Managing change during crisis times

Change is the only constant in business and life. In the wake of COVID-19 and the ensuing socio-economic disruption, it becomes a key imperative for businesses around the world to embrace and manage change in their respective ecosystems. Some of these changes could be reactive (such as responses to dealing with the pandemic) while others would be pro-active (such as insulating your business from the virus-inflicted socio-economic shock). Leaders and employees would do well to keep a combination of their product, operations and customers as the focal point of their daily work. Change management is a structured process that takes time and also involves a change in the employee mindset. We take a look at how organizations can embrace and manage change in the turbulent times of today and without diluting the volumes, the quality or the agility of their business.

1. Embrace remote work through digital transformation: Remote work and social distancing are the key mantras of the day, and a digital transformation of your business can work wonders in this direction. Salesforce.com is a trusted CRM on cloud that holds capabilities to involve every business stakeholder of yours in to online operations instead of the offline alternative. In order to digitally transform your business, you as a leader would need to select the right consulting and implementation partner to begin with, followed by choosing the right cloud package for your specific business requirements. Whether you implement a Sales Cloud, a Service Cloud, a Commerce Cloud or an Enterprise Cloud, the right consulting partner would ensure that you maximize returns on your technological investment. Needless to say, your employees and customers stay safer as a result and continue to work in a stable and secure environment.
2. Prepare everyone in advance for change: As a business leader, you need to set clear expectations at the outset itself. Through a virtual town hall or another mode, you need to announce that the ensuing wave of business change is mandatory for every employee to embrace. This CRM-based digital transformation would change your older ways of working for the better, and also impart enhanced agility, quality and innovation capabilities to your business. Many of your existing operational bottlenecks would be removed as a result, and your organization would march ahead on its vision, mission, values and goals with a renewed sense of vigour. Advance preparation would only mean that you as a business are all set to leverage your Salesforce implementation to the maximum, having well understood what you are doing, why you are doing it and how you are doing it.
3. Let go of archaic ways of work and embrace newness: You as a leader and a change agent need to acknowledge the fact that not everything that’s working for you currently would necessarily work for your business in the future too. This realization could well mean that you let go of some of the olden policies and cultures such as hand-shakes, mandatory daily physical presence in office, compulsory town hall attendance and the rule to attend sales meetings every month. While these are just some examples made in an attempt to drive the bigger point home, you need to embrace the new normal by framing newer, relevant policies and establish fresher cultures and ways of working. Needless to say, a cloud-based CRM such as Salesforce forms a right step for your business in this direction. You don’t just streamline your operations and automate your key processes through this implementation, but also open avenues for your business to leverage upon the daily data and information generated as a result.
4. Crisis response management: Change management during crisis times is different from change management under normal circumstances. While you can take more time and phase out things otherwise, crises often need you to think on your feet and respond rapidly. Yes, you need to go remote and virtual without losing time, and a proper CRM implementation that is well understood by all of your employees saves the day for you and your business. Given the nature of the current pandemic, office attendance needs to be minimized while encouraging work-from-home practices. If at all attending office is compulsory, the physical task should be carried out by minimum possible personnel and while following social distancing norms. Effectively, you need to keep your people safe and your business stable and secure.
5. Review your crisis response periodically: Change management is never a one-time activity, and it needs you to assess and review your progress against the crisis every once in a while. Against a pre-defined timeline, you and your key people need to sit together and observe what’s going right and what’s going wrong, as also what all can be done better and what all can be avoided. Understand that crisis inflicts pressure on both top-line and bottom-line, and you’d do well to re-prioritize your set of business activities in resonance with the new normal. Cloud forms an important chunk of those changes, and its adoption for use across your organization becomes critically important. The other part is the regular upgradations, maintenance and integrations that your customized CRM would need from time to time.

To sum up, your CRM implementation and your technology consulting partner play a key role in enabling you to manage change during crisis times in an effective manner. Salesforce.com is a proven cloud-based CRM that helps you achieve digital transformation and drive its use throughout your organization. ABSYZ is a trusted Salesforce partner that has nearly a decade of experience helping businesses make the most of their digital transformation and the investment made therein. To know more about how ABSYZ can help you plan and manage change during these testing times, contact us.