Business Trends From COVID-19

https://youtu.be/2Sgu0T3zNNg

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Transcript

Good day and welcome to the leading with nice daily. My name is Mathieu Yuill in this week we are going to look at five trends that are emerging out of COVID-19 and how you can be prepared. I hate to say capitalize on them, but really it’s about how you can exit this time and really thrive. So the first one I want to talk to you about is innovation. And really I can only imagine what is going to come out of pharmaceutical companies over the next 18 to 24 months, with the massive amount of R and D that has been going on around COVID-19 and how this will impact your business. Is there will be so much innovation in other industries and sectors that the public will expect you to also be innovative? So what do you do about this? Well, it’s actually not that hard.

The first thing you need to do if you do not have one already is create a scorecard. And by that I mean you need to be tracking the effectiveness of the different products and services you’re offering. You need to create a scorecard that not only measures the outcome, but measures the input. So for example, the good analogy is weight loss. You don’t measure your weight loss to know if you’re being effective. You measure your calories intake and your calories burned by exercise. That will tell you what your weight loss will be. Like. If you don’t have a scorecard, you won’t know what to drop or what new things you’re trying are any good. And you need to have some sort of scorecards. You can do this with confidence. Scorecards are the jam. Now, today we want to talk about societal compliance and protecting the vulnerable and how your organization is going to do both.

So people will look to your company for rules, regulations, boundaries on how they can operate and be safe. People will really think twice about washing their hands about germ passage, about viruses. They’ll want to know when they’re in your place of business, what are you doing? So for example, if you’re retail, this might include having hand sanitizer, whereas typically you would not only through nose, maybe in your bathrooms or in other places. But every business will need to have a hand sanitizer station. And the other thing they will want to know is how are you looking out for societies vulnerable? If you’re a nonprofit charity, this is easy. This is what you probably do all day every day. But if you’re a for-profit company, you probably have done really shallow team building activities where you went and did something like build a house, work in a food bank.

And I say that because I saw it firsthand there, there was a little lasting impact for many of those employees. People will want to know what you are doing today that is actually meaningful. They will not to know how are you supporting our society’s most vulnerable? And I don’t mean just the ones who suffer from extreme mental health, but from those who are living at or near the poverty line, what is your company doing? So one of the trends that will come out that will impact everybody is defining the future of work and how we do it. We will need to be able to pivot very quickly because. We had to pivot very quickly where everybody worked at home. You know, some of the interesting things that came out of this is, podcasting mics were sold out at Amazon. And zoom quickly became in the spotlight and nuances around their security and how good the software is became a big deal really quickly.

But they’ve upgraded their security and they’ve addressed a lot of the concerns and podcast manufacturers made sure they got supply quickly and people could buy the webcams as well were another thing that went out of stock very quickly. So when it pertains to how you interact with your employees. Now we already know many of them will expect to be able to work at home going forward. So my question is to you, how will your organization pivot and enable this to happen regularly? You can let it not happen and say, no, you have to work here and have fun having the bottom of the barrel employees, but that’ll be on you. You will need to be able to pivot quickly, set somebody up remotely, allow them to do other work elsewhere and you’ll need to able to do this very quickly. Basically pivoting on a dime.

Now today I want to talk about something that I’ve mentioned before, but it’s worth repeating and that is supply chain transparency. You know, we’re very lucky that this particular crisis did not involve loss of power or loss of internet connectivity. If you were around, you may recall the blackout that had impacted much of the Northeastern seaboard of the United States and Canada. I remember talking with my wife on a cell phone and I was at, my place of employment at the time, which was a college and all the lights went out. My cell phone signal almost immediately dropped, which was rare because power outages usually didn’t, didn’t impact that. And we waited around for about half an hour and then we decided to go home because there was no power coming back on and they couldn’t fix it. And on the way home, all the traffic lights were blinking.

It was pretty bad. And we had about three or four days of no power somewhere longer this time we did not have that. What we did have though as supply chain problems where we couldn’t get toilet paper, food, etc. So moving forward, one of the biggest issues we’ll face is how do we secure our supply chain? Do we have the actual infrastructure on-site to maintain what we need to do in lu of a technological crisis where we don’t have that connectivity? We’ve got off pretty easy now. I just been a lot of death. I’m not diminishing that. But in terms of a way of continuing doing business and keeping our houses warm and food on the table, we got off fairly easy on this one in, in North America at the very least. So you need to be sure that your transparency in your supply chain is solid and that you have the gear or the stuff readily available so that in readiness for the next crisis you are good to go.

Now today I want to talk about buying local and you see it all over message boards on the internet and people talking about it on television. How when this is all over, they will be eating out at local restaurants, buying things from local shops. They will not be shopping online as much. Now I don’t know if we will see much of an impact as people talk about it, but it definitely will be more so my question for you and your business, if you are not a quote-unquote local business, how will you become a local business? What does that look like for you? Does that mean you will be supporting businesses that are local differently? Will you be creating a store displays? Will that being, you’ll be creating some sort of a social initiative where you are really embedding yourself as a name in the community?

I really question how will organizations that don’t have a retail front be really local that are a nationwide chain or international, how will they beyond just of course hiring local employees show that they are local. We’re seeing a shift in values already, in a shift of brand loyalty values in terms of what do I actually really think is important to me and brand loyalty as then when I couldn’t get your thing, when I needed it most. So I just switched to another brand. This combined with buying local will have huge implications for your business if you are not already local, and if you are local, think about how you can capitalize on this by using it as a main thrust behind your communications. That’s all for this week. For more on this topic, visit leadingwithnice.com where we want to help you inspire others, build loyalty and get results talk to you again next week.