How to develop a recovery roadmap post-COVID-19 (and what are the key strategic considerations for a successful recovery)

Corporate executives need to plan for their organisation’s post-COVID-19 recovery. They have to evaluate existing corporate strategies and determine how they can create or protect value in a post–Covid-19 world.

Relationships between governments, businesses, consumers and individuals have shifted due to COVID-19. This requires a fundamental rethinking as corporate executives reshape a better society to avoid the reoccurrence of the kind of health crisis we are experiencing today.

This pandemic has caused many existing strategic priorities and relationships to be renewed; others will shift; others will changed totally. It will involve redesigning and the execution of ‘new’ strategies. Executives, workers and teams will be realigned and supported to implement the recovery plans.

Having worked hard to overcome the first wave of urgent COVID-19 operational issues — among them protecting employees and customers to ensure that there is continuity in operations and business — now, a new wave of strategic questions are emerging about what to do next and what does recovery and normalisation look like.

Returning businesses to ‘normal’ operational health after a severe shutdown is extremely challenging especially with the possibility that the virus could re-emerge.

Changing preferences and expectations

Before COVID-19, you couldn’t walk into a local restaurant and get a cocktail to go. Now you can. Why? Because the law was changed.

Before COVID-19, you couldn’t talk to your doctor over Zoom or FaceTime. Now you can. Why? Because the law was changed

.The pandemic has caused significant shifts in preferences and expectations of individuals — citizens, workers and consumers. This will significantly impact how we live, work, interact with other people, and use technology.

It has been reported that 33 percent of Chinese consumers changed food brands during the crisis. And 20 percent of them plan to stick with the alternatives that they tried out.

Many people will not be going back to their pre-COVID-19 lifestyles and preferences after being forced to try something new during the pandemic lockdown.

Governments and businesses will have to adapt their existing structures and processes to cater for these changing preferences and expectations.

In particular, organisations have to think through different demand scenarios, inventory movements, production deployment, and associated logistics. They have to assess the strength of their suppliers, partners, distributors, and supply chain. The resilience and reliability of supply chains and production capacity and capability have been significantly challenged.

The ‘new’ normal will not be the same as the ‘old’ normal

No one knows exactly how this will all play out. What is clear is that for many industries, organisations and businesses, there will be no going back to how things were before.

Organisations that hurry back to their old ways of working may very well stumble in the years to come.

This crisis has given executives opportunities to transform themselves and be resilient and flexible to face a more turbulent world. The reset button has been pressed. It is now time to do something positive about it.

Changing consumer and individual preferences will require new service delivery, operating and business models. This will drive changes to supply chains and how we manage production and inventories.

Customers and workers will be more vigilant about their health and well-being. They will increase their demands on safety and health. Businesses will need to provide products and services that adhere to more rigorous health and safety requirements. They have to provide customers and workers with safety guarantees that will restore trust.

There will also be an acceleration of digital transformation to serve new consumer and worker requirements. IT infrastructures and systems must be relevant, secure, and able to meet these emerging expectations and requirements.

Data analytics will play a crucial role as there will be demand for additional data sources to inform strategic and operational decisions.

Job automation will be more virtual

Here’s the scary outcome of this pandemic.

This pandemic has shown that many of us can do our jobs remotely because we’re primarily working on a computer. This may eventually mean that more and more of our work (or components of our jobs) can be done by the computer itself or done remotely by someone in China or India where labour cost is much lower without the headaches of modern-day industrial relations and regulations.

This is the “remote working test”.

If work can be done remotely, that person’s job is not secure. That work can be replaced by automation or outsourced!

Time to review assumptions and redundancies

Many organisations have become more resilient by responding to the COVID–19 outbreak. They are questioning assumptions on which their businesses have been operating on.

Organisations that have global supply chains based on low costs and just-in-time production found themselves without supplies. This pandemic has prompted the need to actively manage for redundancy and to identify which parts of their value chain can be managed for costs. They may have to find suppliers closer to their customers and hold some level of inventories.

Organisations that have outsourced call centres across multiple countries and locations to ‘guarantee redundancy’ found themselves without support when their employees didn’t have access to laptops or broadband at home.

This pandemic has prompted a review of their business continuity strategies. They have to plan for remote working for their workforce and upgraded technology to support working from home in the future.

Planning for how the future will look like

This pandemic has exposed many weaknesses across the corporate world. Few organisations were ready. Boards will eventually be redefining what it means to be prepared for a crisis and pandemic.

It’s about planing for those more frequent black swans. Scenarios planning can help organisations become better prepared for a wide range of potential challenges before, during and after a pandemic.

Old assumptions must be revisited and reviewed. New assumptions must be formulated.

The vision for the ‘new’ world post-COVID-19 must be established. It will describe how it differs from what we have previously envisioned especially when there is no known vaccine available, yet.

