With the businesses getting the impact of the new disruptor, the Coronavirus, a pandemic that probably no contingency plan has accounted for, keeping their operations running is at the top of the agendas of busy managers.
The pandemic is posing new threats to people and to the businesses. The total impact of this disruption is yet unknown. Employee absence and a fall in both supply and demand in most of the goods and services are presumed outcomes. At the peak of the pandemic, a lockdown may cause to a halt of the businesses.
Working from home seems to be an easy solution to the employee problem. True but not a perfect solution; not every employee will have the environment to perform as efficiently as they were in their workplace and probably, and unfortunately, not everybody will be in workable condition but dealing with the effects of the pandemic.
There is a vivid freelancing sector in the UK already addressing short term sourcing issues. There are online portals bringing together the businesses and talent for task or project-based solutions. Up until now this line of sourcing was mostly in the radar of small businesses but this is now a good time to explore and utilise this more to navigate through the emergency.
The very idea for starting Instant Finance Partners, my ad-hoc support business, was to support the businesses with their temporary sourcing needs. To cover some important tasks in finance departments for unexpected employee absence is one of the services offered by IFP. Yesterday while talking over the news on possible effects of the Coronavirus my friend made a comment that I have heard quite a few times from the business prospects in the past year. Going for outsourcing for very short terms is not seen as a practical solution; for the reasons such as the possibility of not coming across with the right talent in a limited time, the time required to understand in-house ways of doing things, GDPR etc. Yes, all of these are valid concerns to be addressed, and management of a business is about addressing the concerns to overcome obstacles to perform necessary tasks. There are different ways to overcome these concerns, and it is always possible to use external resources if businesses really wanted to.
A change in perspective will open the way to new possibilities in a time of crisis, in this case utilising a capacity existent in the market, to solve an emerging problem, to have a wildcard to work around an unexpected situation. The recent events suggest that not changing your perspective may not be a viable alternative at all.
Teoman Akyuz, 14 March 2020
This article was published on LinkedIn on 14 March 2020