STAY HOME, STAY SAFE

Coronavirus disease is highly infectious, it is spreading rapidly affecting most of the world’s population. Governments in many countries take serious measures to slow the spread. Please follow the guidelines of your local government and keep social distancing, wash your hands frequently. If you can, work from your home.

Obviously many businesses are affected by this pandemic. To switch from working in offices to working from home is a daunting task for some industries and impossible for others. In addition to all this hardship, hackers are threatening companies implementing home office work. Information security is more important now than ever before.

But, how do you balance between the safety of your staff, their families and let your revenue continue during this challenging situation? There is no single answer to this dilemma. A few ideas that we have implemented long time ago in DACHS, allowing us to continue operation with no disruptions:

If you are already setup to enable your employees to be able to work from their homes, encourage them to telecommute, if you have not done it yet. Companies that allow for remote work will be more adapted to similar situations in the future.

Make sure your management is ready to support this flexibility of their staff working from their homes. Managers need to learn how to handle remote workers. So, to speak, trust and verify, which means they need to learn to delegate and measure results.

Businesses that cannot continue some of their operation should perhaps encourage their staff to learn additional skills through distance learning. At some point the economy will pick up and there may be a surge in demand as many projects may have been postponed or delayed.

Create a business continuity plan that incorporates telecommuting among others. How do you plan to handle continuous operation, if your operation is run from multiple geographic locations, or from a single location?

DACHS, has been supporting big pharma companies globally for over two decades, using remote working tools. Since our services are predominantly consulting, software development, business analysis, support, etc., many of our staff have already been working from their homes. Even at the office, we mostly work remotely with our clients.

This is a new situation that we have not experienced in this form and extent yet. The world will be different after we conquered the pandemic and come out at the end of the tunnel. We need to prepare for being able to adopt and to embrace the transformation of the new economy.

Take all the preventive measures seriously and protect yourself, your staff, and others in this current health crisis.

16/04/2020