Whether it’s an epidemic resurgence, another hit to the economy, or another, as yet unknown disruptive force, the next crisis is coming – and you need to be ready.
If this current crisis has made anything clear, it’s the fact that continuing to do business as usual without the ability to react to severe changes can – and will – incur outrageous costs. It’s during these hard times that organizations’ futures are decided – so you need to be asking yourself, “Are we doing all that we can to futureproof our company?”
To make sure your organization is ready for whatever’s coming next, we’ve put together a few questions you should be asking yourself right now, to see how ready you are to take on whatever challenge 2020 (and beyond) throws at us next.
As we detail in our whitepaper, Getting Through a Recession: Lessons Learned from Major Enterprises in Past Financial Crises, in order to effectively deal with radical changes and unexpected scenarios, there are a few pivotal changes and decisions that organizations need to make. The following questions are meant to help you self-assess your current situation, and let you identify any possible gaps that need to be bridged before the next unexpected scenario hits.
Each question can be answered with a ranking of 1 to 5, with 1 indicating an extremely negative response, and 5 indicating an extremely positive one.
At the end of the questionnaire we’ll sum up your results, giving you an indication of your readiness for the next crisis.
So without further ado, let’s get to it:
Let’s take a look at two companies that ranked 35 in this questionnaire: Unilever and Schneider Electric.
Unilever, one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, is also one of the oldest multinational companies ever. Despite their long history, the company is no stranger to innovation. Around two years ago, Unilever began working with a Gloat-powered internal talent marketplace, branded internally as “Flex,” which allows rapid redeployment, tracking of employee goals and abilities and deep organizational insights in several of their global locations as a pilot. As COVID progressed, the company made a strategic decision to roll the platform out throughout the entire organization almost overnight, covering over 100 countries and 60,000 employees. In the weeks following this decision, the company was able to redeploy over 3,000 people. Their speedy reaction enabled them to not only function more economically during the collective belt-tightening that the corona pandemic necessitated, but actually allowed them to improve their operating margins by over 9% resulting in high Q1 returns and growth on par with their pre-COVID annual projections.
Schneider Electric are also a multinational enterprise, focusing primarily on energy and automation solutions. Much like Unilever, SE began several pilots in several locations of the Gloat-powered talent marketplace back in 2018.
Following the current crisis, SE decided to deploy the new technology throughout the entire organization – and haven’t looked back since.
“We’re relying tremendously on our open talent markets,” says Andrew Saidy, Schneider Electric’s vice president of talent digitization. “The pace of employee registrations we’re seeing is unprecedented; more projects are being posted. With the crisis, you have budget cuts here, you have roles being frozen there. But managers still have projects that they need to deliver, so they need helping hands.”
It’s clear that the advantages of the Talent Marketplace have been instrumental in helping large enterprises get through the current crisis, and that it will continue playing a major role in their future endeavors. What’s important to remember is that if you’re not moving forward, you’re being pulled back in relation to the competition. The Talent Marketplace provides such a clear advantage to companies who choose to implement it, that in future crises, anyone left unprepared won’t stand a chance in dealing with turbulent financial circumstances, and will be left behind, much like the companies that failed to reallocate resources in previous economic downturns.
Can you afford to take that risk?
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