The pandemic has shown us that we need to be more prepared with crisis management to ensure a healthier business future. Drawing on years of helping our clients build business agility and resilience, Enlighten has created a toolkit to help leaders navigate through COVID-19 and create stronger businesses as a result.
The pandemic has shown us that we need to be more prepared with crisis management to ensure a healthier business future. Drawing on years of helping our clients build business agility and resilience, Enlighten has created a toolkit to help leaders navigate through COVID-19 and create stronger businesses as a result.
4 ways leaders can create a healthier future for their business
Rapid response team
Meaningful metrics
A new road map
A future-focus
Rapid response team
The key to any crisis response is having the right team to help roll out changes, mitigate challenges and ease the transition for the entire workforce.
Here are three areas your RRT will focus on:
Making the appropriate decisions for immediate action
Empowering the responders to face minimal resistance
Creating a framework for managing future crises
Meaningful metrics
To get ready for the future and quickly action the learnings from this experience, leaders have to define the data that is meaningful and generate relevant insights.
Here are three areas to frame parameters around:
Understanding the roles that will be affected
Identifying measures for broader change
Adopting and integrating the right technology
A new road map
Before leaders transition the workforce back to the new normal, it’s critical to develop a road map and establish ways of engaging the workforce in the new vision.
Here are three ways to get your team on board:
Defining the checkpoints on the journey towards achieving the new normal
Giving employees supported ownership over their contribution to the future vision
Provide tools and training in shaping the new working model: a hybrid workforce
A future-focus
Leaders must now position their organisations to be fit for growth post the crisis and decide on a framework for managing the new normal to ensure a healthier future.
Here are three ways to learn from the crisis:
Use this as an opportunity to highlight preparedness
Dedicate resources for future crisis management
Analyse the current response and adapt the future plan
5 in 5 exclusive interviews
5 minutes with Helen Mackay – The beginning of a new era
We speak with Helen, Head of Sales & Marketing at Enlighten, who has held a vast number of virtual coffee chats with global leaders about their outlook for the future. Helen was keen to understand how leaders, who often check in on others and rarely get checked in on themselves, coped with the business challenges. The conversations revolved around their greatest challenges and their outlook for “the new beginning” post-crisis.
5 minutes with Jeremy Birt – A roadmap to a healthier future
We speak to Jeremy Birt, CEO at CX Ops Design, a strategic partner at Enlighten that works help us unlock and manage the business potential of our clients. CX Ops Design uses a unique operational approach and market leading technology to drive improvements with tailored customer experiences.
5 minutes with Nathan Graham – driving for results in a time of crisis
We speak to Nathan Graham, the Executive Manager for Client Support at Enlighten who works in the Partnering Team to ensure our clients maximise their benefits from utilising our Operational Excellence software and following the Single Source of Truth methodology.
Explore how Enlighten can help you manage your crisis response and get ready for the future with a free consultation. Contact us now to book in a virtual coffee chat with one of our leadership team and find out how to build your business agility.
How Enlighten will enhance your Business Continuity Plan
Problem Statement/Hypothesis: Your entire workforce has to work remotely from tomorrow.
How would you manage through an overnight disruption of your business given:
Decreasing off-shore operations to depend on
Increasing mission-critical volumes
Negatively impacted the quality of your output
Reduced productivity with unengaged teams
Enlighten partners with Managers to offer support with their business continuity plans and work side-by-side with teams on how to retain control during a business disruption. Here are the four key areas we are partnering with businesses to manage in the current climate:
SEAMLESS INTEGRATION
Undertaking business continuity planning is complex. Organisations need to be able adapt quickly and integrate systems and existing platforms to gain a single view of operations. Enlighten has rapid response teams available for immediate remote implementation to gain this view.
The Enlighten Software® is a cloud-based, comprehensive SaaS operational excellence platform that can be seamlessly integrated with any registry,workflow or peripheral systems. It is fully scalable and will suit various business functions.
