If you lead a business, your mind is likely focused on survival and minimizing your losses, both economic and people-related. There’s another key element to put front and center though — a timely and effective recovery. Take it from one who has led emergency efforts in large organizations: plan now for life on the other side. If you do, you’ll come out better, and in a better market position. Count on it. 

The good news is that this work is also part of the healing process, to begin to put in motion steps to return to normal operations. Depending on your business type, there are different ways to plan your business recovery, however we recommend considering a phased return, especially in health emergencies. That allows you to ramp up production and revenues as you have a more consistent workforce presence. Also, if there are waves of illness over time, you will still have the core workforce to proceed effectively. Other than that broad recommendation in view of this situation, here are five key steps to guide your project plan for a business recovery: 

1. Adjust your mindset. Look in the mirror, and find the positives around you. Attitude is key to a successful recovery, and that starts from within. What are the new discoveries that you and your team learned through the crisis? How did it help you to advance skills, knowledge or new services? What of those learnings and changes should be continued, or built upon? It’s easy to see the challenges, yet if we look, there are likely a lot of positives too. Positive energy and focus is energizing and engaging. Lead with positivity, and watch the recovery truly begin. Balance every challenge with a positive outcome.  

2. Evaluate your current state. As a leader, you need to set the direction for the company’s future, in full reality of your current position. Survey the damage, and take an honest view of a phased recovery in terms of revenues, market impact and resources. If you have had some workers work out of their home, and it’s working for you and them, can that continue? If you have had to shut down entirely, what are the product or service lines that are strongest, and most in demand, that you should scale back into operations first? Are you marketing now to be top of mind once the recovery is clear? We recommend doing a risk evaluation/assessment of your business and talent strategy, customer relationships, infrastructure/needs, operations & financials. You may also need to evaluate a long-term capital or facility plan. Be clear, honest and confident. If you need a tool to help you objectively evaluate your organization, we can help. 

 Business Recovery Assessment Tool     

3. Update the long term strategy. This may seem counterintuitive, however taking a longer-term view first helps to manage the short-term recovery more effectively. Did you have a business strategy before the crisis? What were the key items that you committed to do? Where are those priority items now? It’s absolutely OK for strategic priorities and objectives to shift. Often they remain, however, there are some interim actions needed to get back on track. Those items need to be added to the implementation action plan, and likely some timeframes need to shift. Engage other key leaders and stakeholders in offering feedback to the plan and changes needed. Broader input helps to reduce blind spots, and gain buy-in, especially if additional steps are needed. Once the long-term plan is set and considers all of the additional learnings and strengths through the crisis, it’s time to move to action. 

4. Identify short-term priorities. Identify the top three things for stage 1 recovery, up to 25% of your business operations. These often fall into a few themes: 

Structure/Infrastructure - what physical changes need to be restored? 

Financial - what accounts payable and accounts receivable need attention, either to support your brand reputation, or cash flow? 

People - what changes have you experienced in your workforce and talent needs? Where are the biggest gaps that you need to fill first? 

Customer care - how are you planning to engage your current, former, and new customers? Have you updated your marketing strategy?  

Operations - have you identified ways to increase efficiencies through the crisis? Can you standardize those modified processes? 

Recognize that you can’t do everything at once. Balance is key to recovery. Create specific priority actions with the goal of achieving 25% of your former monthly operating revenue within 30 days. From there, target a phased increase each month until you’re back on track. 

5. Be visible and show your cultural values. In the midst of a recovery, your team needs to see you, and hear from you often. Even though you have 500 items on your to-do list, the most important one is to connect with your team and your customers. No one else can do that for you, and everyone is watching. If you listen, engage, problem-solve, and reflect trust and transparency in action, your team will rally like never before. They want you to partner with them. Do it. This truly is a great opportunity to strengthen and align your culture like never before. You’ve just been through a horrendous challenge, and everyone is thankful to be on the path to a mend. You’re leading it, and they need to have confidence and trust that you’ve set the right direction. If you’re present, you can answer questions timely, show respect and gratitude, and learn more about what your customers want and need from your products and services. That builds relationships, and dramatically increases your chance of success with your business recovery strategy!

There are many other relevant best practices for business recovery in specific industry sectors. We serve as trusted advisers to guide the process with you, for the best results. Making mistakes in a recovery process can cost you the future. Make wise choices, and call us to get it right the first time!       

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Your Success is Our Success

Dawn Garcia is Principal and Founder of Pursuit of Excellence LLC, an independent business management consulting firm specializing in service-based businesses; delivering leadership, business and talent strategy, and execution expertise. Experience the Excellence Driven® System and The Predictive Index® for your business, and achieve the results you need! Every business needs help at some point; great business leaders actually get help when needed, realizing greater returns. 

When you need help, consult the experts. We're here for you and your business!

If you've heard people talk about an OKR system, or KRAs, and you're wondering what that is, let us explain. These are initials for a leadership system, designed to yield better business results, focused on what is most significant for your business success. Sounds like a great idea, right? It's time to do it. 

Why OKRs?  

About 25-30 years ago, the best management practice for leaders was management by objectives, or MBOs. The concept was one of spending significant time and effort to identify specific leadership objectives, plans, and a level of accountability overall for getting things done. The focus was on the objectives, not the results. While the concept of setting strategic objectives was a great one, it was missing something - a clear picture of the results needed to reflect business success. The premise was that setting a strong plan would generate the right results. That wasn't exactly reality.  Many leaders considered planning as their work, not results. 

