Managing uncertainty a practical guide

Managing
uncertainty
A practical guide to business continuity
2020/21

2
Managing uncertainty – A practical guide to business continuity
Contents
Introduction 3
Support and enable employees during the pandemic 4
Audit and improve tools and processes 8
Achieving business continuity with the cloud 10
Preparing your business for the new normal 11

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How is your business continuity plan coping in the coronavirus climate?
No doubt it is under strain, and like most businesses throughout the world,
you are being challenged to adapt and pivot plans in response to
unprecedented circumstances.
The effects of coronavirus are seismic and unique, and industries across the
board are under pressure to convert traditional business models to digital-friendly
ones and to drive performance regardless.
The somewhat frustrating benefit of hindsight tells us that incident planning for
such ‘black swan’ scenarios are a stark lesson for businesses in 2020 – but how
is this kind of future-proof plan achieved?
In this guide, we offer advice that will help you to solidify a plan. One which will
assist in predicting the unpredictable and respond quickly and effectively to
disruption in the future.
Introduction

4
According to growth and development strategist Tripp Braden, collaboration must
underpin your response to business disruption.
Bringing people together leverages individual and
organisational strengths in new ways to mitigate
issues and stoke morale.
A business continuity team, then, is an obvious way to
spark strong leadership and unite to solve problems.
How to build a business continuity team
This first-response team should represent the best
people from different parts of your business.
Make sure that those chosen to be part of the team
have detailed and specific knowledge of each of
their domains, in order for you build a clear picture
of the entire organisation with no gray areas.
Do consider the benefits in selecting team members
who aren’t necessarily in management positions.
Arguably there is valuable insight and connection to
be gained from engaging with those working on the
front lines of the business, troubleshooting and
innovating on a day-to-day basis.
Characteristics and experience are important factors
to weigh when considering which individuals are
best suited to dealing with conflict as part of this
role. An effective business continuity team will be
skilled and prepared to respond to a wide range of
emotions from employees and during a public
health event such a coronavirus, be knowledgeable,
proactive and empathetic when team members
contract sickness or have to quarantine.
Support and
enable employees
during the pandemic
Tips to improve communication during
uncertainty:
• Leverage technology to create
communication hubs
• Look for informal opportunities to talk
with others
• Check-in with your stakeholders to
ensure messaging is understood,
helpful and meaningful
• Express appreciation and respect for
others when they share opinions that
may differ from your own
• Learn how to constructively disagree
without intimidating or silencing others
• Update people regularly, even when
there isn’t much to be shared

5
Coronavirushasaccelerated
the widespread adoption
of a remote working
culture. And whereas
some businesses may have
historically offered this
flexibility to employees in
some incarnation, many
hadn’t yet embedded it as
routine practice until the
pandemic demanded it.
Evaluating the effect on
your business processes
if you have the majority
of your people working
from home (and it may
even be 100%) is imperative
to continue to run the
business smoothly.

6
Director for Boomer Consulting Inc Ariana Campbell has some questions you
need to ask when it comes to assessing your remote working processes:
Do you have a good communication process?
Excellent communication is crucial for distributed
teams – not just for getting work done, but for
transplanting that “in-the-office” feeling.
To successfully work remotely, you will need a
combination of communication tools, including
instant messaging, email and video conferencing.
These comms tools will also help in ensuring that
your business processes remain transparent.
Ensure that every communication tool is efficient
enough for your team to complete their work and
ensure they are used consistently. If your
communication processes are complicated and
inconsistent, your remote team members won’t be
motivated to stay connected.
Do you have a good process for transferring
knowledge?
The training process in many firms involves getting
a group of people in one room. When that’s not
possible, how are you transferring knowledge?
Your process for transferring knowledge needs to
include formal training as well as social learning.
You can achieve this by maintaining a bank of
learning materials, such as short videos and
holding regular “meet-ups” via video conference.
This way, your remote team members will feel like
a part of the team and be able to discover and
discuss new concepts and ideas.
Are you maintaining employee engagement?
Engaging with your employees and team is more
natural in a face-to-face situation. However, if it is
necessary for them to work from home, as is the
case with the coronavirus outbreak, then you will
need to strategise to maintain that engagement.

