Have you managed the Lockdown?

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Lock Down
Lock Down

This moment of Pandemic is fatal and disruptive for our belief, confidence, power, and economy worldwide. May be our perception towards business, life, relations, customer, supplier, employees might change for a very long time. Every challenge lives behind a learning curve for the generation to come, so do we have to learn from this Pandemic situation we all are in.

Many companies got unaware, unprepared to handle and tackle Lockdown, Home office, etc. There is nothing wrong with it per se, however here again there is a learning curve for the stakeholder, management, department heads, and others.

During the lockdown, I have personally spoken to many companies and I found there are two types of companies majorly if I describe this way.

A. TO DO LIST

There are many SME’s and even large scale companies have managed the lockdown as one of the best times they have in terms of focusing on their own deficiencies and long-awaited “To DO LIST”. These include manufacturing units, IT-ITES, Agriculture These companies since got a hint of lockdown, well prepared their office infrastructure wise to be prepared for work from home, internet, power back up and so on. Their management team had put real efforts that al desired person will be able to work full time from home. And it has worked!

They had a systematic plan in place once lockdown is declared or about, timeline, Gantt chart of each individual and team who – what will be done on each day. Most such companies had focused on their own SOP’s, Design improvisation, Quality issue, Supplier related quality issue, Webinar participation, online marketing, website up-gradation, even new interview to be recruit in few months on specific requirements.

Even top management was available fully and participated in many webinars (which is rare), Demo of the products, details discussion on the existing challenges they are facing in manufacturing despite the fact that both sides know there will be no upfront business or requirements immediately in the current scenario.

The one common thing among these companies was – they had no excuses, they really want to utilize this time with the best of their abilities. It also indicates and speak a lot about company behavior, culture, and how they take any challenge!

My favorite quote among a few was from Ms. Rupali of Meemansa “We as a Meemansa team, decided to make this lockdown as a best of time, instead of making waste of time.”

B. LET's WAIT & WATCH

While for some companies it was the best time to relax, calm down, enjoy family time, let’s wait and watch. In some cases, even key person phones are not reachable and switched off. Most of these companies were caught sleeping and handicapped by infrastructure. Many of them could not even access their server or hardware even from home. 

There is nothing wrong with this if it is strategically defined and decided for the lockdown. 

There is one common thing among these companies were – We can’t do much from home, we have production/manufacturing and teamwork activities. Even if lockdown ends, and we assume it may take another 3-4 weeks to get new orders, materials these types of companies might not be able to work or deliver much even if they will be in their office.

Those who have moved to digitization have got the partial benefit, those who have transformed to the digitalization have got max benefit, while those who rely on paper, document, files, are the worst hit in the lockdown. 

Continuation of this article, I will be writing about How you can manage after Lockdown, in the next article. Stay Safe, Stay Healthy!

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