Wherever teams are dispersed, on or offshore, home or in the office, Managers need robust visibility into their organisations’ key operational metrics to enable proactive decisions and interventions to be made quickly and stay in control.
VISIBILITY
The shift to remote, decentralised work comes with new challenges and uncertainties. There likely has never been a more critical time to have access to accurate and timely data on operational capacity and workloads. The Enlighten Software® creates one single source of the truth, one common language and consistency throughout the enterprise. At the click of a button, your business will be equipped to understand where capacity exists to undertake business critical activities.
Especially during these disruptive times, Executives can rely on customised dashboards providing insights into the key performance indicators for your business and crucial performance data, whether teams are onshore, offshore, in the office or working remotely. These dashboards will be based on measuring productive outcomes with a balanced scorecard including:
Work in Progress levels in both volume and hours at activity, team and business unit level
Capacity and highlighting the ability to undertake critical activities
Productivity levels of teams and individuals across all locations
Transparency of critical work items and how effectively teams are achieving customer outcomes
Ensuring the quality of work and performance through customisable questionnaires as pulse checks
Customer Satisfaction surveys to ensure customer outcomes are being met
Skills management by activity ensuring the right people perform critical tasks
Knowing where your skill gaps are so you can address training plans
Employee Engagement through checking in with your team
FORECASTING & PLANNING
Planning for the unexpected is critical – managing in uncertain times is essential. Organisations must model the effect of changes in business volumes and the availability of staff. Enlighten will support Managers in understanding how to maximise their people’s utilisation in order to:
Increase capacity to focus delivery on critical outcomes
Become proactive to changing SLAs
Prioritise work on hand to elevate pressure of backlog
Load balancing between teams by loaning team members, maximising resource utilisation by moving work where there is capacity regardless of location
Whilst we can’t predict the future, we do bring science in planning on how businesses will react to the changing scenarios.
CONNECTIVITY
Connecting workers and the operational expectations to the work at hand to effectively service customers in unusual circumstances is vital. Creating a virtual operating rhythm using Enlighten’s methodology centred around communication is a key foundation in business continuity. Enlighten enables virtual daily huddles focused around meaningful metrics which facilitate Managers to be proactive, balancing critical tasks to meet customer demand whilst engaging their teams, whether that be face-to-face or working remotely.
Feedback loops supported by objective reporting and an inclusive approach to waste identification and reduction are designed to make employees feel like they’re physically connected. The Enlighten Software® dashboard provides this lens of what has been achieved and what is the right outcome for the customer.
Client Testimony
“Throughout Quarter 1 2020, we have multiple events that have caused disruption to our operations in the Philippines and Australia, including extreme weather and pandemic situations. It has been invaluable to have a global view of all of our offices and manage workloads.The ease of having Enlighten available to our staff has meant, regardless of where they are working from we can keep track of both performance and forecast volumes and make the appropriate decisions accordingly.”
5 minutes with Helen Mackay – The beginning of a new era
We speak with Helen, Head of Sales & Marketing at Enlighten, who has held a vast number of virtual coffee chats with global leaders about their outlook for the future. Helen was keen to understand how leaders, who often check in on others and rarely get checked in on themselves, coped with this crisis. The conversations revolved around their greatest challenges and their outlook for “the new beginning” post crisis.
What are some of the key themes you observed from these conversations?
What has been interesting during all of my conversations is the enormous resilience and optimism shown by global leaders in dealing with this crisis. They are all very proud of how their teams have pulled together in adapting to a new way of working, despite all the challenges and hurdles they faced. There is an undeniable sense of culture and people as the root of success during this time, and the leaders who focused on their people are really seeing the results as they get ready for a smoother transition than perhaps others are.
What are some of the key areas of focus for leaders going forward?
There are definitely some big changes coming for most organsiations, largely revolving around leaders now looking to define what the new hybrid workforce looks like for them. There’ll be greater flexibility, new tools and innovation at play, and even a new style of management. Some of the main areas would be:
Culture. With the new hybrid workforce management, leaders will be focusing on visibility on performance from a point of view of support, checking in rather than checking on their teams and working to help increase productivity and operational excellence regardless of location.
