After the COVID-19 pandemic has been brought under control you will need to be ready with your recovery plan. Things will probably never ever be as they were before as it looks as if COVID-19 will be with us well into the future. I am sure that we will just learn to find the best ways to cope with it as we have many other viruses that came before it. The human race is very resilient and with the release of vaccines, we now can see an end to the COVID-19 crisis, as it morphs into something slightly less scary and life-threatening.
What Will The New Normal Look Like Restarting After COVID-19
If we are realistic and accept that things will be different, we need to look at how the different scenarios that we are now likely to face will look like and how they will impact the way that we do things going forward.
Social distancing and better general hygiene will mean that we need to focus on how we can adapt standard operating procedures to take these factors into consideration.
Working from home for at least a proportion of the time is something that many more people have now gotten used to. This allows us to comply with the new social distancing requirements and is something that many businesses are beginning to see is a better way forward. It’s not the perfect answer and anybody in that situation will miss the camaraderie and banter of the busy workplace, but it has been something that has kept many businesses open that wouldn’t have otherwise been able to.
Staff working from home brings other challenges for businesses to face up to, such as training and supervision. In the workplace this was easy, but any jobs that have moved to remote working have had to discover how they can also move such activities to an online format. Zoom meetings and online apps such as TimeDoctor and Trello have shown us that we just need to adapt to and adopt the new technology to allow this to happen.
What Changes Are Needed To Your Business Model After COVID-19
In addition to the way that we work together with our staff, we will probably find ourselves also having to rethink how we work with our customers. Just as we need to consider how we can move staff interaction online, we should also be thinking about how we could do the same thing with our customer interactions.
As face-to-face businesses such as retail, entertainment, catering, bars and clubs grinded to a halt and the economic impact of this all threw us into recession, it’s interesting to note how the online retailers took advantage of the situation and their businesses boomed.
Online Marketing In Your Recovery Plan
So with a little bit of effort and ingenuity, we need to uncover new operating models that will allow us to cater to new customer behaviors and change our critical business operations to explore how business owners can move online.
If you haven’t already done so, now would be the time to develop an online presence, create an e-commerce platform wherever viable and consider how in many circumstances online sales can be more profitable and give you a better return on your marketing expenditure.
6 Ways To Rebuild Your Small Business After COVID-19
- Explore online sales opportunities
The creation of e-commerce websites is now within the reach of every business. You need to work on a new business strategy that will establish how you can move to online sales and transactions. You will probably find that operating costs can be cut and profit margins maximized. Most small to medium businesses find themselves taking advantage of third-party experts to help them achieve this. - Create an Online Marketing strategy for your business
Marketing online is not the same thing as selling online. Digital marketing is all about getting you in front of potential customers as they surf online and needs a whole new approach. The digital transformation that you will need to undertake will mean that you redirect staff activity and expenditure into new areas. Outsourcing this to specialist teams is again usually the most cost-effective way of getting this done. - Move staff to work from home wherever possible
Businesses that don’t rely upon face-to-face contact in order to deliver services or products to their customers will be the easiest to transition over to remote working for their staff. Working from home is a much safer environment while we progress through Covid 19 recovery but many retail businesses and service providers will find this more of a challenge. Wherever possible take the opportunity to move administration and support staff to remote working and then focus on how you can minimize the risk for other staff while we are still under threat from the Covid 19 outbreak. 
Move training online
Training on the job has always been a method of improving the skills of your workforce and allowing your business to grow on the back of that. But with the introduction of online training platforms and with the acceptance by the vast majority of people of digital communication during the coronavirus pandemic, this is something that is now within the grasp of all small to medium businesses.- Discover ways of monitoring staff online that will work for you
This is a similar situation to online training. With many more people now working online we have seen both the introduction and refinement of online monitoring systems that now bring this within the reach of most small to middle-market businesses. - Think about how your customers needs may change after the COVID-19 global pandemic
This may be the area that will require the most attention and creative thinking. Some industries and sectors have been affected more during the current pandemic than others. Some of those businesses that felt the impact heaviest will be able to bounce back with an effective business recovery plan. But for some the COVID-19 pandemic may well change customer behaviors permanently. Many restaurants, bars and clubs are concerned that their clientele have become too accustomed to eating drinking and being entertained at home. Whether we see a return to business levels the same as they were before the current crisis remains to be seen.
Where Will Your Business Come From?
The business impacts of the Covid crisis have been wide-ranging, affecting many areas such as supply and supply chain disruptions, financing, short-term financing and cash flows. Many businesses instructed senior management and key employees to undertake new risk assessment and business continuity planning in order to put themselves in a better position to cope should this happen again.
We have seen how caught out by the pandemic our mighty government institutions have been, so it is no surprise that the world of business did not have a disaster recovery plan in place to ensure effective business continuity. However, business leaders also need to show resilience and adapts to new customer expectations in the new post COVID-19 world that we all look forward to.
