Calamities: Protect Your Business Against Covid-19
Protecting your business is focusing on safeguarding your staff and the business assets. As you do so, it is important to foresee and plan on how to keep your business safe against calamities such as Covid-19. Not to mention earthquakes and major storms, like hurricanes.
Once such disasters occur, are deadly setbacks on businesses. And it takes a long time to reestablish your company and get back to normal. Here, you need to keep your business safe through proper planning. That’s before, throughout, and after a calamity.
You can organize your business ready to face any disasters by;
Creating an Emergency Operations Plan
Let’s say, a natural disaster like COVID-19 or an earthquake has crashed into your business. What would be your fallback to such a tragic event? You don’t have to be caught off guard and start creating and implementing ad-lib plans at the same time.
Creating an emergency plan before the disaster would not worry you about the measures to sustain your business during and after the tragedy.
This idea of an emergency plan in advancement will help reduce the cost of equipping your staff with the rightful information on actions to take in time, rather than during the disasters.
For example, in this Covid-19 time, it’s a friendly move to cut the number of your employees, and as well train them on how to pilot into a company with a new hierarchy and budget. But how could you put in place such an idea without prior planning? You need a plan.
Areas to address when drafting a plan
- Who will be in charge of a natural disaster?
- How to divide responsibilities to employees in and after a disaster?
- In case the employees disintegrate or the disaster collapses the premise, how will the business operate?
- Do you have emergency kits and are they enough?
- Emphasize on means of communication with employees, clients, and customers. This includes messaging through social media platforms, emails, or press releases. With such mediums, information can reach your audience about the impact of the disaster on your business.
If you don’t plan, then you’ve already planned to fail. It is time you have to create an emergency response plan to protect your business.
Documenting your assets
Remember, the assets include the personnel and other valuable units of your company.
All documents have to be kept well. You can’t afford your account to dry out due to poor accounting.
What would you do if you discovered that your accountant, a Covid-19 victim misplaced the details of debt you would already have cleared?
Ensure you check your obligations and properties to keep your documents updated.
Incorporate your team members to help keep the records of all the assets that belong to the business. That’s your responsibility as a company.
Documenting your assets serves the following major purposes in the business.
- You will easily identify the asset and the area that needs a remedy in case of a disaster. You don’t have to frustrate yourself trying to solve the problems through estimations.
- A complete record of your assets will appear presentable before an insurance company. Or else replace every lost property all by yourself because you lacked documents to decide your compensation after a natural disaster.
Have your assets documented and stored safely. Produce both hard and soft copies and encode in a confidential database. You can as well entrust some copies with your lawyer, accountant, or any shareholders.
Backing up important data
We do not prepare many businesses on how to deal with situations that cause losing or compromising the existing data. Your documents are as valuable as a leaf of gold. No matter the times or state of your business, make sure you manage your accounting.
You need to have all the important data from your side for the smooth running of your business. Think of your company’s private information,
Mm! Your confidential financial information about your clients. What would happen if such information was compromised, or even lost? You will be accountable for all the damage that may arise, and you are likely to lose the benefits of your business in a short time.
Organize the existing data and keep it safe at all costs.
The idea is through developing a backup plan that will sort your worries about losing some documents under any circumstances.
Produce and store enough paper-copies containing essential information about your business. We are talking about payroll data, tax procedures, and insurance statements.
Store your data both in paperwork and online. To back up your data online, you need to scan, upload, and synchronize the electronic files to your Cloud account.
The Cloud system enables you to use your information anytime, anywhere. You can get access to your data and facilitate your business remotely as you ‘keep a distance,’ through your smartphone.
Failing to protect and back up your data could cause bankruptcy because many businesses can’t bounce back after a disaster. You can recover your data after a disaster, but it’s not a guarantee for your business to continue. Click here to learn more about the business continuity plan after disaster recovery.
Budgeting for payroll without revenue
Covid-19 pandemic has shaken businesses in a way that their course of operations has changed. Talk of either suspending or dismissing some of your employees. Working with a reduced staff can lead to poor customer service and product delivery to the market. This can cause a drastic decline in your business.
With some foresight, plan and set aside a payroll in advance. Accept that at some point you might experience eventualities. Though you may have to dig deeper into your pocket to expedite the payroll, it’s better than understaffing which leaves you with no peace of mind because of low productivity.
Conclusion
You need to understand that competition in the global market is high. And for a growing business to thrive after a disaster strike is difficult. Not to mention the Covid-19 scenario that led to movement restriction around the world.
The idea is to reflect the probable hindrances you experience with your business and plan how to fall back to an event that may cause any setback. By so doing, you will have mitigated the threats to your business sustainability and survival after a disaster.
It’s your turn to take action and adopt the above-given ideas. Let this article change your school of thought. Be an effective businessperson ready to face ordinary business challenges and tragic natural disasters like the Coronavirus.