Capacity. A big shift will be in how we look at capacity management, with leaders now seeing opportunities to increase capacity on-shore and balance what gets sent off-shore. The flexibility in location has opened us up to consider how remote working can even allow capacity redeployment in other regions, regardless of the asset’s actual location.
Tools. The key to the above is building up their operational resilience, especially for remote working teams, and leaders will be investing in new tools and management styles to accommodate that. A part of that is a focus on data, looking at the results around productivity and using the insights to develop a healthy operating rhythm.
What are some of the critical lessons you’ve seen your clients take from this period?
Enlighten’s Single Source of Truth has been pivotal in this period to help our clients shift their thinking. Being able to see how busy specific employees are, how productive they are, what issues they might be having during this time has pushed them from thinking about just the data in productivity to really understanding capacity.
Our team takes the feed from the client’s platform, looks at the data to identify spikes in demand and helps paint a clear picture of workloads and capacity to see if tasks can be reassigned. Clients can also put their data into our forecasting model to really understand the more customised functions, such a cash payment or corporate action, to manage how they shift a resource to deliver on that. We’re definitely seeing these visibility metrics, as Nathan previously said, to be tapped on more frequently as we prepare for the next phase.
The beginning of a new era: Post Covid-19
In our crisis management insights series, we have shared tips and tools to help leaders lead through the current pandemic and come out the other side fitter and healthier. From planning to resourcing, analysing meaningful metrics to creating solid business plans, to defining a new future roadmap, we have explored what it takes to effectively pivot a business during challenging times.
To get ready for this new world, leaders must look towards operational resilience by assessing, analysing and adapting their business model, and focusing on agility through innovation. This crisis especially highlighted an essential lesson on preparedness for most organisations and part of the future will be understanding how as a leader, you can be “always-on” with your business continuity plan, no matter the scale, type or magnitude of the crisis. Ongoing business resilience will be critical as you drive sustainable growth post the crisis and get ahead of other major challenges going forward.
As part of our series, we interviewed leaders on their “ah-ha” moments during this time. We have seen companies innovate in how they manage, how they engage and how they are measuring business performance. According to Nathan Graham, Executive Manager for Client Support at Enlighten, companies are exploring a permanent hybrid working model, with continuing work-from-home arrangements and increased workplace flexibility. Other shifts include getting senior leadership involved in operational management, focusing on targeted business metrics and redeploying capacity swiftly.
So, as leaders prepare for a transition to the new world, what should they be doing? Here are three practical yet effective steps we have identified for leaders to follow over the following weeks:
Get prepared. Not enough companies were prepared for this pandemic. According to Deloitte, more than 40% of organisations were without an in-house crisis response team at the start of the crisis, suggesting that comprehensive business continuity plans and structures were either not in place or not up to scratch,. With any crisis, there is an urgent need to implement swift action to pivot the business while still managing regular day-to-day operations to some extent. Leaders must have an agile yet solid framework in place to help confront a crisis and then be quick to communicate the plan to their people.
Review your workforce structure. The period has forced us to look at flexible workplaces and from that, leaders have begun to explore a new model of working: the hybrid workforce. As we’ve seen with our own clients, greater flexibility will be ongoing and the traditional business model is shifting. The focus is on bringing the insights on performance from this period into developing a new framework for working and managing teams. Part of this is ensuring a clear, common language across the organisations, leveraging a single source of truth on data and encouraging a culture of continuous improvement.
Encourage experimentation and new thinking. Encourage everyone, individually and as a team, to experiment with new ways of operating as you move into a new operating model. The people who do the work at the frontline understand the strengths and weaknesses of existing systems and may have new ideas on how to now improve the way of doing things. This will further engage and motivate them in driving towards the new vision as they feel they’ve helped shape it. For example, you might encourage employees to invent new, innovative ways of engaging customers and proving an outstanding experience remotely when the old CRM strategies don’t suit the current situation. Be prepared to adopt new strategies when things are no longer working and to figure out the future with your team. Be organised and have a plan in place, but also be willing to allow in that plan for creation, innovation and experimentation.