Executives will need to know which existing trends will accelerate, which ones will become obsolete, or which new ones must be contemplated. These are key questions they need to ask themselves.

It is about exploring how these future trends could alter the boundaries of business, profitability and the rules of the game — customer propositions, corporate capabilities, finance in the new world, and new ways of working especially remote working.

One important test to do is stress-testing the organisation’s cash position and its profit-and-loss statement. This ensures that the organisation has sufficient cash to operate the business especially in the ‘new’ world post-COVID-19.

Optimise the use of working capital. Have sufficient cash flow to cope with the shocks of the crisis and recovery regardless of which scenario takes place.

Revising customer demand for products and services

COVID-19 has hit consumer spending hard especially when 10 percent to 20 percent of workers are unemployed and without buying power.

Most likely, it will also trigger a recession (or even a depression) in many countries. This will significantly reduce consumer demand for goods and services around the world.

Emerging from the lockdown, customers will not be quick to open their wallets. There will still be a high level of cautiousness and uncertainties in their minds.

Knowing what goods and services consumers may cut back as the economy contracts and where spending surge may occur as an expansion starts will help businesses plan for the subsequent recovery.

Businesses must revive their customer base in order to survive themselves. They must be able to stimulate demand in a time when economies are weak and consumer confidence is at its lowest.

It is worth noting that some economies may not even go back to normal for some time. Instead, they could remain in a transitional stage between being fully closed and fully open for some time.

This is where stronger businesses will have to assist customers and suppliers in financial difficulty.

Develop a compelling narrative

The end result is the creation of a compelling narrative as to where executives want their organisation to go, the ‘new’ vision for success.

By reprioritising their workforce and resources to cater to the changing preferences, executives are repositioning their organisation in a better position for creating value and surviving in the ‘new’ world they see coming. They create a ‘new’ roadmap or strategy for how to get there. But executing that strategy will be the only key to success.

This strategy will include how corporates will orchestrate all the steps they will need to take and the sequence in which they will need to take them.

A successful restart will require addressing a large number of inter-dependent issues simultaneously. This will require an increase in the speed of decision making.

It is, therefore, important to maintain the flexibility and speed of execution, and simplified decision and reporting lines for a successful restart.

During COVID-19, most organisations have found that decisions that took weeks or months were now taking a matter of days. Cross-organizational collaboration has been easier.

Now, it is time to permanently embed this speed of decision making and execution in organisations.

The roadmap for successful recovery

This roadmap will guide production, supply chain, and marketing and sales.

Recovery will be systematic — country by country, site by site, segment by segment, customer by customer, and product by product.

The sequencing criteria may include the regulatory environment of each site, the state of local demand; the site’s capacity and capability in terms of workforce and production capabilities; and financial stability of consumers, suppliers, and service providers.

Key strategic considerations

Here are some considerations when formulating your roadmap to recovery.

The list below is not exhaustive and each organisation will need to carefully assess COVID-19’s impact in the 12 areas.