Enter OKRs about 20 years ago, starting in technology companies like Google and Intel. OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results; KRA stands for Key Result Areas. Highly competitive and dynamic organizations struggled to achieve alignment and active movement in the industry amidst rapid growth until visionary leaders realized that they needed active team collaboration and transparency across the organization toward clear, foundational and aspirational objectives. A foundational objective is a business requirement. An aspirational objective is a stretch goal that would potentially be disruptive in the industry. This was the beginning of a true OKR system. Over the years, OKR's success has led to broader adoption, yet many organizations still lack execution of the basic principles: shared, aligned, priority objectives, and result accountability to each person, role, and department. It's interesting that one of the consistent reasons why employees leave organizations is because of a lack of clear role expectations and work alignment to the mission. It's time to change this through OKRs!

OKR Value Equation

An OKR system depends upon clear identification of 3-5 strategic objectives by the leaders, alignment of accountability for key results to each member of the organization, and an ongoing system of results monitoring weekly, monthly, and quarterly to ensure progressive results achievement. The hardest part of using OKRs is getting a reasonable number of the right objectives identified to focus on. Generally the best way to implement OKRs is through the senior leaders spending some time to get acquainted with the concept and use, and holding themselves accountable for up to six months or more. Once the senior leaders get comfortable with OKRs, then cascading them to the middle management team is next. Senior leaders are typically early adopters of the process as they see the value, while the middle management group is often more conflicted with expectations from their team and senior leaders. Once the system is deployed to the leaders, then alignment to the workforce is actually pretty straightforward, as long as there is a system to visualize and reward progress transparently across the organization. The true value of the OKR system is through aligned collaborative performance toward the most important strategic objectives. Most organizations achieve 10-30% or more performance gains as a result of the OKR system. Think about that potential in your organization!

Small Business Benefits

Using an OKR system as a small business offers as many benefits as it does for a larger business, by helping the leader, owner or partners to be on the same page, and hold themselves accountable for key results. When the responsibility for effective business operations and growth falls on a single leader, who holds the leader accountable? An OKR system can. Wearing many hats, as most business leaders must, makes it easy to lose focus or set the performance bar too low. An OKR system creates a clear focus on what's most important, especially when supported by a business advisor or consultant. Most OKR systems are cloud-based software tools with performance dashboards that are viewable by the advisor or consultant, to boost accountability and just-in-time solutions. Another significant small business benefit is the transparency with the work team, to harness more productivity and empowerment. When an owner reflects confidence in the team, and shares key business results, it boosts employee morale and retention. Organizations that have a clear plan simply achieve more, and that creates business success.

A Digital OKR Solution

Those who have been using an OKR system for a number of years swear by a cloud-based transparent software solution as key to success. While there are a number of different OKR options in the market, our recommendation is to find one that isn't too complex, that delivers a great value as you grow. Key features that we recommend include: 1) the ability to easily set and enter annual and quarterly objectives at the organizational, leader and department/team levels, 2) dashboards and status updates at all levels, 3) measurable key results for each objective, 4) feedback, communication and recognition elements to reward progress to targets, 5) and weekly plans to capture the key activities needed to achieve results. For example, if a car sales business were using OKRs, the sales team would have OKRs focused upon the number of sales per month, per quarter and annually, perhaps by model or brand. In addition, the sales team would have weekly plans to achieve certain levels of contacts, follow-ups, or referrals, in order to build the opportunity to make monthly and quarterly sales targets. A dashboard would reflect the performance of the sales team, visible to the manager, while the sales team could also see the targets and progress of the service department, as key to organizational revenues, customer satisfaction and retention levels. As team members see each other's progress, they can explore creative solutions to achieve targets. Teamwork works!

Getting Started  

As you consider the advantages of identifying the most important business objectives and bringing them to life, there's not a better time to get started with OKRs! Fortunately, there are a number of systems on the market that are quite good. You just need to determine which one might work best for you, based upon the size and scale of your organization, your team's maturity with leadership accountability, and your budget. Pursuit of Excellence (POE) Digital Solutions services can help make this easier through an initial meeting with your leaders, to identify these elements, and recommend a best fit system for your needs. Find out more at the link below.

About POE Digital Solutions

Pursuit of Excellence Digital Solutions (POE-DS) is a division of Pursuit of Excellence LLC, a business management consulting agency that focuses upon helping leaders to be more effective, advance strategic performance, and achieve high-level performance results. POE-DS offers a variety of state-of-the-art solution packages for different business technology needs, including an OKR setup, coaching and monitoring service, and a suite of enterprise relationship programs to meet the dynamic  needs of small and mid-sized organizations. If you or your leaders need to advance your digital strategy for competitive positioning, POE-DS should be your first stop. If your organization is not ready to get on board with digital solutions yet, consider that your competition has already been moving there...Let's connect now!

Dawn Garcia is Principal and Founder of Pursuit of Excellence LLC, an independent business management consulting firm specializing in service-based businesses; delivering leadership, strategy and execution expertise. Experience the Excellence Driven® System for your business, and achieve the results you need! Every business needs help at some point; great business leaders actually get help when needed, realizing greater returns. When you need help, consult the experts. Our success is your success!