Crisis management is much more than living in the now – leaders must consider the changing landscape, their employees, the tools available and evolving customer expectations. There are many stakeholders to assure when managing such an unprecedented transition, and leaders who fail to see past the immediate challenges will be left behind when we emerge from the other side of the pandemic.
Establish a healthier future now for tomorrow. To explore how Enlighten can support your business, reach out to Helen Mackay, Head of Sales and Marketing at helen.mackay@enlighten-opex.com for a virtual coffee chat.
5 minutes with Jeremy Birt – A roadmap to a healthier future
We speak to Jeremy Birt, CEO at CX Ops Design, a strategic partner at Enlighten that works help us unlock and manage the business potential of our clients. CX Ops Design uses a unique operational approach and market leading technology to drive improvements with tailored customer experiences.
What is the biggest challenge you are anticipating leaders will need to deal with?
As distributed teams become more prevalent, one of the greatest challenges within distributed operations is identifying best practise and then sharing that with the broader organisation. Ensuring business process consistency and maximising business process improvement is difficult enough with teams situated together in one location but adding the complexity of working from home can magnify gaps that companies have in their processes and communications in general. These gaps can be simple to fill but if they’re not addressed quickly, they could lead to losses in productivity.
What are some of the ways leaders can look to mitigate this?
There are three really important things here – communication, data and the right tools and training. As highlighted in Enlighten’s roadmap article, everything starts with outlining the process, breaking it down and getting people onboard. The more connected employees feel with the organisation’s new vision, the better the employee engagement and the happier staff will be once we make the transition. We’ve then got to support that strategy with the access to really strong data. You looked at meaningful metrics in your previous piece and here’s where that really plays a role. Granular operational data will provide visibility on activities and behaviours down to an individual level it and highlight any team variances that may exist. Companies that have one source of performance data ensure data consistency and reliability. And finally, we’ve got to enable the human element with the tools that they need, such as the access to that single source of truth and the training to use it effectively in decision-making at the individual and departmental level. This will help to ensure consistent performance irrespective of the actual location of the team members.
How can leaders engage people in the journey with a productivity management program?
I’ve used the Enlighten Productivity Management in the past with teams that I’ve managed at different organisations to fully understand operational performance at a granular level in large teams, and in each case the team has been able to improve performance by over 20%. The way to get the best from the tool is to share the data you get from the system with your team. You’re showing trust in their capabilities, a need for their unique contribution and a willingness to hear their voice in shaping the future. But this also needs to be managed properly.
Sharing good information is easy, it boosts confidence in the team, builds morale and fuels team performance. Interestingly I’ve also found that sharing poor performance metrics with the team to be almost as effective in improving performance. It allows collaboration in a way that gives teams the opportunity to own the data and the results, and to workshop and develop ideas on how we can improve performance. A lot of the time, people actually doing the work understand company processes better than anyone and they’re often very well placed to suggest effective performance improvement initiatives to improve output.
The importance of sharing an updated company roadmap with your people
A crisis of the scale and magnitude of COVID-19 will inevitably take its toll on businesses in a way that we have never seen before. The way we work, the way we manage our people, the way we deliver our services – every facet of business has undergone significant change and will continue to do so to meet evolving challenges quickly and efficiently.
From this, leaders have learned a great deal. By measuring the right metrics and drawing insights from actionable data, there is an opportunity to come out of the crisis stronger than before. It is time to combat the change, disruption and uncertainty with a redefined vision for the future, starting with an updated roadmap to steer everyone in the same direction together.
In our ongoing series Leading through a crisis for a healthier future, we dive into the various aspects of the crisis management framework that we have built from years of working with senior executives. In this blog, we examine the steps leaders need to take to pivot their business; from developing a roadmap to getting the workforce on board.
