Do you remember when you had to go to the bank before the weekend to get enough cash to make it until the next week? Do you remember when they stopped accepting cheques at your local grocery store? Do you remember when ATMs grounded underneath a shady stair of a club were the only method of getting money to pay for your evening?
I do remember those days and thankfully they are gone. The “Cash Only” sign has been placed across countless venues both downtown and uptown when banknotes were essential customers’ financial trading. Then the age of digital trading came through the internet and the gig was up and done.
In the last ten years paying the bills has drastically changed, we don’t carry staches of $100 bill in our pocket to make it through the day, and we don’t need to stand in line at our local teller to get some cash for our shopping needs.
Along came the age of online payments in different forms to free us from the necessity of having our wallet robbed while going back home from work during the evening. We now have the chance of making our finance dues only through the use of our smartphones.
Facebook Messenger has added a feature to split the bill when paying for the tab. This means social platforms have absorbed the need to improve their users’ experience by providing the necessary tools from their devices.
Smartphones technology will continue to host more and more alternative ways to promote digital payment systems, along with bill and purchasing offers in order to maximize the user’s experience.
Vaccines are working, cities are full again, the dust is settling, or is it? Over the last six months the press and the media have emphasized furthermore the problem of empty cities due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the need for shops, restaurants, and venues to reopen.
Despite the great hopes of going back to our 2019 life and routine, we have to be honest with ourselves and admit the post-pandemic reality won’t be the same as yesterday. Too much has changed and this whole terrible period is now a trauma on our body and soul.
But how are we going to fend the next six months and eventually the whole 2022? Do we have a strategy beyond what governments and health experts have already told us? Apparently not. We are scrambling amidst the lack of exit plan from the pandemic, masks will continue to be part of our lives, hand sanitizers will be everywhere like smartphones, but what about people and their workplace?
I’ve seen a struggle of public relations coming from politicians and CEOs on the topic of working from home, or working away from within the walls of their companies both in the public and private sector. Smart working saved countless lives and brands were praised for the effort taken by their workers staying away from their offices, finding the living room environment more productive than their cubicle.
Let’s not just make smart working a publicity stunt by rushing workers to immediately go back to their desks or else. It already happened at the Washingtonian Media where employees stopped publishing for a day in protest of their CEO’s message on the consequence of not coming back to the office.
The worst strategy leaders can pull off is to publicly threaten their employees. Threatening workers to remove their healthcare, 401k, and other fundamental benefits that are essential to any individual is as cheap as it sounds. A shot below the belt that will cripple the fragile situation many are still facing due to the effects of Covid-19.
So what can companies do to facilitate the transition to “normality”? CEOs should first admit to themselves the world has drastically changed. We cannot turn back the clock just like it was two years ago. The post-summer period will be chaotic as flu season will cycle back threatening the global healthcare, offices will risk to become again hot spots for any disease to spread.
Employees who are threatened to go back to work from the office will look at their leaders under a whole new different light, CEOs will lose that precious trust from their workers that allows performance and confidence to strengthen their success, and trust has become a rare commodity to treasure. Many will leave and seek new and more hospitable companies to work for, places that can offer even better conditions by hiring talented professionals from high-ranking companies.
Brands should talk to their employees by offering options to keep work schedules flexible. Let workers give back by extending that trust that was placed on them when working remotely and keep it that way, allow them to choose by not forcing on them. This will create even stronger bonds between the management and employees, many will choose on their own will to work again from the office.
Workers have faced traumatic experiences getting ill or having a loved one becoming affected by the pandemic. Stressing this scenario will backfire immediately upon companies ignoring this element. People want normality back and working with less stress as possible will help them through the transition, many will take longer to adapt and that’s fine, we can’t rush certain things especially since their lives have been touched forever and companies are not today what they were yesterday. –
The difficulties between yesterday’s and tomorrow’s business models continue to exist in a struggle to find a balance. Companies who found their comfort zone are clashing against those who seek new horizons through innovation, but the disruptive element is still worrying old-school business models who found self-validation surviving through the Covid-19 pandemic.
A company works best balancing their services/clients ratio in a value zone that allows them to find fertile land to thrive. On the other hand, there are two danger zones to consider and also to avoid at all costs: A) too few services and many clients, B) too few clients and many services.
Case A starts with an old school imprint of business core decisions where the enterprise has been coasting for years, more likely over a decade where it found a cozy comfort zone that is in fact a danger zone. As markets and economies shift faster and faster, having only one or just a few services or products is harming any business activity. No restaurant offers one dish and one drink, so why should companies do that? Yes, some might claim “location”, yet until a competitor spawns right next to you, then your days are numbered.
Case B is where a company sets to make a difference too fast and too energetically forgetting to build first a solid and basic line of clients. Companies doing this are just showering their few accounts with too many services that will appear distracting to them, but more importantly, remove any focus from their business core. Despite the need of adapting to new scenarios, companies ought to develop one important primary asset to satisfy and make clients happy.
How to achieve the value zone? This target is not a precise point that requires unfathomable resources or time to obtain. The value zone is first accepting the fact there are danger areas to avoid, places to which are often taken for comfort zones. Once you raised awareness the following step is to admit mistakes were made, where the best solution to this problem is to accept the fact new strategies must be taken: 1) Do I have few services and many clients? Expect such service to be taken away from you by some competitor with better prices; or, expect the next economic turmoil that pushes politics and markets to pull the rug from beneath you. 2) Do I have few clients and many services? Expect such clients to run away because the lack of focus brings up the lack of experience and confidence; therefore you will provide average to below results as your energies and resources are spread on too many fronts. Less is sometimes more.
In the end, we can identify the value zone as a place where companies understand their potential through team work, being open-minded, but most importantly acknowledging times are changing faster and faster, that there no room for inside politics, pride, or ego.
