COVID-19: Is Your Business Continuity Plan Digital?
Predictability and stability are key elements to running a successful business. In this article, we discuss the importance of having a digital business continuity plan (BCP) in place, so as to even out disruptions in the COVID-19 pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic is far from over. In the past two weeks, countries all over the world had extended their lockdowns and tightened restrictions on movements. As more and more employees start to get used to working from home, it becomes even more crucial for companies to have a business continuity plan in place to smoothen future disruptions.
What is a business continuity plan (BCP)? According to Enterprise Singapore, it is a process that outlines and mitigates potential impacts of black swan events and unforeseen disasters, and create policies to respond to them.
Some guidelines in BCPs of large companies include:
- Complete movement to remote work, with ramped up IT capabilities to help facilitate telecommuting;
- Enabling collaboration and connectivity amongst all stakeholders through telecommunication tools and software applications;
- A professional counselling hotline is also set up to help employees cope with organisational change. Some companies like ours also do virtual lunches.
An effective BCP not only serves to smoothen out unforeseen disruptions to the business, it can help the business be antifragile– that is, boost performance during the crisis.
“Business as Usual”: The Benefits of Integrating SaaS Solutions to Your BCP
Indeed, more and more enterprises are adopting cloud-based enterprise tools to support remote working processes as part of their BCP. In particular, software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions have been wildly popular as an enterprise solution in recent years.
SaaS solutions complements BCP by offering real-time connectivity to ensure uninterrupted communication across all stakeholders. They also provide real-time online access to their platforms, enabling enterprises to have stable access to their corporate data. Gone are the days when employees need to physically travel to their offices to retrieve data or documents.
SaaS solutions also empowers employees to be more productive because data sharing across the organization can now be done in a more effective manner, usually for a low monthly subscription fee as compared to legacy solutions.
In addition, SaaS solutions are designed to be highly scalable and flexible– perfect features to be included in every company’s BCP. What this means is that enterprises can feel free to customize their requirements based on existing market conditions, monitor the situation, before choosing to then increase or decrease its users’ subscription as the pandemic evolves.
Seamless Integration Is Key
In the process of designing BCP and researching new digital solutions, it is important to ensure that these tools integrate well with existing systems that the enterprise is currently using. Enterprises also need to be certain that companies do not have too many systems as it creates hassle and possible frustrations on the part of employees.
At TeamSpirit, we go the extra mile to make sure that our Workforce Success Platform (WSP) can connect easily to other applications or tools for a wide range of business functions. We prioritise seamless integration and an amazing user experience so that remote work can be more hassle-free.
Post COVID-19: Preparing For The New Norm With A Powered-BCP
It is clear that the world post COVID-19 will be a dramatically different one, especially in terms of digital transformation. Do you have a digital BCP in place? If you haven’t, perhaps it is time to come up with one to prepare your enterprise or business for the new norm.