Challenges and Opportunities Post- COVID

Moving forward will depend on the recognition that there is no going back to old ways of doing things.

the reopening of the economy, the AS BUSINESSES CONTEMPLATE only thing that seems certain is that a lot will be different. Many executives have expressed a desire to ‘do the right thing’. But what is the right thing? How do you plan without knowing even broad parameters on what will occur, such as when a vaccine will be available, and what the timetable looks like for the lifting of all restrictions?

In this article, we take on these questions and try to offer the best answers that we can, given what we know now. A critical facet of our approach is to use the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals as a north star for where value can be created during and post COVID.

A Shared Priority

As the economy reopens, the first priority for every organization must be to preserve health and safety unambiguously and with full commitment of resources and capabilities. A wide range of interventions are required to make workspaces safe. Physical distancing floor markers, plexiglass dividers and hand sanitizing stations are now standard business needs. Companies must ensure that workers have appropriate PPE, while also adapting to deliver any services virtually so that face-to-face interaction with customers is as limited as possible until a vaccine is available. These and other immediate approaches to physical distancing are clearly imperative and will need to be thought through by every employer.

We must also go to the mat to produce products and services to stop COVID. Inspiring companies around the world have stepped up in recent months by converting activities and chanelling resources on the COVID- critical agenda. Distilleries and breweries, including Anheuser-busch and Diageo, are producing hand sanitizer. Canada Goose, Nike, New Balance, Gap and a countless number of small and medium-sized clothing companies are making PPE for healthcare workers. General Motors, Ford and Dyson are making ventilators. The New England Patriots’ plane travelled to China to transport N95 respirators to Massachusetts. Sports franchises around the world continue to provide financial support to non-working event staff. Restaurants are donating food, shoes, PPE and other supplies to front-line workers in grocery, transportation, distribution and healthcare. Each of these acts of solidarity will long be remembered.

Prioritizing health and safety also carries other responsibilities for companies that may be less obvious. Governments may ask organizations to implement testing and to send workers home if they appear to be contagious. Employers will have to be ready to adapt quickly to departures from the workplace by critical workers who test positive on-site. The potential for prior contagion will have to be addressed based on what those workers were doing in the days prior to detection. Some organizations are developing A, B and C teams for work rotations to create defensive capacity, but the duplication of responsibility is expensive and inefficient. Companies will have to take

steps commensurate with the risk of onsite contagion to others. As many employees without immunity continue to work from home, replacing the sent-home worker will be complicated and sometimes impossible. All of this will delay a business’s ability to re-establish a sense of normalcy and rebuild towards continuity. Companies like Twitter and Shopify have responded by instituting permanent work-from-home policies, while others have embraced a phased approach while contemplating, planning for and intensively managing these issues, and other issues like them.

The Implications of Changes in Stakeholder Behaviour

In the months ahead, companies both large and small will also confront other types of disruptions in demand, supply chains, financial burdens, governmental intervention and employee needs. The simple experience of spending less during lockdown has left many of us wondering why we wasted so much money on things that no longer seem important. For many, the loss of a job or of a family member’s job has created intense budgetary pressure. Permanent changes in consumer behaviour are likely.

The financial burdens arising from the shutdown are likely to be extensive, and will include the renegotiation of contracts and a restructuring of obligations that will have an impact on consumer demand through other routes. Supply chains — infamously fragile in producing PPE at the height of the pandemic — must now also contend with new kinds of restrictions on international trading behaviour that will affect costs and prices. Governmental intervention is not only likely to intensify, but conflicts, tensions, and issues may arise in the demands of local, provincial, federal, and international authorities. As a result, shortages may arise and persist.

Changes in employee needs will also arise from the pandemic’s enormous psychological and social toll, including from loss of loved ones, jobs, savings, stability, and interaction with others. The mental health of those working from home or simply remaining inside has worsened. Workers in essential industries are, of course, exhausted with consequences from COVID that will be revealed only after periods of months and years. Without question, COVID has put an intense spotlight on systemic income and racial inequalities.

As the economy reopens and these demands intensify, leaders will look for a way forward. A recent Boston Consulting Group report suggests that now is not the time for precise budgeting and forecasting, but rather a time for scenario planning. Mckinsey authors emphasize that the future for business will require resilience and the ability to withstand intense government scrutiny, demand shocks, privacy concerns and sectoral disruption.

Figuring out the right approach for your organization will depend on discerning which stakeholders to serve, how to serve them, and where to draw boundaries as to what is possible. Some analysts are suggesting that the economic landscape is ending a 75-year cycle that began during the Great Depression, and that we should expect a whole new economic system to emerge — one that reflects the values of humanism, collaboration, equity, and a different kind of globalization.

Dealing with all of this is daunting. How do you even begin — especially while facing resource constraints, a fragile workforce and reluctant customers? Research in the fields of strategic management and organizational behaviour points unambiguously to the best place to begin: All business leaders looking for a way forward for their organizations must reconsider their missions, purposes and goals over a time horizon aligned with the process of re-emergence.

For many companies, this will mean looking ahead several years. Critically, effective goal-setting requires imagining how the organization will adapt to what we’re now thinking of as a ‘new normal’ that involves much more than persistent social distancing. COVID- 19 has pulled the plug on the accumulating pressure of climate change, de-globalization, rampant insecurity, structural inequality and unsustainable consumerism. As the economy reopens, the companies that prosper will be those that assess their resources and envision effectively how to meet the needs of stakeholders relentlessly during the forthcoming period of turbulence in most industries.

One place to look for answers on how to accomplish this is in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS). These are 17 major goals ( see sidebar) developed over a period of study that involved extensive consultation with stakeholders from around the world, supported by expert analysis. They focus on addressing social development issues (via goals 1, 2, 3, 4 and 8), and they provide a roadmap for combating inequality (via goals 5 and 10). They address the major environmental