5 Key Ways To Prepare Your Business for the Post-COVID-19 World

Is your business prepared to deal with the post-COVID-19 world and its emerging trends? The outbreak has drastically changed the norm in everyone’s life and businesses have to quickly adapt to these massive changes or they risk being permanently shut down. There is no denying that economies around the world have dramatically taken a downturn with massive fluctuations in the stock market. In Singapore, businesses have gradually been allowed to resume operations in phases after the circuit-breaker but business is no longer “as usual”. With the unpredictability of this period, remote work, social distancing, and other controlled measures in place, businesses must rethink their current models and reinvent new processes.

To prepare for the uncertainty ahead, organizations must start investing in stronger capabilities inflexible cost structures, cybersecurity, digital tools, the transformation of the work environment, and e-commerce.

Here are 5 key ways to prepare your business for the post-COVID-19 world to outmanoeuvre this uncertain and long-lasting period.

Build a Resilient and Elastic Cost Structure

With the economic downturn, more businesses are now looking to have increased control in expenses such as greater flexibility in provisions in agreements, reduced contract durations, and emergency clauses to protect businesses. Make sure your business commits to an elastic cost structure and locks down rapid, short-term cost reductions.

It is imperative to establish a culture of cost control ownership and continuously assess cost reduction measures to ensure long-term investment. Businesses can consider streamlining cash management by reducing the stock-keeping unit (SKU) complexity and investing in data intelligence to effectively adjust cost structures.

If your business is taking part in government programs, always assess how it could affect competitive resilience and agility, and long-term liquidity.

Invest in Cybersecurity to Secure Business Workflow

To cope with the impact of the pandemic on foot traffic in retail stores, companies are increasingly bringing their businesses online and transactions are going digital. With the surge of online traffic, data breaches and cyberattacks, such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and other hacking techniques, are on an all-time high.

Businesses that use unsecured solutions, third-party tools and data access or storage practices that violate privacy laws are the leading causes of potential data breaches. Smaller businesses especially have to face these cybersecurity issues head-on and are forced to invest in secure and scalable technology that is in line with data protection, privacy and security regulations.

These cyber technologies have to be accessible remotely and continuously updated to ensure that the clients are protected from the most recent cyber threats.

Create a Virtual Space for Meetings and Transactions

The rising trend of virtual meetings is here to stay in the post-COVID-19 business world. Businesses have to prepare a virtual space for meetings and interactions to take place internally and externally.

This trend extends beyond the business world and to other aspects of everyday lives such as having a virtual consultation with your doctor or hairstylist. As businesses will find it hard to conduct any face-to-face meeting or physically hand any materials to the customers, companies now have to prepare digital collaterals such as digital business cards and digital brochures.

Design a Dynamic Work Environment for Remote Employees

WFH. This term has become part of the daily working life for most of us. A survey conducted by Accenture shows that 49% of the respondents who have never worked from home before now prefer to have more of such remote work arrangements in the future. Many companies that used to be against such work arrangements are now realising that remote employees can still be efficient and productive.

Your company needs to redesign work such that it can be completed remotely effectively and create a dynamic virtual-physical hybrid work environment. The employee contracts should take into consideration the need for greater employee monitoring and security measures for the remote work arrangements. Leaders should also be trained in managing virtual-physical teams.

Businesses should extend data protocols, networks, and systems security, and technology support to manage the new digital workplace, devices, and collaboration tools. Rethink the physical workspace to ensure physical contact is limited and it can be used flexibly by those on various shifts.

By reframing and redesigning the needs and work of your company, your business will be prepared and positioned at the forefront of the emerging revolution in remote, digital technology.

Go Digital and Be Website-Ready

During the circuit-breaker, non-essential businesses had to close their brick-and-mortar outlets and many went out of business as they did not have the technical tools to bring their businesses online.

Businesses have to adapt through enhanced websites and digital tools to meet the needs of their customers. Amid the pandemic outbreak, e-commerce transactions figured around 17.8% of total retail turnover in April 2020 as compared to 5.8% for the whole of 2019.

With e-commerce on the rise, Enterprise Singapore (ESG) announced Singapore’s first standard on e-commerce transactions on setting up user-centric processes and policies from pre- to post-purchase online.
Small- and medium-sized businesses, even those in industries that have never needed to use e-commerce before, have to rely on digital tools and enhanced websites to stay afloat during these trying times.

This is the time when the long-term success of businesses depends on how they leverage new technologies at scale and build new capabilities. Every business needs a website and an online presence to survive today more than ever. At the very least, your business should have a professionally designed website that has a seamless user interface where your potential customers can find out more about your brand, and the products or services that you are offering, and how they can benefit from it.