By Sean Gerard Angel Pijuan
Our country was struck by the COVID-19 pandemic, placing it under a state of public-health emergency for almost 3 months and running. Strict enhanced community quarantines (ECQ) or lockdowns were implemented in our localities, crippling, or stopping our business operations. The lack of progress and ongoing extensions made us question if our businesses are to survive. Even after the transition from ECQ to general community quarantine(GCQ), there will still be restrictions imposed on our businesses. The natural inclination for businesses right now is to recover or restart, do with what it has left to revive.
It is expected that everyone should already have started planning. If not, then start now. As the uncertainty continues, it is up to us to fill the void. It is smart to assign a person-in-charge or a team that will handle the business’ transition. Control needs to be centralized. Also, it will be pretty handy to create a checklist to guide us through. Finally, nothing will work if we don’t give it a timeline. Once everything is in place we need to know when it will happen.
One of the first and obvious decisions is to communicate. Make announcements on your websites and social media. Every employee must be aware of the direction the company is headed during the transition from the ECQ to a less strict one like the GCQ. Take note that during ECQ, we were obliged to settle with a skeleton workforce or with no workforce at all. This means that some of our employees have not been in the office for a while or not been connected to our company updates.
Listen to feedback from your employees, customers, or even other businesses. Anybody can provide suggestions during this time. The recovery period will not only test our business on how well we react to suggestions and criticism, but it will also teach us how to evolve by learning through feedback. The COVID-19 crisis is unprecedented for most of us, and a lot of what we have done to adjust to it was likely unplanned or had little preparation. It will help to consider finding out how well we did from different perspectives.
Things will get much worse before they get better. We heard this a lot of times. The pandemic has highlighted the fragility of our business in a similar way it did with our public health and insurance systems. Working together is now more crucial. Our businesses could be required to consult or bargain with workers as a group while setting wages and hours, negotiating policies, and determining appropriate health and safety practices. If our businesses survive the lockdowns and its extensions, we will still meet new challenges to address: our recovery, our restart, or even our resurrection.
Sean Gerard Angel Z. Pijuan is the Senior Quality Management Officer of Invictus Prime Holdings Corporation, a corporation that manages the consolidation and integration of operations within its companies: Complete Logistic Control Inc., ZKO Group Distributors Inc., Philfast Global Forwarding Inc., Satellite GPS Tracking and Asset Management System Corp., and SCMIX Builders Inc.
