New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, made it very clear that businesses should use this period between Level 4 and 3 as a chance to prepare.

Recover

With the Government’s decision to move to Level 3 this coming Monday at 11:59 pm, we all need to prepare for a move towards the new normal. This means restoration and recovery of premises, processes, customers, third-party suppliers and most importantly your own staff.

This is a considerable process.

Restore

At RiskLogic, we have seen that some clients have been proactive in preparing for a resumption of business. But most have not thought it through fully.

If you have changed your business as usual processes to accommodate Level 4 restrictions, then you will need to consider how this affects your resumption and recovery strategy.

It is imperative that you look at the changes that have occurred and ask several questions:

• What will our new normal look like?
• What do we want to retain from the way we have been working under Level 4?
• How do we move to this new paradigm?
• How do we safely phase our staff back to work on our premises?

Review

The review, or validation, phase of the planning cycle aims to capture learnings from an event by critically analysing how your organisation responded. These learnings enable you to respond better in the future.

A review should always follow a significant event. But for many businesses, a review will be a new undertaking.

COVID has given us an opportunity to review plans thoroughly. It means we can capture learnings from the lock-down period to update our plans (or write plans if we didn’t already have them). It also means that we can absorb the learnings into our new normal. Such as the large-scale use of applications such as zoom and Microsoft teams.

This process of review is significantly enhanced if conducted by an independent team of experts. They can bring experience, as well as a different perspective to a process that needs to be non-judgemental and robust.

If you need to ensure a professional and realistic, restoration and recovery of your organisation, or if you need assistance to ensure that a review captures all of the learnings from the lockdown disruption, then RiskLogic is ready to support you.