The New Normal in Family Businesses, Part 4: Resilience
How is the Corona pandemic changing our corporate and working world? In a "backward forecast", we look for initial answers. Concrete. Creative. And actionable for today. Here is Part 4 on the topic: The agile, digital organization is becoming a matter of course.
We never wanted to become a virtual family business. But with the shutdown, we became one more quickly and more extensively than the family, shareholders and management could ever have imagined. However, we never came close to Goldman Sachs' 98% "home office" quota in April 2020.
Most of our "homeworkers" were positively surprised. Again and again we heard in 2020: "It works much better than we expected". Also from the managers. The trust they had placed in their employees was not disappointed. On the contrary. Working productively, flexibly and agilely with colleagues or our partners and customers from home or another location has therefore also become an absolute matter of course today - more than a year later. In most areas. We do not want to and will not scale this back or call it into question again. Here, the crisis has also helped us to bring our traditional management and working methods up to date.
Caution "System Confusion
At the top of our top 3 list of challenges, however, is still cleaning up the "system clutter" in our IT system landscape, which we caused ourselves last year through our improvisations in response to the sudden home office compulsion.
In particular, our goal now is to transfer everything into a decentralized, efficient, secure, resilient and future-open IT infrastructure. That's a lot of adjectives, but we don't want to miss any of them. The digitization initiatives in particular will benefit from our significantly higher and more differentiated requirements here. Before the crisis, it was much more difficult for us to make any progress at all - which, from today's perspective, is almost inconceivable.
The family, shareholders and supervisory bodies have also taken a big step forward in terms of digitalization. Today, we have a governance collaboration platform on which all relevant persons have regulated and secure access to all important documents, can organize tap-proof telephone conferences, sign documents, and meet in encrypted "VR lounges.
When we contacted the first solution providers, we were taken with the level of technical performance, process competence and risk expertise. The implementation has taken our committee work to a new level in terms of efficiency, transparency and crisis resilience. With our last Annual General Meeting, we were able to put our pilot system into operation - with consistently positive feedback from users. Also from the older generations.
Investments and funding sources for greater resilience
It was easier for us to invest in this because we had previously freed up a considerable sum in trade fair, event and travel budgets - which were still firmly calculated into the budget before social distancing, worldwide travel warnings and assembly bans.
We expect additional funds in the coming years from the transformation of large parts of our presence workspaces into virtual workplaces. The associated savings in rents and leases are an important source of funding for us to make further investments in strengthening our resilience to crises. Today, we are all a little more in tune with Andrew Grove and his mantra: "Only the paranoid survive." For us, the question today is no longer whether there will be another global crisis. But only: When something like this will occur again in a globally networked world. And then we will be prepared!
Focus on customer needs
In the virtualization of our global sites and the associated adjustments to structures and processes, we are guided to a significant extent by the significantly increased requirements and needs of our customers.
Security, flexibility and partnership remain the focus here. It goes without saying that many of our customers still have to operate in crisis mode and cannot always act as quickly, directly and clearly as we are accustomed to - but they always receive the highest performance values and service levels from us.
We have found out: If you go through the crisis together, nothing will break you apart in a hurry! And at the end of the day, what matters most to us is the resilience of our customer relationships.
(to be continued)
Authors:
Christian Schiede has been advising and assisting entrepreneurial families and family businesses to strengthen cohesion, increase competitiveness and secure value since 2003. Contact: www.schiede.com; schiede@shpadvisors.com
Bastian Schneider has been helping entrepreneurs and management teams strengthen their brands from within and lead their organizations and businesses into the future from this perspective since 2000. In more than 30 industries. In Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Contact: www.brandleadership.ch; bastian.schneider@brandleadership.ch
