As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses have been forced to address business continuity challenges by rethinking strategies and revamping systems. Here’s a 3-step guide to planning your COVID-19 response.

1. Begin with a Business Impact Analysis (BIA)

While it is natural for a business owner to come up with a contingency plan during the business’ initial days and modify it when the need arises, keeping the outbreak in mind, businesses have had to forgo their old plans and come up with new ones quickly. Therefore, an updated and thorough BIA is the need of the hour and can be broken down into the following focus areas:

• Employees

Since your employees are your biggest priority, start by devising a plan that will enable them to carry out their work remotely, or take necessary steps as per government mandates in order to keep them safe at the workplace. Also, prepare response plans to implement in the event of an employee getting infected. Plan back-ups for employees in critical roles to ensure operations are not severely impacted. 

• Customers

Equally important is to focus on customers and how you will ensure delivery in line with SLAs. An important part of this process is ensuring open communication and setting realistic expectations, while also planning and implementing effective operational risk management strategies.

2. Plan your technology roadmap

Once you’re done assessing employees, suppliers, and customers, it’s time to think out of the box, with technology at the forefront, and make decisions that challenge your previous conventional choices. Enable social distancing with efficient operations from home, video conferencing for collaboration, and web-based communication with employees, customers, and vendors.

Consider these changes for improved efficiency:

• Adopting cloud-based technologies for operations and collaboration
• Disseminating and tracking training and awareness initiatives through an LMS
• Tracking your employees’ work, schedules and log-ins with technologies like geo-fencing

3. Implement your post-lockdown strategy

Most businesses will need to incorporate fundamental changes into their operations before they reopen their workplaces. These changes need to focus on mitigating the spread of COVID-19 at the workplace, ensuring productive operations, staying updated on government announcements, and ensuring verifiable compliance with mandates. 

Manually tracking every aspect of your COVID-19 response strategy will be extremely cumbersome and, more importantly, will leave room for mistakes that your business cannot afford. Therefore, the need of the hour is a comprehensive, single platform that captures all the information involved in this process. This will help to save time by automating this tracking process, whilst ensuring compliance and keeping you audit-ready.

Unprecedented times call for new measures to help build resilience in business processes. At CloudNow, we understand the stress involved in ensuring smooth operations and staying in control post-COVID-19. With this in mind, we’ve designed a tool that caters to the urgent need of monitoring and management of your COVID-19 response.

The AKKU Business Continuity and Operational Resilience Management (BCORM) solution by CloudNow Technologies is an incident-tracking and workflow management tool to address your post-lockdown operations and business concerns. Get in touch with us to know how you can provide visibility to your workforce and automate the workflow while also monitoring your staff’s health.