Area	Strategic considerations
Strategy	1. Are you agile and resilient enough to adapt to changes and withstand unforeseen shocks? 2. Will your existing strategy remain relevant? 3. What strategic choices should you confidently recommit to? 4. How should you position your business for growth? 5. What are the opportunities to pursue competitive advantage? 6. What are the options to pivot? 7. How does the ‘new’ normal look like and how do you get there? 8. How can you shape the narrative on how the ‘new’ normal will look like? 9. Are there sufficient availability and reliability of data to make meaningful decisions especially for anticipating the future? 10. Will the uneven reopening of markets and geographies add an unusual amount of complexity to your operations? 11. What’s the ‘big idea’ that could shape your industry and organisation for the next decade? 12. What are the new trends you need to confront and adapt to? 13. How do you build adaptability, capability and resilience into your strategy and operations? 14. How do you reimagine your business and activate your capacity to start your business? 15. What is your plan for bouncing back? 16. How prepared are you to execute your plans and projects? 17. How can you act like a small company to have a big impact?
Customers	1. What are the customer needs that you can serve? 2. Where is the demand and how will you configure the business systems — supply chains, production and service operations, distribution, etc. — to meet it? 3. Should you engage your customers for acquisition or retention? 4. Has customer behaviours and brand preferences moved, changed, or likely to be permanent? 5. How will the next generation of customers that may fuel your growth be different than your core customers prior to COVID-19? 6. What are the opportunities to acquire new customers? 7. What are the opportunities to acquire new products/services?
Product / services	1. How should your product/service mix and pricing look like? 2. Are the product/service benefits and features still relevant? 3. Can you offer a version of your products/services through an online channel? 4. Can you use existing infrastructure to produce products or offer services that are in demand? 5. How can you rapidly increase your capacity to produce and distribute products/services?
Supply chain	1. What are the opportunities to improve your supply chain? 2. How can you strengthen your suppliers, distributors and transportation? 3. What alternate supply chain arrangements based on geographic and business resilience considerations can you implement or improve?
Operations	1. What are the opportunities to innovate or improve your operations and processes? 2. What automation and technological solutions can you use or leverage on? 3. Which ways of working that you have discovered during this crisis should you preserve and build upon? 4. How can you design your operations to allow for flexible transitions to/from COVID operations? 5. How do you expect COVID-19 to impact your future operating results and near-and-long-term financial condition? 6. Do you expect that COVID-19 will impact future operations differently than how it affected the current period? 7. Have COVID-19-related circumstances such as remote work arrangements adversely affected your ability to maintain operations? 8. Will your operations be materially impacted by any constraints or other impacts on your human capital resources, productivity or capacity? 9. Are travel restrictions and border closures expected to have a material impact on your ability to operate and achieve your business and operational goals? 10. What new projects do you need to launch, run, and coordinate?
People	1. Is everyone including the leadership team fully aligned around the decision to move forward? 2. What are the gaps in workforce readiness, competency, capacity and capability? 3. Is your workforce aligned and supported to implement the recovery plan? 4. Do you have the right operating and governance structures and collaboration in place to implement the recovery plan? 5. Do you have the people with the right capability and competence to execute the recovery plan? 6. How has the social contract with your workers and contractors changed? 7. Do you need to amend/upgrade your people, training and development policies? 8. Is working remotely permanent? 9. Would workers return all at once or on a phased basis over time? 10. How will your organisation ensure worker safety and well-being? 11. Is it time to off-shore and outsourced capabilities and capacities? 12. How do you increase the intensity and speed of your learning and development as you navigate the uncertainties ahead? 13. How will your culture and identity change? 14. What skills are you depending on for your recovery business model? 15. How do you build your employee skills critical to your new business model? 16. How can you launch tailored learning journeys to close critical skill gaps?
Governance, risk and compliance	1. What new organisational transformation initiatives can you implement to organise yourself better or improve the effectiveness of your operations and performance? 2. How does your risk profile look like? 3. How have your stakeholders’ expectations changed? 4. How can you engage with regulators to maintain crisis-driven changed in rules?
Technology	1. How can you increase your digital capabilities to enable growth, decrease cost and provide valuable and timely insights, analysis and transformation? 2. How can you improve your cybersecurity posture? 3. Do you re-prioritise your digital and IT infrastructure investments? 4. What improvements can you implement for your technical architecture?
Performance	1. Should you manage for profit or resilience? 2. How can you build resilience and capacity into your revenue streams? 3. Where should you tighten your belts or take more cost reduction measures? 4. How can you update and improve your cash flow and budgets? 5. How do you expect COVID-19 to affect the assets on your balance sheet and your ability to timely account for those assets? 6. How can you strengthen your balance-sheet?
Funding	1. Do you need to embark on pre-emptive capital raising? 2. Do you need to negotiate further debt facilities and covenants? 3. Have you aligned your lenders, investors and shareholders on terms, timing and capital availability? 4. How can you allocate capital to developing new capabilities and capacities? 5. Has your cost of or access to capital and funding sources, such as revolving credit facilities or other sources changed, or is it reasonably likely to change? 6. If a material liquidity deficiency has been identified, what course of action have you taken or proposed to take to remedy the deficiency?
Cash flow	1. Should you operate for cash or profit? 2. What are the opportunities for CAPEX investments? 3, What other opportunities can you implement to manage cost, increase revenues and increase your gross operating profit?
Marketing	1. What are the opportunities to increase market share? 2. How can you improve your communications strategies? 3. What marketing messages can you adopt to improve engagement with your customers and stakeholders?

This recovery will not follow a straight line, so executives should get used to thinking about it dynamically. They’ll make hard decisions and commit to learning by doing. It is about developing a pragmatic roadmap for returning to work and getting started all over again.

The playing field has been leveled. Recovery from COVID-19 will be less like restarting a business than like STARTING A NEW BUSINESS. Executives face some of the same questions that confront every business founder: What are the customer needs that I can serve? Where is the demand? How do I configure the business systems — supply chains, production and service operations, distribution — to meet my customers’ needs?

It is only by first understanding the demand side of the equation can executives determine how many people need to return to work physically to meet that demand. It starts with evaluating customer demand by product or service and geography. Then assessing the abilities of suppliers and distributors to support that customer demand.

And it’s all about the people who will be executing the strategy and recovery plan

Mitigating risk to workers as they return requires new policies, infrastructure and personal behavioural changes tailored to work sites.

The final important step is to invest in new people capabilities after determining what those capabilities will be to execute their ‘new’ strategy.

It is people who will be executing the strategy and recovery plan. Support them well and provide the necessary operating environment and safety and health guarantees that will accelerate their productivity and efficiencies.