shoulders, leaders need to solve these problems with different approaches. That will require trial and error. More importantly, it will require visiting stores and listening to employees and customers on the ground.

Adapt or Die

The Covid-19 pandemic officially started on December 12, 2019. That makes today the 774th day of the pandemic. It’s hard to remember the time before, as this virus has upended our lives in every way. And I say this with compassion and love and as someone who ran two already struggling companies during the pandemic: it’s time for businesses to stop using the pandemic as an excuse.

In no way is my statement meant to minimize the stories of the almost 6 million people worldwide who perished from this awful virus. Nor is it meant to lessen the misery of the 350 million people around the globe who contracted Covid. Both statistics likely understate the virulence of this virus. I had Covid twice. Before being vaccinated, I came down with the virus and was hospitalized with stroke-like symptoms. It was no picnic, and I was one of the fortunate ones.

Furthermore, I’m not punching down at the small businesses that have taken the brunt of the pandemic’s hits. They’ve been through the entire gamut of incomprehensible experience. From mixed messages from multiple levels of government to an out-of-touch Congress botching multiple rounds of emergency funding, America’s small business owners feel like they’ve lived a thousand lives in a span of two-plus years. ?

The commentary in this article is mainly directed at executives and CEO’s of mid-sized and large companies. These are my peers, and I’ve walked in their shoes. Plus, let's face it: this is why we make the big bucks. I offer this advice as a former CEO and CMO who is also a customer and can see the ground swell of people who have had enough with pandemic mediocrity.

The pandemic cannot be a catch-all excuse forever. The businesses who solve these issues will thrive. The ones who don't will lose customers. So, what’s a leader to do in these trying times? I recommend four tactics for tackling lingering pandemic challenges.

Reevaluate Your Pricing Strategy

“Inflation” is replacing “pandemic” as the new buzzword and for good reason. Prices are rising at the fastest pace in nearly 40 years in almost every category of goods and services. I work with small and large businesses, and everyone is reluctant to raise prices because they’re afraid they’ll lose customers.

I have a different view. Consumers watch the news. They’re not unreasonable. They understand that input costs are rising, and someone has to pay for that. All they want is transparency. Tell them in plain terms why you’re raising prices with a well-coordinated communications plan. Then, follow through on your service and product promises. Make sure your employees are educated on the reasons for price changes and can deliver a consistent message.

But before you do that, now is a good time to reevaluate your pricing strategy relative to your product and service mix.

Is every item or service pulling its weight? Now is not the time to drain margins by keeping laggards. Perhaps more importantly, you need to examine your place in the market relative to your competitors’ pricing. Is there an obvious hole in the market, and can you fill it? The answer doesn’t have to be yes, but you should always be asking this question, especially given the dynamic market conditions.

Take a Radically Different Approach to Attracting Talent

Repeat after me: recruiting is marketing. The same, tired recruiting tactics won’t cut it in this market. You’re going to have to attract talent with a radically different approach. I recommend approaching it like any marketing campaign. First, define your demographic target for the positions you need to fill. This isn't the same as compiling a laundry list of skills and searching for people who match that list perfectly. This will require you to get creative about where you might find people who have many of the skills you need. It will require you to look beyond titles and industries.

In the case of my local pharmacy, they need pharmacy technicians who are reliable, organized, good with managing lots of details and great with customers. Perhaps they could market to former teachers. Primary and secondary teachers are transitioning out of the profession in droves. These professionals are incredibly organized and tend to be empathetic and good with people. Simply put, if you’ve managed a classroom, you can manage 20 angry customers in a pharmacy line.

Other demographics to explore include hospitality and recent retirees. So many retired people are vibrant, experienced and looking for a second career. Create a vision of one for them.

That brings us to another aspect of recruiting as marketing: advertising. Once you’ve defined your recruiting demographic, focus on storytelling. What story can you tell potential recruits about the career you have waiting for them?

Money is important, and you want to be sure you’re paying a competitive rate. Depending on where your business is located, you may have to pay the most competitive rate in your market. Stop resisting this point. The amount of time you’re wasting on constant recruiting activities and turnover makes paying more worth it. Great people are your most important investment.

