The most crippling outcomes often arise from a lack of preparedness. This is nowhere more apparent than in the number of companies that went out of business during the worst of the economic turmoil of 2020. This is often not entirely the fault of the business, especially for smaller businesses that have fewer resources to pour into safety measures. But such businesses are reported to be 2.5 times more likely to go bankrupt than larger ones in the event of a massive economic downturn, according to UN news.
In light of how devastating the lack of preparation for both small and big businesses, companies need to learn what they should have done in order to survive. However demanding these things may be, they will need to reconcile these with their capabilities in order to maximize their chances of persevering through another dire situation. But no matter the size of the business, the same principle will decide whether it will rise or fall in a crisis.
Small businesses may be capable of a lot less, but keeping costs under control is more a matter of planning than the sheer amount of resources. And to formulate the right plans, businesses will need to take these crucial lessons on board.
Communication Is of Paramount Importance in a Crisis
Workplaces all over the world were treated to a rude awakening last year. The COVID-19 pandemic caught everyone by surprise, and the fact that we are still reeling from its effects makes it clear that a long list of changes need to be made to ensure that commerce won’t be hit nearly as hard by such disasters in the future. Among these changes, many business experts realized, is the need to increase communication.
The primary reason that so many businesses spun out during the outset of the pandemic was the fact that coordination often ranged from mediocre to extremely low. Employers failed to communicate proper instructions to their employees, and this resulted in a cascade of delays and inefficiencies. This manifested in several ways, such as in the shaky transition to remote work, where employees were often not properly briefed on the tools and protocols involved. Or in the flawed implementation of skeletal in-office workforces.
Due to these shortcomings, it is clear that workplaces of the future need to increase their transparency in order to improve reaction times and efficacy during a crisis. Employees need to be privy to the rationale behind managerial decisions, as well as their options. To ensure that everything is running without a hitch, the admin staff need to be constantly on hand to give the workforce guidance and address questions and concerns.
Workplaces Need To Have Better Contingencies in Place for Health Emergencies
If future disease outbreaks prove to be as infectious and unpredictable as COVID-19, then businesses need to be much more proactive than they were at the start of the pandemic. Since the nature of work varies from workplace to workplace, agencies like OSHA recommend that offices follow specialized plans tailored to their specific conditions and built around current health and safety policies. For certain cases, such as highly specialized industries, businesses may need to consult with OSHA or their local equivalent in order to formulate an ideal health emergency plan.
Such plans would have to contain multilayered countermeasures against infection, such as disease testing protocols, social distancing requirements, specialized ventilation and cleaning, and other controls. These may also involve workplace-sponsored vaccinations or at least paid leave for those who are going to get vaccinated.
In the future, businesses might even be encouraged to work closely with healthcare professionals in order to guarantee that their offices are insulated against health threats. Building a comprehensive plan now prepares a business for similar outbreaks in the future.
Employees Need To Take Their Safety Into Their Own Hands
Even before 2020, workplace safety was already a major concern across all workplaces. The ILO reports that an average of 7500 fatalities happened each day in the years leading up to 2020. As tragic as that statistic is, it is only a percentage of the larger body of workplace-related injuries, which can number up to 1 million different occurrences every single day.
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that not all workplaces can respond competently to a situation that can compromise their employees’ health and safety, or even care to do so. For these reasons, the best way a worker can guarantee that they will not be disadvantaged in the event of a severe accident is to start taking control of their own safety. This isn’t limited to looking after oneself. Contacting attorneys before an accident can even happen is the best way to ensure a strong legal case for when you take the workplace injury to court, according to http://jjsjustice.com/.
In the future, as more and more employees learn to prepare legal safety nets, employers would have much more motivation to ensure that the workplace is as safe as it can possibly be. But taking ownership of one’s own safety at work doesn’t just involve making employers more accountable for their health and safety practices. It also holds individual employees accountable for observing personal health and safety habits for the sake of their workmates as much as their own. This may evolve into employees policing one another’s habits under the pain of probation or legal action.
We Need To Accept the Reality of Hybrid Work
There’s all this talk of the “new normal,” but some workplaces may not realize what that entails for the nature of work in the future. This seemingly endless cycle of lockdowns will hopefully cease at some point, but the far-reaching effects of the pandemic on labor will be felt for possibly decades to come.
Viral diseases in the 21st century have proven to be more infectious than ever before and have shown themselves to be incredibly volatile, capable of deadly mutations. As we continue to try to purge the world of coronavirus, and indeed as the possibility of similar diseases appearing continues to loom, we need to accept that hybrid work is here to stay, and that’s arguably a good thing.
Stripping down in-person staffing to its bare minimum is the best adaptation to a world in which multi-vector, extremely infectious, and volatile diseases exist. Plus, there’s a clear advantage for both employers and employees in opening up the option to do remote work. Workplaces can save on overhead if employees don’t use up office space and utilities, and workers save on commuting expenses and dodge time wastes such as traffic jams.
Once we get used to the practices of hybrid work, it has the potential to make workflows, resource consumption, and work-life balances much more efficient. This doesn’t ignore the reality that in-person work is essential, however. In mastering hybrid work, we will also be able to create systems in which essential workers can be called in as needed as part of a flexible work scheme.
In order to survive, businesses will have to assume new forms and adopt new practices. Transitioning to this case of affairs will be difficult for all, but as long as they learn from the mistakes of those who came before, they will have the knowledge they need to see things through.