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How can you help your people to adapt to working remotely?
Here are some tactics that you can put into play that will help to foster employee engagement for all staff
members and suitable as tips for your managers in maintaining collaboration within their teams.
1. Book online weekly team meetings
While your employees may be used to sitting around
a table once a week for a catch up with their team, a
move to remote working means that physical
togetherness isn’t possible.
However, it doesn’t mean they can’t have their
weekly catch up – using technology. Since multiple
people can feature and contribute using those
communication tools, your teams can continue to
have their regular catch-ups, albeit virtually.
If a daily scrum is their catch up of choice, simply
follow suit and encourage everyone to show up
online for 10 minutes each morning to highlight the
tasks of the day before they dive into their work.
2. Switch on your camera
When your employees have their meetings – be it
team catch-ups on one-to-one chats – try and avoid
doing it in a faceless setting.
To fill the gap of your employees not seeing each
other daily, ask them to be bold and turn their
cameras on. By seeing each other, it will help to
generate the human interaction that your employees
may be lacking when they are working from home.
3. Keep up with performance management
How are your employees getting on with their
workloads? Are they achieving their goals – or do
they need support to stay on track?
Put processes in place so managers can check in with
employees regularly to measure progress and offer
guidance. Doing so using cloud HR or performance
management software means goals and documents
can be kept in one place and easily accessed.
Use video conferencing tools (with the camera
switched on if desired), so your managers and
employees can have regular one-to-one interactions.
4. Feedback to employees regularly and check how
they are getting on
As well as providing support to your people as they
work from home, it’s worth checking in to see how
they are getting on. Why not try creating an
employee engagement survey and sending it round
to your staff?
That might lead to the creation of a weekly update.
Look at creating a newsletter or holding an online
company meeting, where people from around the
business have the chance to make a positive
contribution.
5. Virtual water cooler catch-ups
The chance for spontaneous catch-ups may have
disappeared from those trips to the coffee machine
that your employees are used to – but that doesn’t
mean they can’t still have quick chats.
By using instant messaging apps such as Microsoft
Teams, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, your
employees can stay in the loop with the latest gossip.
However, there’s also a work-related benefit to this
too, in addition to the social one.
Say someone from your accounts team has a cash
flow management query and needs to check in with
the finance director. Rather than sending an email
and having to wait for them to get round to reading
it, a quick message via a messaging app can result
in a faster response.
6. Virtual team building activities
That’s right, paintball trips and go-karting are out
when it comes to remote working. But that’s not to
say that your employees can’t participate in some
team building. You’ll just have to take it online.
There are several things your business can do to
keep employee engagement levels high in this area.
You could put on virtual coffee and cake sessions
where your employees get together in an online
meeting to chat about a topic of choice. It could be
something light-hearted that allows everyone to
avoid talking shop for a while and get to know each
other better.
Or you could even venture into online gaming and
set up competitions for your employees to
participate in, be it via consoles or gaming apps.
35%
65%