Also, don’t neglect things like schedule flexibility, great healthcare benefits, remote work arrangements, parenting leave and a commitment to training and development. Those things matter and are big part of your story. They can help you stand out in a crowded field that’s wedded to using the same old cliches in job postings.

Obsess About Employee Retention Like You Obsess About EBITDA

Employee retention drives business continuity which drives EBITDA. Your company should be tracking retention and looking at the metric daily. It’s a lot easier to make an employee happy than to recruit a replacement. Take a hard look at your culture and why employees would want to stay with you. Once again, competitive salaries and wages are important, but they’re not the only thing that matters. Now is a good time to get employee feedback on the benefits and programs you have and the ones you lack. Employee surveys are good. Focus groups are better.

When I was the CEO at a global e-commerce event photography retailer, I used to host listening sessions with my employees. Most of the time, I kept the agenda for these open and let them talk about the things that mattered most to them. My role was to listen and take notes. Some of our best ideas came from those sessions, and it kept me in touch with the tone and morale of the employees. One caution: your job in sessions like these is to be open-minded and listen. You’re going to hear tough feedback. Thank your employees for having the courage to give it to you rather than defending or rationalizing.

To retain your employees, it’s also important to recognize the fundamental philosophical shift that’s occurred among employees. Before the pandemic, many of us saw our jobs and titles as the center of our universe. Our careers defined us. After two years of hardship, our frame of reference has changed. Now, our job is just one thing among many that defines us.

That has ramifications for leaders. As leadership strategist Dan Pontefract recently wrote in Forbes, “We are entering a stage where organizations and senior leaders have an obligation. They must come to grips with what people once made central to their being and what they are becoming.”

Employees also want to know they have freedom to choose their path in an organization. For those who want to move up the ladder, they want to see a growth trajectory. Those folks also want to know that your organization is committed to developing them. This isn’t the old model of making disparate, canned training programs available. This goes deeper and establishes the organization as one committed to development in its DNA with thoughtful and specific individual and team plans.

Some employees aren’t interested in climbing the ladder. They enjoy their current roles and want to be valued as contributors. The key is to make these people feel seen and appreciated. They’re important parts of the whole and serve critical functions. Treat them like it.

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Susan Peppercorn suggests five questions every manager should ask their direct reports:

1. How would you like to grow within this organization?

2. Do you feel a sense of purpose in your job?

3. What do you need from me to do your best work?

4. What are we currently not doing as a company that you feel we should do?

5. Do you have the opportunity to do what you best every day?

Adopt an Innovation-First Mindset

As the old business book said, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. The strategies and tactics that have worked for decades likely won’t be enough. We can keep pounding our heads against a brick wall, or we can welcome change and try something new. An innovation-first mindset will win the day in a pandemic and post-pandemic world.

First, know this: your organization’s approach to failure will determine its ability to innovate. If you celebrate smart risk-taking and the failure that often accompanies it, your employees will feel free to innovate. But if your organization has a long institutional memory and insists on punishing innovators, any effort to do new things will stall. Focus on publicly celebrating failures as necessary building blocks to success.

I’ve also had great success with establishing a dedicated incubator for tackling a company’s biggest challenges. The incubator is a dedicated team that collaborates with other established teams and functions in an organization. The incubator focuses on solving the biggest challenges that will determine the company’s future.

That collaboration requires deft knowledge of existing human dynamics and is usually staffed by experienced people with varied and creative skillsets who can read a room. They also refuse to quit in the face of the biggest challenges. They’re masters of resilience.

I established an innovation incubator that achieved great results when I was the CEO at Iconic Group. I tapped our scrappiest and most creative problem solver to run the team, a guy named David Evard. David was a 30+ year vet with the company who is literally fire. He inspires everyone around him to be more. He was our resident Macgyver and had a reputation for solving the toughest problems in the field. He often invented revisions to equipment and processes that made our operations exponentially better.

That team ultimately figured out how to implement facial recognition technology in our graduation photography business which turned out to be a force multiplier for the business.

Conclusion

By no means will these four recommendations solve every problem at every business. But I believe these are the big philosophical shifts that need to occur for businesses to move past pandemic excuses and into a new era of operations.