Business Recovery Plan: Renewing Activities After the Pandemic

With many countries starting to relax quarantine restrictions, business owners are faced with the task of preparing their companies for a new reality. Not only has the COVID-19 crisis caused a significant humanitarian crisis, but it has also wreaked havoc in the business world as well. This includes things like plummeting consumer demand, huge regulatory changes, interruptions in the supply chain, and the list can go on and on. Just like we need to start recovering from the impact made in the health and humanitarian areas, there needs to be a disaster recovery plan for businesses as well.  

In order to help companies start picking up the pieces and try to return to regular business activities, we would like to share with you some elements every pandemic disaster recovery plan should have. Keep in mind that your exact plan will depend on the needs of each individual business.   

Start with Positioning  

Before you make any decisions, you need to take some time to assess the position your business finds itself in. Think about your market. How does your business fit in? Who are your biggest competitors? Then focus on the direction you can take to fit your positioning. Will it be possible for you to regain all of the ground you lost during the lockdown? Perhaps you will emerge even stronger due to all of the developments.   

The hardest-hit sectors are the travel, hospitality, and entertainment industries, and companies who are operating in these verticals are questioning whether or not they can recover from this. On the other hand, some will emerge even more stable, the companies offering videoconferencing and other internet-enabled communication tools, home delivery services, home office equipment, AR/VR development companies, and many others as well. Since each company will find themselves on different sides of the spectrum, you need to incorporate positioning in your pandemic plan for business.   

How Are You Going to Bounce Back?  

Any plan involves listing concrete steps you will take today to achieve certain objectives tomorrow. In our situation, you need to think about what you can do to get through the crisis and return to usual business activities when it’s all said and done. By not having a plan moving forward, you are only exacerbating a bad situation. Think about your long-term goals and what you need to start doing today to be where you want next year or a couple of years from now. Also, list some benchmarks that you plan to achieve on your way to your goals to measure your progress.   

How Will Your Culture and Identity Be Affected?   

Before the crisis, your employees had a particular perspective i.e., the way they perceived the world around them. Since this will change as a result of the pandemic, so will your culture and identity. A crisis of the magnitude that we lived through can either bring people closer together or it can rip them apart. The latter occurs when people start distrusting one another and looking out for themselves. With this in mind, pandemic planning for businesses needs to take into account how well your firm was prepared to handle the crisis from the cultural standpoint and how it fared in reality.   

Also, think about how employees will see your company when they start returning to work. A lot of businesses’ instinctive reaction was to protect the interests of the shareholders instead of worrying about the people who actually make things happen. If you decided to costs by laying off people, this would really hurt your relationship with your employees because it shows who you really are as a company. The masks come off in a time of crisis, and your team members do not like what they see.   

Which Projects Have Priority?  

This involves starting new projects internally to help resolve any COVID-19 problems you are experience right now and help protect your organization in the future. Here, it is crucial to prioritize all of your initiatives because if you have too much stuff going on at the same time, you will start a war over resources and divide your employees even more. Think about what businesses in a post-pandemic world will need to operate and what will help you survive future crises such as this one.   

How Ready Are You to Actualize the Projects?  

Now that you created a list of initiatives you would like to take, and you prioritized them accordingly, you also need to consider how possible it will be to actualize what you planned out. The remote work culture has caused significant disruptions in the preparedness level of teams and individual team members, so you also need to take this into account during the planning process.   

Keep Business Alive After the Lockdown  

Many companies have experienced significant losses during the lockdown, but the ones that had a plan and the agility to adjust the new reality fared much better during the crisis and will emerge from it in better shape. A lot of companies did not know how to respond to the new reality they live in and decided to raise prices and other measures that will hurt their relationship with the consumers. This is just further evidence that they were not prepared at all for the crisis and improvising on the spot.   

Software development companies have an opportunity today to help companies bounce back, in particular, the ones with offshore development teams. Not only can they help companies in the IT industry, but they can also help companies create or implement new technologies that will further help reduce costs. Skywell Software has extensive experience in the sphere of software development and is committed to helping companies recover from this in any way they can.