Throughout this journey, it is essential that the human element remains a focal point. Especially with the upcoming return to the office and the inevitable complexities as employees transition out of working remotely. Leaders will need to communicate clearly and effectively, maintain high levels of employee engagement and reduce the stress of the coming changes.
Here are three critical steps for driving a smooth transition into the new world.
Define the roadmap, the goals and the timeline for getting there. A concise outline of the journey ahead is essential to effectively rally the organisation around the scale of transformation needed for the new normal. This includes defining the overall vision, the map to those goals and the road markers to hit on the way there, as well as how this trickles down into departmental and even individual journeys. Leaders should involve their teams in mapping out this roadmap and drive the conversation with a common language that provides a balanced view of performance in quality, compliance, engagement, customer experience and productivity. This will allow strategic decisions to be defined by a single source of truth, while allowing employees to feel invested in the process.
Give people supported ownership over their contribution. While it’s important to engage people in the journey, it’s equally critical to avoid throwing them in the deep end without support. Especially considering the complex transition for the workforce ahead as we navigate the new normal across the business landscape. Leaders must coach their people through implementing transformation as you find a balance between productivity and performance, while understanding how to tackle workloads in this new environment. However, this guidance does not mean checking up on employees. Rather, it’s about checking in with them and focusing on the outcomes to understand the work being completed.
Provide tools and training to enable the hybrid workforce. Based on the insights we’re seeing, the future workforce will be a hybrid model. Forward-thinking leaders are investing in the perfectly blended team, with a portion of employees working remotely, at least on a regular basis. This requires investment from leaders into the right tools to support the hybrid workforce and training for people to embrace them. For example, a performance management tool focused on employee engagement can dramatically improve results given the right sponsorship. It allows leaders to celebrate high performance, identify gaps for training and redeploy capacity effectively, ensuring a healthy and consistent operating rhythm.
A strong roadmap is the starting point of successful business transformation and is significant in ensuring your organisation is ready to transition into working with a hybrid workforce. By defining the journey, working to keep employees engaged and giving them the right support and tools to embrace the changes, leaders will come out of this crisis stronger than before. The way forward is clear. It’s time to step into the future of work or risk being left behind.
Explore how Enlighten’s performance management program can offer you a single source of truth on outcome-based deliverables. For a free consultation and virtual coffee catch up, contact Helen Mackay, Head of Sales and Marketing, at helen.mackay@enlighten-opex.com to get started.
5 minutes with Nathan Graham - driving results in a time of crisis
We speak to Nathan Graham, the Executive Manager for Client Support at Enlighten who works in the Partnering Team to ensure our clients maximise their benefits from utilising our Operational Excellence software and following the Single Source of Truth methodology.
What was been an interesting outcome of this current crisis?
We’ve observed that data at all leadership levels has been more important than ever. The insights our clients have gotten from our Operational Excellence software has played a large role in helping them manage the crisis swiftly and efficiently, allowing crystal clear pin-point solutions for action across even the highest levels of management.
They’ve been able to shift capacity effectively, redeploy staff and even see a dramatic increase in workloads (fig. 1), with one example in the finance sector achieving a spike in work from an average of 75 hours for a particular team to 747 hours – a nearly 1000% increase within this period.
Fig. 1 Clients are seeing similar patterns of greatly increasing capacity
How does the Single Source of Truth ideology enable these results?
It’s allowed our clients to very quickly understand what are the meaningful metrics for this period and then take the data to look internally for the skills and tools they need. This means they’ve been able to learn from this experience in a way that’s going to help when we shift back to a more traditional form of working, having uncovered opportunities that may not have been as obvious before.
Our clients are moving through the phases of crisis management really quickly and there’s definitely a sense of readying for a return to business as usual. Initially, it was about exercising their business continuity plans and focusing on critical activities but they were able to transition rapidly into the second phase and look at identifying and upskilling staff and now, the data shows that for most cases, we’re well into the third phase where clients are stabilising the newly expanded workforce and delving into performance and quality metrics.
