Responding Right to Succeed During Pandemic

Talking about the pandemic, Covid-19 and its variants undoubtedly created chaos in almost the entire world. While some countries have managed to control it better, others are still struggling. Whatever be the current situation, most of the countries at some point in time were in deep trouble, sheer confusion, and experienced a state of ‘feeling lost’. Citizens and business organisations shared the same state of affairs.

Reflecting on the ways/means successful organisations adopted to strive, survive, and thrive, one must pause and seriously think about learnings from the experiences. It will be unfair to limit the usefulness of these learnings from the current pandemic to any other pandemic situation. We need to think of its implications in a much broader sense. The current pandemic is the most unusual situation ever handled by anyone of our generation. It can be better classified as an unprecedented, unknown, unique, unusual situation”. The form we are confronting now is pandemic. It has come to us a few years ago as an economic downturn in 2009, though the magnitude was much milder. Still, it created havoc in our life. Companies shut down, employees became jobless. A few years ago it came in the form of two world wars. During these periods also many organisations thrived and many perished.?

The geopolitics around the world is changing rapidly and such unforeseen situations could come in the form of war which could be cause and effect of realignment of powers. The flood in Germany is unique again as they had never experienced streets getting inundated leading to loss of life.

The point I wish to drive is these learnings can be utilised to overcome any unique, complex, and unprecedented situations that are potential derailers to business organisations.

In each of these situations what is critical is the pattern of response. The set of responses or demonstration of successful behaviour made us face pandemics better. The response defeated the obstacles created by the pandemic. It would be wrong to say that any organisation has come out unscathed, but some have certainly become as or more successful during pandemic time as these would have been in a normal situation. We at “UltraTech” demonstrated admirable positive behaviour which made us perform very well during the pandemic and I believe these could also be used for any future situation which pushes us into extreme uncertainty.?

I must mention here that in the future the chronological gap between such unprecedented circumstances would possibly get reduced or mankind may experience these kinds of situations more frequently than we have done earlier. Another point to remember is our preparedness as a race is far lower than what we believed it to be or what the futurists make us believe to be. For example, our inability to control pandemics is an indication of the lack of development of our medical sciences. We are yet to understand the virus. We took a year to develop a reliable vaccine.?

In the financial year 2020, a pandemic hit us for a few weeks in the month of March, allowing us to close the financial year with hardly any or minor impact of Covid. We as an organization closed the financial year with a turnover of around Rs 42,125 Crore. Whereas the financial year 2021 was entirely under the impact of the pandemic. All 12 months we experienced the devastation caused by the virus to a varying degree. In that scenario also managed to do additional business of around Rs 2600 Crore which depicted a positive exponential growth in the organization. The share price of the company also saw remarkable growth which the whole world looks at as an expression of confidence as it just got doubled in the year 2021. We were able to handle the pandemic so well that industry, investors, and the stakeholders expressed confidence in us brightening up all performance indicators. Among the industries, manufacturing was hit the worst and construction was the first operation that was stopped across the country. But we as an organization grew.?

The initial days were the days of confusion as the Government instructed to stop the work at the factories. News of different kinds lacking certainty was floating around. At that point in time, we told ourselves, we do not know what we would be confronting in the coming days, be curious and try to understand the situation in the best possible way, learn from it. And then respond very consciously and thoughtfully. The probability of doing mistakes leading to failure or sub-optimal success was high. These were the messages we passed on to the employees in the organization. And then when we did the operation shut down. This was a unique experience for most of our employees. We did it in a well-coordinated manner leading to no incident. When we got clearance to open the manufacturing and mining sites, we found out that there were organisations across the globe that were running successfully middle of a pandemic. The objective was to learn, tailor-make, and adopt. To share one learning that we picked up, anyone including an employee who is entering into the premise was assumed to be Covid infected. S/he has to be allowed to run the operation. All the precautions required to be taken in such a case were taken. This limited the spread among the employees building confidence among our colleagues; established us as a caring employer.

The second thing which was highlighted was “be prepared for the worst”. And that preparedness really made us agile and made us respond to the challenge in a holistic manner. We connected with our channel partners; the dealers and distributors with the objective of extending our helping hand in providing healthcare facilities, aid to their emotional well-being, make them feel that our relationship is beyond business. It provided us an opportunity to connect with their family members as well. Our bond got stronger than ever before.

While you shut down the plants with no employees inside, protection of assets becomes important. Further exercising control on entry into your site was important. We realised quite early that security employees are the most important group. They are mostly migrant population and hence needed extra care to stay and stay engaged. Sanitisation of their residential areas, regular doctors’ visits, ensuring that they could make video calls to their family members, educating/training them on maintaining personal and protective hygiene were few initiatives we took.?

Very early on, we got our doctors and medical staff certified by WHO to treat Covid patients. This, we realised, was a huge help throughout to fight Covid. Tremendous confidence got built up.

Relating our response to the logistics side of the operation, we treated every truck driver and helper assuming they are Covid carriers. We needed to treat them well and protect our employees. Touchless entry/exit, zero interaction with employees, taking care of their basic needs like food and water, treating them with respect, giving them even food packets so that they don’t get down during their return journey….were the few actions we took.?

The impact of Covid was not bad on all fronts. It taught us a few lessons, made us hone some necessary skill sets, provided us many opportunities to encash. We called faculties of global repute to train our employees which otherwise was not possible for many reasons. We invested heavily in the learning and training of the employees using the online platforms.?

We studied the process and implications of reverse migration very closely. One crucial realisation was with the migration of construction workers to small towns and rural areas of the country, the projects also migrated to those areas. Government projects were shifted from towns to villages, individual home builders in rural areas got active and business shifted to less populated areas. We were very quick and fast in recasting our organisation, re-training our people, and moved focus to the place business shifted to. We demonstrated incredible agility and flexibility in adjusting to the new norm.?

We nurtured positivity and reinforced our image as a caring company as we extended support in many different forms to employees, their family members, and the community at large. All these activities were well-thought-out responses that we carefully chose during the pandemic. These, enhanced engagement, commitment, belongingness, and respect for us as an organisation; resulting in higher productivity.

All these timely and intelligently crafted initiatives on all fronts made us reach the newly evolved market and enhance the volume of production, turnover and eventually, the stock market responded the way it did.?

To conclude, we should retain the learnings from organisations that succeeded during the pandemic, use these for navigating out of any uncertain, unique, unforeseen situations. Reasons for reaching such a confused state may vary but responses helping an organisation to succeed will remain similar. It will be prudent to stay prepared for another such situation in another form.??

The article is also featured in Human Possibilities