As more vaccines are being distributed globally, countries are easing restrictions and ending lockdowns, giving businesses the chance to get back on track and continue regular operations. Businesses and establishments will need to restart operations holistically for the best results, and the tips mentioned can make the process easier—allowing you to get your business back on track.
Safeguarding Employee Health
The number one priority you need to take care of when restarting business operations is your employees. Although many are more than eager to get back to work, many are worried about doing it safely. That’s why you need to reassure your workers about their safety and implement different strategies to motivate them in a post-lockdown environment. The first thing you need to do is ensure employee safety in the office, controlling access to the workplace following national regulations, which means you need to implement several measures.
Those measures include testing employees for the virus, whether it’s a regular swab test or the more thorough ace2 assay test to see workers are free from the virus, and checking temperatures before entering the building. Plus, as an owner or manager, you need to reduce the density of the space between each employee by redesigning the workspace to meet national regulations. You can do this by delineating safe places to avoid contagion, reconfiguring team members to ensure there are no skills shortages, or tearing working hours by rotating shifts.
Employers also need to extend protection measures for their employees outside the office by providing workers with safety equipment for personal use and encouraging them to travel individually.
Providing Customers with Safety Guarantees
With the past lockdowns, clients will be more vigilant regarding health, increasing their demands for safety. That’s why business owners need to offer products and services adhering to the most rigorous health and safety conditions and show and explain to clients. You can do this by defining requirements to ensure a safe experience for your customers, introducing new practices like temperature controls and provision of hydro-alcoholic gel at the entrances of malls, or generalized use of contactless payment methods delivery.
Another way to provide customers with safety guidelines is by proactively communicating about measures implemented that may not be visible to customers in your back offices and manufacturing sites. These could range from reducing human handling, testing procedures across the supply chain, and the rigorous application of the highest sanitary standards in infrastructure.
Reboot Operations and Supply Chains
After taking care of the human aspects in restarting your operations, you can now focus on returning to the market at the desired speed by doing a couple of methods. These include securing your supply chain on strategic procurement and operational processes to ensure recovery, strengthening your business’s ability to anticipate and meet current demands to ensure you’re offering quality products and services at the desired rate.
It’s also best to set out a phase recovery per site, where you should base sequencing on four significant criteria. These include the regional regulatory environment of your business’s location and its distribution centers, the extent of local demand, site capacity, and the solidity of your finances and operations. Finally, make sure to reassure all your partners about operational reliability by making your operations more flexible.
Shifting IT and Technology to Restart Smoothly
From the beginning of the pandemic and its succeeding lockdowns, IT personnel have made a lot of effort to cope with the increasing demand against deadlines and customer demands. That’s why businesses have had to orchestrate the sudden switch to remote work or work at home protocols for workers, using the latest collaborative tools in a way that’s both efficient and secure. Businesses had to ramp up digital channels to serve customers better, solidifying their business’s IT infrastructure at a time of substantial load increases.
Despite all these achievements, businesses still have the chance to do more, especially post-lockdown, as the importance of digital processes to customers, suppliers, and the whole global economy has accelerated. That’s why to make sure you have a smooth restart of operations, accelerate digital transformation to serve employees and customers better. It’s also wise to enhance data-driven decision-making and data availability to make better-informed strategic and operational decisions.
Create a Detailed Relaunch Map
Finally for all business owners to ensure their restart of operations go smoothly, you’ll need to define a solid framework for action in an ever-changing environment—and the best way to do this is by developing a detailed relaunch map in all aspects. Making one can give you ample guidance with production, supply chain, marketing, sale, and create a recovery timeline for each site.
As coronavirus-related restrictions begin to lift alongside lockdowns ending across the world, organizations and businesses are ready to resolve supply-chain issues and restart operations—and the tips mentioned can help ensure a smoother process and slowly get back to a regular pace.