What are some critical lessons from this period?
We’re hearing from our clients that having been able to explore in-depth the impact of the new working model, this increased workplace flexibility is here to stay in many industries. Business metrics have become more targeted rather than overcomplicated and a lot of senior leadership has become more involved in operational management, giving them better context for high-level decisions.
Following the crisis, from the feedback we’re getting, I expect to see a period of growth in the use of Enlighten’s Operational Excellence software as clients put a greater emphasis on leveraging the results and having better visibility on true business performance, especially in identifying exactly where capacity has to be allocated (Fig. 2).
Fig 2. Clients are seeing a better spread of resource hours across non-processing activity
Meaningful metrics for Australian businesses returning to work
The business landscape has evolved drastically since the pandemic hit Australia and each week has brought yet another wave of change for leaders to deal with. Now, with the situation starting to relent and restrictions being lowered, there is a new challenge on the horizon. How do we return to working as normal and what does that even look like?
There is an urgency for leaders in getting prepared for the big shift. In some ways, this will prove a reversal of the experience at the start of the pandemic. The question is, will leaders be more prepared this time to hit the ground running?
In our ongoing series on Leading through a crisis for a healthier future, we dive into the various aspects of our crisis management framework. This week, we explore a key step that will ensure leaders can manage the shift back to some level of normalcy more effectively – looking at the opportunity in data and meaningful metrics.
Leaders must prepare for the changes that have occurred since the start of the crisis, understanding what the new normal looks like and championing the positives that have come out of this experience. To enable this, we must have all the necessary information at hand to properly execute change and reduce the probability of errors. However, an overload of information becomes distracting rather than helpful.
Focusing on the data that matters
Leaders must set the tone for how data is filtered through to the different levels of the organisation and how it is acted upon by different departments. This is where a well-formed rapid response team (RRT) from our previous article would play a significant role
Here are three key areas for leaders to focus efforts and ensure a streamlined strategy around getting back to business:
Understanding what the workforce will look like. The way we work and manage the workforce has changed dramatically, with most companies shifting to an almost entirely remote model during the crisis. We now understand that the future of our teams will be more hybrid in nature. Greater work location flexibility is likely to be a part of our new normal. The data from this crisis will help leaders challenge previous thinking around what can and cannot be done remotely and how roles can have flexibility and work outside the traditional business model. Now is the time to create a framework to bring these insights into the standard way of working.
Identifying performance measures for hybrid working environments. Visibility of performance is now more important than ever. Hybrid working environments rely on clear and transparent sharing of information and metrics to create much needed engagement. During this transition, the creation of a common language through metrics and performance measures will enhance engagement and build on a culture of continuous improvement. Using these meaningful metrics when hosting virtual meetings and daily huddles will ensure unity within teamwork, creating a pathway for success.
Adopting and integrating the right technology. Leaders need to have access to a solution that provides visibility over end to end performance and an understanding of operational improvement in customer, culture, quality, productivity, employee engagement, risk and compliance. This is what it means to have a single source of truth for all operational data, the ideology that supports Enlighten’s clients in measuring and implementing solutions.
While a crisis can bring significant disruption to the business, it can also provide an opportunity for learning and evolving at a scale not afforded during regular operations. Leaders must use this as a way to create sustainability for the future, both in improving operations and being ready for future crises.
Establish a healthier future by focusing on meaningful metrics for your hybrid workforce. Explore how Enlighten can help you establish visibility of your new way of working through our Single Source of Truth ideology with a free consultation. Contact Helen Mackay, Head of Sales and Marketing, for a virtual coffee chat at helen.mackay@enlighten-opex.com.
As businesses continue to navigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, some organisations are feeling the fallout more than others. For some leaders, there has been a realisation on how prepared or underprepared they are to manage the ongoing crisis as it unfolds.
