REFOCUSING YOUR STRATEGY DURING THE CORONA CRISIS
And why the ability to adapt is crucial for your survival.
“Until further notice”, a work-from-home structure is the new regulation imposed in our intent to combat COVID-19. As uncertain and unpredictable as this might be, we need to accept it and find ways to quickly adapt to the new working situation. Remember what Darwin said?
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” — Charles Darwin
Last week, we shared with you our top 7 tools to make a company-wide remote work setting simple, effective and enjoyable. As you might have been able to see, a few tricks and tips were already a massive game-changer! Now, thanks to a clear internal set-up and the majority of remote communication-barriers cleared out of the way, the company can get back into its “normal” workflow. Efficiency and teamwork are back! Similar to this, it is also important to rearrange our priorities and readjust frameworks if we want to keep the boat afloat in times of crisis.
“Where should we focus now?” — this is probably one of the most common doubts for enterprises in times of the corona crisis.
The answer is:
stay calm and focus on everything that is new, old or valuable for the future.
NEW — Focus on effectively reacting to the new situation.
First of all, panic won’t bring you anywhere. So instead of wasting energy by neglecting the obvious reality, we recommend you to act quickly and assemble a crisis management as fast as possible. “Due to the fact that external circumstances can change so rapidly, it is important to be flexible, adaptable and make hard decisions quickly, without getting overwhelmed.” says Tobi, Co-Founder of Mapify. “…Of course, a huge challenge is to make the ‘right’ move at the right time, which is why having a crisis management is so important. The idea behind it, is to not let the ship be steered by the tides, but rather being in control of the waves yourself.”
To give you a brief overview, here’s what you should focus on while setting up your crisis management:
Your primary concern should be the customer’s safety. Therefore, when an emergency situation arises, you should put all your attention on ensuring their wellbeing. For instance, being Mapify a travel startup, the first priority we had when the corona crisis set off in Europe, was to bring each and every single Mapify customer back home safely.
Only after this threat has been successfully tackled, you can move to the next step: looking into the financial situation of the organization. Here, it is important to meticulously calculate the new economic standpoint, reduce expenses and cut all trivial costs, while always communicating and updating the team about new findings.
“In times in which external circumstances change so quickly…” explains Tobi “…we have to be in full control over our financial processes. Right now, with the corona crisis, the entire world’s economy is suffering and we as employers must communicate honestly and as transparently as we can to keep everyone up to date and highly informed about their immediate future and the future of the company.”
Last but not least, a crisis management is also designed to uphold the reputation of the organization, protect its stakeholders from imminent danger and create a new internal strategy to reduce the impacts of the crisis as much as possible.
So, if you don’t know where to center your attention during a crisis, you can start by creating and implementing effective crisis management.
OLD — Focus on all the things you never have time to do otherwise.
One of the most common characteristics in the startup world is the voracious creation of ideas. We barely notice how quickly documents and folders pile up on each other and how fast structures are constantly changing. If you don’t know where to focus in times of a crisis, one of the safest bets is to invest it in a thorough clean-up. This means: get rid of old unused files, archive unnecessary folders, respond and organize old customer emails, redesign internal systems, clean up company-wide platforms, cancel old memberships you haven’t been using years… See it as an opportunity to do all the things you never have time to do otherwise!
At Mapify, for instance, our file management drive and Notion knowledge-board have received a deep clean-up. “It was really necessary to finally remove all the clutter and unnecessary information that we had been keeping there for years.” says Lush, our ‘ virtual Mapify cleaner’. “…My general rule was to set up a main folder for each department and only keep files that could bring value now or in the future.”
When decluttering your platforms, it is important to not throw anything away directly, but rather set up ‘archive’ folders for stakeholders to evaluate on their own. “Rather than me having long calls and debates with each stakeholder on what to keep or delete, I accumulated all the files in the ‘Archive’ and sent it to each one. Then, the respective stakeholders cleaned out their own folders for me to integrate into our new structure” continues Lush.
By doing a massive clean-up of the company and platforms you use on a daily basis, you are creating extreme clarity for existing and future team members, which will help them find necessary information fast and easy. This will positively affect your workflow — especially in times where a work-from-home structure is a part of every company.
“Situations change and right now, we find ourselves in an unprecedented crisis. The whole team is working remotely, therefore our documentation needs to be clear for people to be able to quickly find the necessary information and execute their tasks. If we hadn’t done the clean-up now, it might have been buried somewhere in the backlog. As a silver lining, this crisis has given us an opportunity to restructure our internal documentation and processes, making the team execution more clear and efficient.
FUTURE — Focus on what is to come.
As a final tip, we recommend you to focus on the future. Ask yourself things like “In what ways can I use the time that I have now, to make future processes better?”, “How can I increase the company’s internal knowledge?” or “What ideas can I create now that might be useful for innovating in the future?”.
At Mapify, we really believe that this crisis is a chance to optimize all existing company processes, smoothen out structures inside each and every department, set creative tasks for the future and, who knows, maybe even get back to projects we had completely forgotten about but that might be interesting for what is to come!
“At the customer experience department, our team manager has assembled a completely new strategy than the one we were following before the crisis.” mentions Lis “…Due to the current travel restrictions and general threat from the corona virus we don’t sell new trips right now, so obviously we had to completely rethink our working structure. Now, each of my co-workers in the department has a separate project, which they all own, but all of the new projects are intertwined with each other. I think it is a very innovative way to move forward, and something that will differentiate our future customer relationships from the ones we had until now ”
Similar to this, you can also work on increasing your internal knowledge, perfecting your database or making time for that brainstorming session you were always putting off. “I think that what we are doing right now is of huge importance.” continues Lis. “…This crisis has given us the necessary time to smoothen out all the little boundaries we used to have, in order to come out of this stronger and with more knowledge than ever before! I call it the ‘prepping’ time for when we can pick up trip sales again.”
In conclusion: life is what you make it! Even if the situation is not at all ideal, you can still extract the best out of it by focusing on what will bring you forward. And we assure you: there are a lot of problems you can tackle, things you can catch up on, documents you can revise, products you can invent, ideas you can develop, structures you can change and a ton of other ways you can use this crisis for the better, and grow!
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