Return to Work

You are encouraged to make reference to individual country restrictions, where applicable, for work information and/or overseas deployments. It is expected that these may further ease in the coming weeks as the infection rate and peak of the virus subsides. To that end, it remains important to have a strategy in place for the eventual return as it could take longer than expected to get moving. Companies are encouraged to think about a staged and prolonged return process that sees the reintegration of their workforce and restarting of operations.

Many companies will fit one of the following scenarios:

1. Your business is not trading with all staff furloughed or otherwise.
2. Your business has limited operational capacity with some staff furloughed, others working from home or ‘essential’ staff currently allowed in the workplace.
3. Your business is fully operational but all staff working from home.

Social distancing practices (however these are defined in each country) will almost certainly be a key factor too, and the need to risk manage how people work remains very important. How staff are usually located, the grouping of teams or departments also needs to be assessed. You will wish to plan your approach with any health, safety and human resource elements within your business. By working together, you should look to create an environment which is useable and safeguards personnel as much as possible.

Business Resilience

Business resilience is the ability to quickly adapt and respond to disruptive events to safeguard people, assets and reputation, while still maintaining continuous operations. Thorough planning ensures that staff can respond, resume and restore to a pre-determined level of operations following any disruption. Never has there been such an important time to look at business resilience and how organisations cope with global disruption – of course coveringthe way that the pandemic can impact people medically, but also assessing the secondary and tertiary shockwaves that are often overlooked from a business perspective.

The COVID-19 emergency is having a significant impact on all business operations. Those that come out best will have striven to turn the crisis into an opportunity for positive review and change. This means adapting to the new normal and making it work for the business. As the world remains in a state of financial, social and political instability, with global lockdowns, and infections reaching over one million, there is still much to know about the cycle of this virus and how we learn to live with it, so businesses will need to remain both highly adaptable and proactive in their approach.