CRISIS MANAGEMENT AND BUSINESS AGILITY

Are you business owners and managers looking for ways to manage your company in times of crisis, how to adapt to crisis conditions as quickly as possible and how to be ready in time when the crisis is over?

We will help you not only to manage the crisis, but also to put in place a management system that will facilitate a quick start to a more stable period, as well as a more flexible response to future crises should they occur. We will supply you with a comprehensive business management tool and help you deploy it quickly.

To truly RESTART a company, we need to master three important phases:

Our approach is abbreviated AAA after the initial letters of each phase:

ACCEPTANCE

It is said that in a crisis, you get to know the real leaders. Now is the opportunity. We accept the status quo as something that will not end anytime soon. We make the decision that the only solution is our own work. We convince subordinates, colleagues and partners that there is a way.

ADAPTACE

We are adapting our existing business to the new conditions. We are introducing a home office, we are learning to solve many problems ON-LINE. We adjust working hours and seek government support. We are gradually regaining control of the company. But we all feel it takes more than that.

ACTIVITY

We take our destiny into our own hands. We turn threats into opportunities. We introduce new services and products. Shaping new markets. We create options for different modes of work. Flexibility has become a competitive advantage and a condition for survival.

Acceptance of crisis is not resignation to fate, but acceptance of responsibility for it. Start with yourself
Your people and partners must be convinced that it will pay to follow you. Blaming those around you is a sign of helplessness. Accept responsibility for the future and make it known. Find a path for your company
Seek a vision for your company to overcome the crisis, propose meaningful goals and paths to them. No one has the certainty of correctly estimating the future. Goals and paths may evolve and change, but that is management. Engage the team
Many people today feel uncertain or even threatened. Your example will help them overcome these feelings, and you’ll gain collaborators you can count on. Taking an interest in people and communicating with them on a daily basis are crucial in these times. This phase is entirely in the hands of business leaders. The success of the other two phases depends on how you handle it.

At this stage, the company needs to adapt to the new reality. The goal is to react faster and more accurately to changes in the environment. This is also where we make full use of ATTIS, which effectively supports the most important management tasks.

WHAT CAN BE DELEGATED

Free your hands for strategic and systemic decisions. Operational management in the task-control mode is exhausting, requires your permanent involvement and sometimes you may not see the trees for the forest. You can delegate in several ways: Divide management
You can delegate responsibility for managing a coherent area to some of your colleagues. This is likely to expose them to a similar operational burden, which you have disposed of. Establish clear rules and procedures
Forget about textual guidelines. Teach your team to create clear process procedures in which everyone has clearly defined roles, required deliverables and rules for collaboration. Simple graphical digrams that can be instantly published online as an interactive map will help. Procedures are easy to control, and you can delegate control to the team. Get rid of the ballast. It proceeds step by step, starting with simple but important procedures and processes. People should be able to absorb the new system gradually. But from the first steps, they should perceive its benefits. Control tasks
If you already have to manage through tasks, implement a system so that only information about unfulfilled tasks reaches you, together with an explanation of the reason for non-fulfilment and a suggestion for a solution.
ATTIS will help you to maintain an up-to-date organisational structure, including the contact details of all employees. You can create procedures and rules in a simple graphical form to publish on the web. It will also help with task management and control.

MAKE INFORMED DECISIONS

Information for decision-making should be up-to-date, accurate and presented in a managerial manner. It must be clear at a glance where the biggest problems are and what the options for solutions are. What information do you have for decision making today? Emails, memos, verbal information? Do you make decisions intuitively? Determine what information you need, how often you need it, and what values and trends need to be tracked and evaluated. Instruct your people to “report back” regularly while giving you explanations of the situation and suggestions for solutions. In the first stages, introduce reporting of the most important data. Create clear management dashboards that will alert you at a glance to problems that need to be addressed.
ATTIS supports the setting of performance indicators, their regular reporting and evaluation. It visualizes the status of indicator development in the form of a “traffic light system”.

DON’T BE SURPRISED

There can always be events that can threaten what you are so committed to building – the risks. In most cases they cannot be prevented, but you can be prepared if they occur. Identify risks and threats
Record and assess risks and threats in terms of the likelihood of them occurring and the impact they will have on your business. Categorise risks by severity and deal with them accordingly. Implement measures to prevent or mitigate the consequences of the risk
For serious risks, identify measures to address them. Assign responsibilities and tasks. Monitor trends and re-evaluate risks
The significance of risks will change with changes in the environment and the effectiveness of the measures you put in place. Reassess risks regularly and update priorities.
If you have already worked with risks, purge your risk catalogues of trivialities that distract from the real threats. Be consistent in your management actions. ATTIS supports risk management, including monitoring the implementation of imposed measures.

BECOME CHAMPIONS OF CHANGE

In the previous steps you have established a management system. You translate goals into rules, procedures and tasks. You have up-to-date information on the development of key indicators and a dynamic risk management system. Now you need to manage change. Justify and plan for change
Change can be triggered by three types of stimuli:
– internal improvement needs
– feedback from KPI assessments
– actions to address risk.
So you have enough information about the urgency of change. Describe the causes and define the objectives of the change. Set clear priorities, you cannot do everything at once. Communicate the need and plan for change to your people. Use the right tools
Sometimes all you need to achieve change is positive motivation, an explanation or a personal example. Other times you need to change goals, processes, job descriptions or teach people new skills. Always consider carefully which tools you use, sometimes surprisingly little is needed to implement successful change. Communicate, validate, support
Resistance to change is a natural human trait. Any software cannot replace the manager in his daily support, orientation and motivation of subordinates.
Work with change as a permanent part of company life, the ability to react quickly can be a condition of survival.
ATTIS will provide effective support to explain the reasons for change, help select and deploy the optimal tools for designing changes in the management system and also support consistent communication and implementation of change.

In the previous stage, we taught the company to react flexibly to changes in the environment. We can therefore afford to actively trigger changes ourselves. Every threat can be an opportunity if you deal with it better than your competitors. We are witnessing many industries changing the way they do business. Companies are developing and launching new products in orders of magnitude shorter timescales, new partnerships are being formed. Sooner or later, the economy will take off again and you need to build a good starting position. Turn threats into opportunities
You have learned to record and assess risks and take action to address them. Apply the same technique to influences with the opposite sign, to opportunities. Look for ways to reframe the threat into an opportunity, assess for significance, suggest measures to take advantage of the opportunity. You will use this in the very next step. Innovate the vision and strategy
While in the previous phases the vision and strategy were focused on adapting the company to the crisis conditions, in this phase we can deal with the preparation of a development vision and strategy. Again, leadership will come into play, but this time with a much broader involvement of expert teams and the whole company. The result will be a development strategy and strategic objectives that will trigger the relevant changes. Use the system developed in the adaptation phase
With the new strategy you have defined the new conditions to which you want to adapt the company. Therefore, use all the tools you have learned in the Adaptation phase. In this phase, ATTIS will help you define your development strategy, translate it into sub-objectives and indicators and effectively manage its implementation.