The primary strategic challenge for organisations will be to deal with reduced demand and shrinking markets
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As the lockdown eases in different parts of India, industries and organisations are limping back to operations, hoping for normalcy to return during the next three to six months. Irrespective of the “new normal” that organisations are going to encounter as an when the lockdown eases completely, organisations are in for challenging times ahead. In this article, I discuss the various dimensions of challenge that organisations will need to reckon with and negotiate. I divide them into the dimensions of strategy, structure, processes and culture. I have generalised these challenges even though they will vary between industries and individual organisations to some extent.
The primary strategic challenge for organisations will be to deal with reduced demand and shrinking markets. Given the loss of livelihood, reduction in income and economic depression, consumers will postpone or become very conservative in buying products and services. For organisations, this implies decline in revenues. If they intend to remain profitable, they will have to reduce costs. They will have to cut down activities that may be regarded as non-essential in the short run as well as reduce staff. Investments will have to get postponed, new hiring to be stopped. All of these, while effective for profitability in the short run, are dangerous for the long run. Organisations need to be especially careful about reducing functions and activities such as research and development that often seems non-essential in the short run but are important for the survival in the long run. They should not mistakenly consider what is not urgent as unnecessary. Likewise, when employees are laid off, organisations often lose high quality talent. Moreover, it leaves a permanent scar in the minds of the employees who are retained because of the signal such expedient actions communicate about the long-term values of the organisation. In the face of shrinking revenues and increasing losses, it will only be organisations with deep pockets that will survive, resulting in a spate of acquisitions and industry consolidation. It will therefore be a good opportunity for cash rich and big organisations to shop for talent and smaller organizations who they can buy cheap. If this happens, industries will get concentrated which is often bad news for consumers in the long run unless the regulator steps in to prevent potential monopolies or cartelization. Organizations that survive will do well to seek alliances and partnerships, maybe even with competitors to share resources and undertake joint activities. It is here that one might witness some innovations. Strategy and management consultants, investment bankers and private equity players might see greater demand for their services provided organizations are able to afford them. Providing credit and financing will become essential to sell one’s products or services and thus keep the customer committed to the organization.
In a crisis situation, organization structures become centralized and COVID has been a crisis like never before. This happens primarily because of two reasons. Crisis situation demands rapid response from organizations and during such times organizations can ill-afford the time needed for decentralized and consensual decision making. You do not want a lot of debate and discussion regarding the best path to escape when your house is on fire! Moreover, in times of such difficulties, employees who are in various states of discomfort and distress, look up to their leaders to provide direction. This naturally reduces employee discretion and makes the organization dependent on the abilities of a few leaders. We are already witnessing some centralization of decision making in governance on the political and policy front. This is likely to increase as means of responding to immediate challenges and will also result in greater rules and regulations within organization. In sum, organization structures are going to get more centralized and formalized, both of which, even if justifiable for immediate response to the situation can result in loss of flexibility and dampening of creativity in the medium to long run. It also increases the risk of being dependent on a few individual leaders.
Organizations run on routines and processes. Robust processes enable organizations to build long term competencies by repeatedly doing things correctly, as well as improving them incrementally. It also enables organizations to judiciously allocate attention of senior management, a valuable and scarce resource, to tasks that are unique and strategic in nature rather than worry about tasks that are standardized. Routines and processes get reinforced and embedded in organizations through repetition till a point they become almost an unconditional reflex. However, routines degenerate if they are not practiced. This might have happened to most organizations during the lock down period. While many organizations have been innovative in creating new routines such as meetings over video conferencing, their existing routines and processes, such as those of customer acquisition, maintaining relationship with suppliers or employee socialization may have atrophied or disappeared from organizational memory. These routines and disrupted processes will have to be revived, brought back into the realm of consciousness, even as organizations need to adopt new routines to deal with many of the strategic challenges discussed before. Many of the routines will have to be evaluated to weed out inefficiencies, redundancies and thus reduce costs. If organizations can invest in information technology, some of the routines can be automated to save costs and increase efficiency. It will be a difficult tradeoff, to make investments upfront to get an advantage in the medium to long term. And finally, organizations would have created new routines to deal with the contingent situation of lockdown. They need to consider whether such routines can now be adopted for the long run, even when the crisis abates. Working form home or doing web-based conferences have both advantages and disadvantages. They are efficient, have far lesser environmental footprint but make employees distant from one another. How should organizations blend some of these remote-working practices with existing routines will have to be carefully evaluated with respect to the specific context of the organization and tasks. For example, teamwork that are lot more unstructured in terms of interaction between colleagues are less amenable to being done remotely than teamwork that are sequential and structured.
The final element is organization culture. Organisations achieve their strategic objectives through the seamless working of the trinity of structure, process and culture. These are highly interdependent and therefore they cannot be viewed in isolation. The culture of many organization would have got fractured during the crisis, when organizations almost stopped working or muddled through. Employees, as they get back to working, will be consumed by fear, uncertainty and doubt regarding their profession, career and organization. Many of them would have suffered tragedy on the personal front. And many would discover that some of their colleagues are no longer working for their organizations, all of which will exacerbate their distress. Cost reduction measures and loss of discretion, which we discussed as consequences before, are antithetical to the psychological contract that exists between an employee and the organization, which inspires employees to give their best for the organization. Overall, there will be a trust deficit which can perilously reduce organizations to a bundle of economic transactions focused only on the short term.