What cost when not following a plotted course??  I guess that most of you will have heard of the MV Costa Concordia or the MV Rena.  Yes I know I can hear a number of you all saying but it was one person’s decision to vary the course.  Well I guess that if there was a learning from history that you can take forward to the future it would be plot the course carefully.  On the same score you most certainly all will have heard of Covid 19 and the specific/non specific ways various governments around the globe have handled this.  In your companies you most likely will have seen a totally different way of doing business.  In fact, recently I heard the saying “the Ivory Towers have burnt”!  Companies are learning new ways of doing business – diversified work forces no longer working from their comfortable offices but working from home.  While the world recovered from pollution a little even though it suffered from the illness a whole new way of doing business has been discovered and the benefits are two fold – their employees get to spend more time at home, not commuting – companies have less liability in so far as real estate rentals.

The big question though now to be addressed is just what does this new workforce look like?  How do you measure what you can’t see, does in fact teamwork matter now and what about personality!  Will our new look workplaces have a personality?  When employing for the future how will you make these decisions?

Is it too early to start setting resolutions for 2021? Probably not. How do you want the post “annus horribilis” of 2020 to look?  2021 could be your “annus mirabilis”.

Just maybe you should start planning and taking action now so that you hit the ground running in the new year.

What happens if you start planning and taking action now and you find yourself ready to go ahead of time? Well that is a problem that a lot of people would like to have rather than the opposite of getting to January 1st and thinking, what now?

It could be that you want to keep doing what you were doing before the current scenario hit us. Great, keep doing it.  As mentioned earlier in this article, part of your planning is likely to involve what your team members will be doing.

You may want to develop the skills, both hard and soft skills, of your team to enhance their current role or move them to a new position that has now evolved from the current environment.  What processes do you have in place to ensure that the right people are put into the right roles to meet the challenges moving forward?

• Do you need to build new job descriptions?
• Do you have profiles of the personality, aptitude and motivation needed to fill the role? 
• Have you got benchmarks in place for each role?

There was a statement made by a good acquaintance of mine when the changed marketplace hit in the late 80’s and that was ‘smart companies plan for the future and spend money on developing their employees during this period of change so that they can hit the road running as the new map is developed’

Where do you and your company sit, if you want to be one of those smart companies contact us and let’s talk about your current and future tool kit for company growth.