Is Covid-19 the Ultimate Disruptor and What Will Business Look Like When We Emerge?

Jun 03, 2020 • Features • Royal Mail • The Field Service Podcast • Covid-19 • Leadership and Strategy • Kevin Green

In this highlight from the Field Service Podcast Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News and Kevin Green, former CEO of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation discuss what the impact of Covid-19 will be in terms of market disruption...

Want to hear more head over to our podcast library @ www.fieldservicenews.com/podcasts and look for Series Five, Episode One 'Kevin Green on Leadership, Strategy and the Economic Impact of Lockdown' for the full episode...

Can we Look forward to a New Normal that is Better than before?

In the last few months we’ve seen such rapid changes in such a short amount of time. There is often talk about disrupters entering a market, but the truth is that perhaps the biggest disrupter our civilisation has ever seen is not a new emerging technology or organisation but the Covid-19 pandemic.

Across the conversation with Green on episode one series five of the Field Service Podcast we explored a number of different aspects to what breeds agility and adaptability into an organisation. We discussed the crucial role of leadership, strategy, people and processes reflecting back on the positives that have emerged as companies have been forced into action to survive the global lockdowns and the economic tsunami of recession, they look set to trigger.

Perhaps the simplest question, has the most complex answer. It is also the question on everybody’s lips. What comes next? What does the new-normal of tomorrow look like?

“When we look at the impact of disruption a classic example of this will be what happens at the end of this year,” Green states.

“If you take a cultural analogy, you know, the adaptive organisation will say ‘okay, what have we learned from this? How do we adapt what we do in light of that [learning]?’

The challenges we’ve all been through in recent months, surely it would be criminal to not seize the learnings from this time as Green suggests and build a better, brighter version of what we had before the lockdowns came?

“Actually, we found that we can have 90% people working from home and we can still deliver the product, we can do some amazing things, using technology as a tool so how do we structure our business going forward? Do we continue to have people working at home, perhaps we have half the people and we can get rid of some office space because we don't need it anymore?

"That's a demonstration of an organisation which is learning and developing and taking the experience of this crisis and trying to build on it and use it for good. What you will find though is that some other organisations will just revert the type. The lockdowns will eventually be lifted and everyone goes back to work and we carry on in the same way.

“That is a classic example of an adaptive learning organisation, versus one which isn't responsive to its environment because it won't see the opportunities that the crisis has created for it and won't learn from this and won't adapt. We'll see a lot of organisations, just go back to doing things it as they’ve always done them.

“However, I think there will be other organisations that saying ‘hang on a second, there is some real good stuff that we've learned here. We've used technology differently, our staff have operated in different ways and we've given them more autonomy. Why don't we build on that and use it as we go forward?”

The challenges we’ve all been through in recent months, surely it would be criminal to not seize the learnings from this time as Green suggests and build a better, brighter version of what we had before the lockdowns came?