While COVID-19 and its far-reaching effects are indeed unique, crisis leadership in itself is not a new concept. As a vastly different future unfolds and we come to realise this new reality is here to stay, it’s time for leaders to determine how they ensure the success of their organisations in the future. The actions of executives will be critical in navigating these uncertain times and rallying the workforce around executing change.
Drawing on our experience supporting clients on building business agility and resilience, we’ve prepared a series of insights on managing this disruption, Leading through a crisis for a healthier future. In the last instalment, we looked at a framework for building sustainability while managing the immediate situation. Now, we dive further into the first step: establishing a strong foundation of support.
A cross-functional rapid response team
As a leader, it’s impossible to drive transformation and manage a crisis independently or on your own. To execute the necessary decisions with swift accuracy, a cross-functional rapid response team (RRT) is essential. This group should comprise key executives, functional department heads and internal change-makers geared towards managing internal and external communications. The RRT will be well-placed to mitigate obstacles and serve as the control centre for your decision-making.
Your RRT will ultimately be responsible for three critical areas:
Making the appropriate decisions at the right time for immediate action. The ability to recognise the early warning signs and respond accordingly will be vital in preventing incidents spiralling into crises of their own. The RRT will classify risks, establish mitigation procedures and conduct scenario-planning, allowing for accumulated risks and behavioural trends in the response plan. They will also need to empower the rest of the organisation to be aware of these signs and take the initiative to report these circumstances. In a time of crisis, it must be all-hands-on-deck to support leaders’ in managing the fallout, and the RRT will play a big part in ensuring that people have the opportunity to provide support.
Empowering the responses to face minimal resistance. The RRT should develop processes for deviating from the norm, training employees to analyse and adapt to situations within their scope that arise because of the crisis. One way to achieve this is through structured training sessions that demonstrate the response plan and establish trigger levels to eliminate ambiguity in execution. A robust training framework allows the rest of the organisation to take responsibility at the individual level for the inevitable changes and feel invested in creating a more stable future. Leaders can then align resilience-based activities with standard roles and develop a sense of security that stems from a strong culture, rather than just rules or protocols.
Creating a framework for managing future crises. Though it’s difficult to predict the nuances of every business challenge yet to come, the COVID-19 situation has highlighted that businesses were mostly not prepared. Now is the time to establish an RRT protocol and put systems in place to mitigate the fallout of future events. The current RRT can take responsibility for this forward-looking strategy by conducting an appraisal of the ongoing response to identify gaps and then developing recommendations to improve on the response plan. They must then prepare the rest of the organisation to execute an updated plan by encouraging scenario-testing and crisis rehearsal and ensure a culture of readiness.
By taking these steps, your RRT can simplify the transition of the workforce during this time and achieve productivity and operational excellence. While this capable group tackles the big decisions and breaks them down into actionable tasks, leaders can focus on the high-level issues and future business growth.
To establish a healthier future, leaders must take action now. Explore how Enlighten can support you in creating your RRT with a free consultation. Contact Helen Mackay, Head of Sales and Marketing, for a virtual coffee chat at helen.mackay@enlighten-opex.com.
We have seen many success stories during this crisis with some of our forward-thinking clients pulling together efficient response teams and driving a healthy operating rhythm despite the challenges. In the case of a leading financial institution, an interesting model was explored around a multi-level RRT.
The client implemented their RRT at both the enterprise and departmental levels, led by a Chief Risk Office and managed with daily meetings. This allowed them to share learnings, challenges and direction for the following day. Having this system set up prior to the peak of the crisis meant the client was able to quickly identify critical tasks and manage capacity before they were spread too thin. It also enabled them to fill in the gaps when external providers closed their services abruptly.
The RRT was able to show them two key things: the importance of engaging employees, providing them with a purpose and value to believe in at all times – this was critical in managing productivity and moving the vision forward – and renegotiating contracts with third parties to be outcome-based, thus changing a critical element of their operating model.
