The New Normal – Fragile or more Resilient ?

Life changing experience

These are unprecedented times and humanity across the globe is having to deal with something it had never imagined. The scale and velocity with which the COVID-19 pandemic is spreading has stretched the healthcare resources to unimaginable heights. Countries across the globe have a single-minded focus, to address the health and safety of its citizens.

Enterprise businesses are no different. They are stretched on their resources (people, cash flow, infrastructure) and their single-minded focus is to ensure that there is no business disruption. ‘Business continuity’ and ‘Business resilience’ are the most trending words in all CXO conversations. But the COVID-19 scenario is not documented in the BCP manuals and hence no standard BCP response has worked perfectly. We are all learning.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place

The COVID-19 situation has had a double whammy impact on Enterprises. On one hand they are impacted by broken global supply chains, labour/talent unavailability due to lockdown across the globe and on the other side, they are impacted by fewer footfalls and limited consumption by end consumers. This is a perfect storm with both supply and demand shocks.

All is not lost however and both humanity and businesses are discovering a new normal. A normal where many past assumptions and taboos are being questioned. A world where one shows care for loved ones by maintaining distance, a world where virtual workplace is preferred over co-located teams. The new normal has created new risks and also opened up newer opportunities.

The new normal

Fast forward a year. Will we go back to the old ways of working? There are conflicting views. Some believe that the desire to go back to the old ways and compulsion to derive ROI from past investments is so high that we will move back as soon as an opportunity presents itself, but a larger view is that some changes that we are seeing around us today, will make their way to the new normal post this outbreak.

Micro workplaces

The past few decades have seen era of large campuses and a few satellite offices. There was significant focus on team co-location, especially the ones working on Agile projects. Enterprises will look at this in a very different way post this pandemic. I foresee micro workplaces will supersede the need for large co-located teams as this not only provides flexibility and business continuity, it is a huge employee engagement initiative. Let alone the cost saved due to lesser physical infrastructure.

 Gig Workers

COVID-19 has opened the minds and firewalls of many enterprises who believed that the only way to deliver work was in a physically secure world. Post this outbreak, there will be greater focus on digital and data security and far greater adoption of gig economy and remote working. Stringent physical security will be good to have, but may not be a show stopper as long as the right background checks have been performed on the talent. The access to this location independent new pool of talent will help enterprises fast track talent acquisition for critical projects and is a great way to manage business continuity.

Shared economy

I foresee the openness of enterprises to leverage services on cloud or in a shared service mode increase significantly. This will not only help in scaling operations up and down quickly, it also has a significant cost advantage. Shared economy will also increase the usage of open source software and platforms and will create opportunities for new models of collaboration among enterprises.

Pre-empting or Managing Risks

The new normal has created a laundry list of concerns that enterprises need to address. Be it access to physical or digital assets, cyber and data security or workforce productivity, there will never be a dull day. While many enterprises will look to audits and tests to check if their exposure is acceptable, the smarter ones will address the root cause to ensure lesser time and money is spent on an ongoing basis to manage the risks. A case in point - would you implement frequent audits and checks to ensure that there is no data breach in a non-prod environment or would you rather implement a data masking solution for every data that flows to a lower environment from prod. A stitch in time saves nine, they say.

Like any change, the transition to the new normal won’t be simple. However, I believe that the enterprises that look at this as an opportunity to re-imagine themselves, will come out more resilient than ever before.