How will data flow during this crisis?Įvaluate the supply chain. If large numbers of your employees have to work remotely for a time, for example, is there enough technology bandwidth to cope? Will your operations be impacted if outsourced, offshore workforces are unable to come to work? What is the procedure for updating travel advice and policy? How will communication with employees be managed? During any crisis, the biggest worry for CEOs is gathering accurate information quickly. Generic plans need to be adapted and tailored to cope with the specific challenges of an epidemic. One Asia-based organization’s pandemic plan, for example, designated a European city as the evacuation site for employees and their families - but flights from China to the city were suspended soon after the outbreak. But nothing tests theory quite like reality. Every well-run business has a crisis or continuity plan, and many will have a specific pandemic plan. Revisit your crisis and continuity plans. You also should plan for policies in the event of lengthy school closures - what will the policy be for working parents? There’s also the issue of tax: If workers are forced to stay in foreign countries longer than expected and then become subject to taxation, what policies do you have in place to address this? Lastly, be prepared to continuously refresh and update these policies as circumstances evolve. Do any need to be repatriated? Or have they asked to work from home? Upcoming travel plans will need to be reviewed, rescheduled, or canceled.Ĭlear policies should be in place to address absence due to sickness or caring for relatives, the protocol for visitors to company sites, the procedure for reporting illness, and travel restrictions. The first priority is to establish exactly where staff are and how many workers are in affected or vulnerable territories. Here are seven actions that you as a leader can take to ensure your organization is in the best shape possible to withstand what’s ahead. The key to managing any crisis is preparation. COVID-19 will test many business leaders to the limit. According to PwC’s most recent Global Crisis Survey, nearly seven in 10 leaders (69 percent) have experienced at least one corporate crisis in the last five years in their companies, and the average number of crises experienced in these firms is greater than three. We’ve already seen massive disruption to supply chains, and if the virus continues to spread, we could soon see widespread closures of schools and workplaces, whether voluntary or enforced.īusiness leaders see managing a crisis as an inevitable part of their role. The International Monetary Fund had downgraded its global growth estimates, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has suggested global growth could be cut in half as a result of the virus. The SARS outbreak is believed to have cost about US$40 billion the economist who made that calculation says COVID-19 could cost three or four times as much. It comes with extreme scope and levels of uncertainty.Įstimating the virus’s effect on the global economy is hard. No crisis is an isolated, neatly contained incident, and the COVID-19 outbreak is exceptional by any standards. In much less time than that, COVID-19 has already infected more than ten times as many people, and is spreading fast. SARS infected more than 8,000 people and lasted nine months. It comes with extreme scope and levels of uncertainty. It’s a situation that is well beyond the experience of most business leaders - the median tenure of a CEO is five years, and the last epidemic that approached anything near this scale was the SARS outbreak in 2003. Business leaders are concerned, and rightly so, for the welfare of their people and their organizations. By the end of February, the phones were ringing off the hook. But as the COVID-19 outbreak has worsened, the volume of calls fielded by our teams has noticeably increased. Note: This is the first of a series of articles describing the three waves of an effective response to the COVID-19 crisis: mobilize, stabilize, and strategize. Read the second article, on the stabilize wave.Īt PwC’s Global Crisis Centre, we deal with crises every day. A version of this article appeared in the Summer 2020 issue of strategy+business.
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