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The value of a supply chain contingency plan
The coronavirus outbreak is affecting businesses on a global scale. It has clearly
shown the world how vulnerable to disruption our global supply chains are.
Exponential growth in trade over the past few
decades means today’s global supply chains are
incredibly complex, with manufacturers and
distributors vulnerable to any sort of disruption.
Pandemics are unique. Where you may well have risk
management processes in place to deal with
controllable and foreseeable challenges, such as
compliance, financial and capacity issues, they could
struggle to prepare you for world-defining events.
For example, you may need to cope with less staff,
a dramatic decrease in productivity and a change
in how your customers decide to spend. And with
China being such an essential and influential part of
global supply chains, there are inevitable
consequences.
How coronavirus is affecting supply chains
According to Gartner1
, disruption to supply chains
impact businesses in the following ways:
A shortage of materials
You may suffer supply shortages of materials or
finished goods coming from logistical hubs in
impacted areas.
A shortage of labour
If you have a presence in an affected area, you may
have problems with finding people to work because
of quarantine guidelines or illness. Travel is limited,
with social distancing and quarantine requirements
significantly affecting labour, which then leads to
sourcing and logistical challenges.
Sourcing challenges
Finding new business or making new agreements will
be challenging with restricted travel in affected areas.
Logistical challenges
Your established hubs and supply networks could
experience issues when it comes to capacity and
availability, so your materials could get stuck,
especially if you have difficulties finding new routes
and modes of transportation.
Audit and improve tools
and processes
1
Smarter with Gartner, February 2020

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10 business continuity planning steps to take now
In terms of contingency planning, what should you do in the short and
medium-term? Here are 10 things to consider:
1
Consider your people – their welfare is
paramount and they are a critical resource to
your business. You may have to rethink work
practices. Look at who can work from home
and who needs to be present on the front line.
2
Monitor what’s happening to your supply chain
in countries affected by coronavirus. If you
don’t have full visibility, prioritise getting this in
place as soon as possible.
3
Build an in-depth and detailed emergency
operations structure and process at the plant
level, with predetermined action plans for
communication and coordination, designated
roles for employees, communication and
decision-making protocols, and emergency
action plans that involve customers and supplier.
4
Make sure inventory is in reach. If you suspect
or know that your stock is in an impacted
area or logistical hub, make sure you have
alternative suppliers.
5
Work closely with your legal, finance,
and HR teams to understand what it’ll mean
financially and legally if you can’t get supplies
to customers.
6
You may have to put in additional steps to
contractual arrangements with customers.
If you can’t meet your obligations, a clear
understanding of your contractual terms will
allow you to plan and prioritise your response.
7
Look at ways to balance supply and demand
while building a buffer when it comes to stock.
8
You may need to find ways to diversify the
suppliers you need and revisit the whole way
you treat risk management.
9
Work with stakeholders and your most critical
suppliers to prepare for potential material and
manufacturing capacity shortages.
10
Review business forecasts and run scenarios
to determine where you are at risk now (and
may be in the future).
Adapt your long-term supply chain strategy
Once the initial impact of coronavirus has been
alleviated, it is going to take some time for the full
repercussions to present themselves.
As a result, it is wise to prepare in case a similarly
disruptive situation occurs again. If you take action
to put in place scenario planning exercises, for
instance, you will put in steps in place to diversify
your supply chain and source alternative supplies if
the worst should happen.
Until recently, business headlines were limited to
human-made events affecting the supply chain,
such as trade wars and tariff wars. Coronavirus has
meant an acceptance of unpredictability and
disruption as a result of an invisible virus. This is
the new normal that we must get to grips with.
In order to organise around disruption, it is not
enough to think about the supply chain strategy
conventionally. You need to rethink logistical
strategy and manage supply chains in a way that
anticipates disruption, rather than just merely
responds to it.
Ensure you have clarity on the processes of all of
your suppliers, even those upstream and several
tiers back. If you don’t have this visibility, your
business is less likely to have the ability to respond
to or estimate impact of an unplanned event, as you
are unfamiliar with upstream suppliers.
It is crucial to understand where your critical
vulnerabilities lie. Your supply chain may have a
dependency that puts your business at risk if a
wide-ranging issue occurs. Say, for example, you are
dependent on a supplier with a single facility and a
large share of the market. If a significant problem
arises (this may range from your supplier going out
of business to a pandemic occurring), you need to
strengthen your weakness so that you are well
equipped to deal with it.

