Important questions executives should answer this year.

Important questions executives should answer this year.

January 21, 2021 0 comment

In the face of all the struggles that businesses face in recent times due to COVID-19, one perplexity that has pre-occupied many business executives’ minds is survival – how to remain afloat.

Staying afloat in business in these times calls for strategic, systemic, and out of the box thinking by all employees, especially C-Suite executives and managers.

And what better time to rethink the decisions and operational processes that will define your business’s short and long-term success or failure than in January?

So, in this article, we want to draw your attention to the following essential questions for your interrogation and conclusions as you plan for 2021.

Will your business continue to operate in survival mode?

Amid the pandemic, what many companies did was devise means that would help them survive the pandemic’s harsh effects without going under.

On that note, whoever managed to lead their organisations out of the harsh realities of 2020 should be congratulated. Unfortunately, many businesses couldn’t come up with strategies to help them survive. Being in a survival mode in the pandemic’s heat is commendable but remaining on the same trajectory, post-pandemic, could be suicidal. The question then is how long your business will continue to operate in survival mode?

As an entrepreneur or executive, your execution strategy must respond to this question so that the short-term measures taken at the height of the pandemic do not dwarf the business’s potential to accelerate into long term success and growth. This may require you to take many strategic steps, including re-allocating resources such as talents to different departments, considering outsourcing, rethinking your market segment, or even partnerships.

Although navigating the current storm is not easy, with the right thinking, creative leadership, and strategy, a lot can be done to bring about a turnaround for your business. Adele Crane, a business professional, advises that a deeper reflection on the organisation’s opportunities and threats should be a priority in such circumstances.

Where are the skillsets gap in your teams?

COVID-19 and its resultant impacts have exposed the skills gaps among many leaders and employees, making it difficult to adapt to current realities. As an entrepreneur or executive, this is the best time to do a skillset audit of your team amidst the digital and data-driven decisions that are determining the success or failure of enterprises. We recommend you use the remaining days of January to actively help staff members to either develop new skills, upskill or retool their skills sets to make them remain relevant. This is the only way a company will develop and sustain growth in this new economy. No other option will suffice.

According to the IBM report titled ‘The Enterprise Guide‘ released way before COVID-19, CEOs need to focus on developing staff competencies in soft skills, creativity, innovation, and communication to effectively perform their roles.

Skills gaps have been worsened by COVID-19, and addressing such gaps among the staff in your business should be one of the salient matters to be concerned about within the first quarter of the year.

How will your staff work now and in the future?

To many entrepreneurs and other corporate managers, remote working has simplified work and made many employees more productive.

The time staff spent in traffic to and from work and its associated costs have been better used.

As a leader, are you going to ensure this flexibility continues or you will introduce a hybrid of remote and physical working for 2021? Whichever way you decide, always remember that staff health and safety come first. Many excellent leaders have opted for a hybrid work environment, and we encourage you to do the same if your business model can accommodate it. Time is now to answer this question as we progress into the year.

A survey conducted by SLACK (2020), indicated that 72 per cent of employees in the US prefer a hybrid remote-office work model and wouldn’t want to go back to routine office work.

How will your company bring more value to your customers?

Despite the pandemic, one of the things that remained constant is the importance of the customer. Therefore, quality customer relationship management, derived from your deep understanding of the customer experience journey matrix, is an important question to answer as an entrepreneur or corporate executive. How will you satisfy the customer?

Whatever effort you are innovating to satisfy and maintain very healthy employee relations in your business, double that effort on the customers’ side.

According to Gautam, M. (2016), to create real value, you must recognise what a customer perceives as value. You must understand how the customer views your competition’s product.

Well, with data now available, this can be ascertained easily, unlike in the past.

Remember that this is the customers’ era, and if your business strategy is not centred around them, please rethink your strategy. Otherwise, the customer will deny you his or her economic vote.

Will your business culture survive in the 2021 digitalised climate?

The new normal that has forced many people to work from home has altered many business cultures. Some employees are slowly but certainly losing business values and identity because of remote working. Remote working has resulted in little or no interaction among colleagues in coffee rooms or hallways.

As an executive, entrepreneur, or manager, how will you ensure that your business culture does not evaporate or get diluted because of remote working? Are you able to innovate your culture digitally to maintain minimal team cohesion and personalised customer touch among your team and business processes? Remember, culture is the only variable in the business success equation that your competitor cannot easily replicate. Losing it on the altar of digitalisation may be a starting point to the collapsing of your business.

Final thought

Never forget that as an entrepreneur, manager, or C-Suite executive, if your business must succeed in this post-pandemic world, it will be determined by the crises you can either solve or the value you can create for customers. When you can clarify that loftier value of caring for them, customers develop a higher level of respect for and loyalty to your brand. Spend what is left of January to redesign the customer care component of your business model effectively. Question every major decision for this year. And let your answers point you to the little things that will bring the innovations that spur remarkable growth.