Too many small business owners want to stick their heads in the sand and wait until “normal” comes back.
This is a bad strategy because no one knows when the marketplace will be “normal” again.
Interview with Dave Silke of Mitel
On the Small Business Radio Show, Dave Silke, the Chief Marketing Officer of Mitel discusses what every small business owner needs to do right now to ensure business continuity during a crisis.
He starts out by suggesting a four-phase approach to business continuity – reaction, mitigation, reassurance, and recovery. Organizations must navigate these four phases to recover from the strain the pandemic has placed on their employees, customers and businesses.
Dave says that in the reaction phase, all small business owners can expect a period of emotional upheaval. In mitigation, the company finds a new equilibrium as work and life collide. In reassurance. business owners start to reorganize and strengthen operations to prevent more loss of business.
Finally, Dave adds that in the recovery phase, there is the realization of the new normal in a post-COVID-19 world.
Dave highlights that most businesses will be in various stages as states restart their economies.
Companies try to survive holding either in mitigation or entering reassurance where leaders in the organization making a promise to employees that the chaos that happened for the pandemic will not happen again.
It is during this phase that companies focus on workflows and business processes, and how technology can complement the work people do. Dave suggests that cloud communications and collaboration can keep people efficient anywhere, anytime, and on any device.
In the reassurance phase, Dave believes it’s all about eliminating disjointed technologies. One study showed that a company’s technology stack is critical and poorly integrated communications apps can cost the business $6,000-$10,000 per employee per year.
Dave thinks this may increase now if the company has not developed remote working/work-from-home capabilities or leaders do not know how manage fully remote teams. He insists that having a solution where all the necessary elements (telephony, chat/messaging, file sharing, video, and workspaces) work together as opposed to piecing together varying technologies to fit individual functions (like using Slack, Zoom, and Google docs) ensures internal productivity with your external customer experience.
Dave believes that it’s critical that small businesses realize the decisions they make regarding their technology strategy today will dictate their culture around communication for future crises. The inertia a business owner creates now will be hard to redirect without the right systems and services.
Listen to the entire interview on the Small Business Radio Show.
Image: mitel.com
This article, “How to Achieve Business Continuity During a Crisis” was first published on Small Business Trends