10
Is your business prepared for a data issue?
Business leaders dedicate the bulk of their time to strategising for growth,
longevity and arming their organisations with the data and technology required
to get things done smarter and faster.
But what if something happens to compromise your
business data, like a security breach or a natural
disaster? Do you have safeguards in place to minimise
business interruption and restore your organisation to
normal? What is your plan for continuity?
There are clear benefits in migrating your core lines
of business to the cloud for business continuity
purposes.
Faster recovery time
One of the main advantages of operating in the
cloud is that you can back up your entire server
almost simultaneously. All the information coupled
with the systems and applications is grouped into
one software block or a virtual server for easy
recovery. This can be managed in minutes, in
comparison to older software with questionable
restoration times.
Lower set-up and recovery costs
Recovery efforts for cloud-based operations are
more cost-efficient to implement and execute than
traditional backup methods. Traditional backup
involves setting up physical servers at a remote
location, which can be costly. The cloud, on the
other hand, enables you to outsource as many
hardware and software resources as you need while
paying only for what you use.
Any amount of downtime can cost a business in
human-hour labour spent to recover or redo the
work lost. In some cases, an eight-hour downtime
window can cost businesses tens of thousands of
pounds. Cloud access mitigates this risk, so you’re
back to generating revenue faster.
No location ties
Choosing the right location for the data recovery
facility is highly important because if the facility
becomes a victim of the same threat, the
information will be lost forever. Having your primary
and backup servers in the same location can spell
trouble in case of a fire, a hurricane, or a flood. With
cloud technology you can choose the backup facility
located in any part of the world.
Easier recovery of fixed assets
What about your business’ fixed assets – tangible
things like desks, chairs, interiors, and equipment?
You need an accurate record of purchasing costs
and depreciation to give to your insurance provider
to start your recovery process.
And if that data is damaged in the event as well?
Safeguarding such information in the cloud prepares
for quick recovery in the unlikely event of a natural or
human-made disaster. You can quickly access
insurance information to file a claim and receive
recovery assistance according to your policy if you
have access to digital inventories.
Achieving business
continuity with the cloud

11
Preparing your business
for the new normal
As we are not yet in a position to wave coronavirus goodbye, the business world
is slowly adjusting to the ‘new normal’ and creating a new reality in which the
way we work has fundamentally changed.
As social distancing, remote working and protective
equipment are now everyday necessities, it’s a critical
time for businesses to make the right changes and
shifts in the way they operate. And there is room for
success if you manage people and processes better
than your competition, which may be experiencing
the same problems.
Here are some steps you can take to ensure your
business prospers after the pandemic:
Start by reviewing your business
Take a good look at your business and examine how
you can operate going forward. The environment is
extremely volatile and fluid, which means you need
to get granular and create a detailed relaunch plan.
Depending on the size of your business, you may
want to consider relaunching in stages, market
by market, site by site, customer by customer,
and product by product. Relaunch planning should
be manageable and will undoubtedly help guide
what you want to when it comes to your people,
production and supply chain.

