The professionals use jargon like continuity & sustainability and operational resilience, but let’s dispense with that and just ask what would your new reality really look like?
Let’s be honest your office work is governed by processes and these need to link up properly if things are to work well, like a jigsaw. Pictorially it might look like this….
If you are office based and you hadn’t thought about what to do in a crisis then what you do when you first change to an “alternative process” might look a little like this.
It may be that this is exactly how it works best, but it doesn’t often go that smoothly. The same as everything else, the more thought and effort you put into something the more you get out of it.
What to think about to make your new reality better
Ask questions is the first thing. All of these questions must concern what needs to be considered from your normal process to your “new reality”.
If you work only from PC’s at the moment with an external back-up, how can you access the information from your normal processing?
If you have a fixed switchboard, how can you make sure those calls are still answered?
How can you print you invoices and/or keep other records up to date?
When you put the questions right in the middle of everything you do things might not change much but an important change takes place.
Everything you do get centred around the questions and you see how change can make things better.
The answers are going to be very individual, a lot of the time, but your new reality will have to work for you and be smooth enough not to cause any significant additional work.
How do you know your new reality will work?
Simply it is to try it out. Large and multinational companies spend millions of pounds on these two catchphrases, continuity & sustainability and operational resilience.
You can try the same thing too. Once you work out how you can link to your IT systems from the outside, try it out and feed the results back. Were the connections too slow? Could you access everything that you should be able to? Etc.
Essentially your jigsaw for your new reality might look like this….
Its not quite the same as your normal jigsaw, but it is what works best for you in your new reality.
Back to normal
What can be learnt from your experiences of this new reality? If people say nothing, then my immediate reaction is that you are not doing it right. Getting back to normal should mean that the feedback from working in your new reality for a while actually makes some changes to your normal process.
Why travel to a customer who is a hundred miles away for every regular review meeting when you can have a virtual meeting. Not only do you save cost of the petrol, but the time spent driving there and back. You could easily have two more virtual meetings in the time you have spent driving. Your own productivity will soar.
So, learn from your new reality and make parts of it normal. It will not work for everything but it will provide real benefits in some areas.
Your normal jigsaw may be changed to look a little like this….
The two changed pieces of your jigsaw may have more benefits than you originally envisaged. There could be benefits to customers in terms of raised customer service levels. There could be a more secure digital environment to keep data safer and more easily accessible by authorised users. The list is pretty much endless and it does include increasing both turnover and profit. You do need to attain a new normal
Finally, let’s be candid. If you never change what you do, your business is really going backwards. It can only go back so far before it becomes irrelevant and fails.
There is so much more information available, some of it very detailed. Please look through the other blogs and see if the information you want is provided.
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