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Improve your customer experience
Do your customers experience a different level of
service when your team is working remotely?
They shouldn’t. Your firm needs to provide the
technology that protects quality of service.
Video conferencing, as well as electronic signature
and delivery, should be part of your process. If they
are, with minor adjustments, your team’s productivity
should be the same.
If your firm hasn’t bought into remote work, this is
the year to enact cultural change and make remote
work viable for your team. If you are struggling with a
distributed team right now, your processes, training,
or communication will be the stumbling blocks – not
the nature of remote working itself.
Rethink the design of your supply chain
Many organisations build supply chains with
globalisation in mind – the assumption has been
that global trade allows us to source, produce and
distribute products from locations with the lowest
cost. However, the likes of Brexit, the US/China tariff
war and now coronavirus will make us think again,
especially if suppliers are located in a central
location far away.
Today, we may be looking at an era of new supply
chain design where businesses can be ultra-agile
and responsive in dealing with changing policies,
regulations and natural disasters.
Redesigning your supply chain is a complex undertaking.
But having a backup capacity for supply, production
and distribution means you reduce the risk of your
entire supply chain being disrupted. The second and
primary sources should ideally be away from each
other. This will decrease your risk but could lead to
an increase in costs. Similarly, having production
facilities with local sources of supply spreads the risk
and could cut transportation costs.
It’s impossible to anticipate the arrival of global
crises such as coronavirus, but businesses can
mitigate their impact by improving their supply
chain preparedness. By putting the right plans in
place before a disruption occurs, and testing and
learning before the fact, you’ll put your business in
the best possible position to keep moving and
hopefully weather the storm.
Handle your finances
As you start up again, you may have to create
detailed financial models considering your cash flow
and staff costs, as it may take some time to establish
relationships with your customers and get the
orders coming in again.
Surrey-based business DPR Motorsport works to
maintain Caterham sports cars for the official
Caterham race series, which unfortunately had to
shut down due to the lockdown.
Without business and under coronavirus restrictions,
DPR Motorsport had to close down its workshop.
DPR Motorsport went into planning mode,
understanding what the shutdown meant for the
business financially. It set up a business plan,
determining fixed costs and making sure they were
reduced to a minimum.
DPR Motorsport also took time to understand its
cash flow, so the company could communicate this
to the bank to ensure that any funding support
would be available when required.

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Automate your workflow
For any firms that haven’t made the switch from
paper routing sheets to an automated workflow
system, the current environment should be a
catalyst to make that leap. An automated workflow
solution eliminates the need to physically move
work between teams.
Start by identifying the bottlenecks that are occurring
with your team working remotely. Where is the work
being held up? What requires people to go into the
office when they don’t really need to? Look at
designing and automating workflows to address
these issues.
Move to the cloud
Compared to physical systems, cloud backup is
virtually endless. As your organisation grows, your
cloud solution grows with you at no risk to the
additional data workload. Not only are you saving
money by only paying for the storage space you
need, but you can also easily add extra storage.
When large enterprises are hit with a data security
breach, it makes front-page news. Small businesses,
however, are more susceptible to data being
compromised because they don’t have the resources
required to combat today’s savvy cyber-criminal.
Operating in the cloud enables you to back up and
restore your business-critical files in case they are
compromised. When it comes to physical security
of their data and facilities, small and medium-sized
businesses can only do so much to prevent
breaches. Cloud software vendors can employ more
robust physical security measures at their facilities
to ensure data safety. IT support providers are also
equipped to avoid data loss from natural disasters,
power outages and common errors. They can also
provide a well-documented disaster recovery plan,
so you don’t have to start from scratch.
In summary
Things happen. Even if it’s not something as
disruptive as coronavirus, natural or human-made
disasters come in all forms, from hurricanes to
tornadoes, to plain old human error.
Nobody wants to think about the possibility of a
threatening event, but ignoring it could cost you
your business. It’s worth the time and money to invest
in your people and processes. This could involve
managing your people differently, modernising your
supply chain and migrating to a cloud solution.
These and other technology solutions can put your
business continuity concerns at ease and help you
sleep at night.
To choose the right technology that supports your
business continuity needs, you must research different
vendors and inquire if they have a history of serving
businesses similar to yours. Ask each to provide
indicative reports to show that they have worked
with similar companies and to explain what business
continuity features they will create to keep your business
safe and thriving if the unpredictable happens.

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Managing uncertainty—A practical guide to business continuity
©2020 Sage Group plc. All rights reserved. Sage, the Sage logos,
and the Sage product and service names mentioned herein are
registered trademarks or trademarks of Sage Group plc, or its affiliated
entities. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Limerick Business Complex,
Raheen Industrial Estate, Raheen,
Limerick, County Limerick,
V94CP26, Ireland
061480980

Managing uncertainty a practical guide

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