Business (un)interrupted in the time of COVID-19 lockdown in South Africa
We have all been bombarded with notices and messages from our suppliers and partners on what they do to deal with the Covid-19 breakout and subsequent lockdown. And yes, that is needed and important. But what happens next? And what can we do now to create that future state? The show must go on…we all agree on that. The question is how? Never before has the concept of “make every day count” been more visible. At least not in our lifetime. We have seen how one day could change our world for, what seems, forever.
How does business continuity look in the time of COVID-19?
For us at Fixed Mobile Telecoms, business continuity means our ability to plan for and respond to events that interrupts our standard operations. Since the outbreak of the Corona COVID-19 virus in South Africa, we find ourselves between a rock and a hard place with an already weak economy on the one side and nationwide lockdown on the other side. When forced to choose between the economy and the health and well-being of our society, we definitely choose the latter; hence, all our preparations to ensure our team is set up to work in the safety of their own homes without disruption to your services. To us, business continuity is our ability to work from anywhere at any time, exactly the same as we did before COVID-19, and to make it possible for your business to do the same.
How will the new world of work post lockdown look?
The new world of work will definitely be a mobile one consisting of jobs and sectors not in existence yet, agile and distributed teams, flexible workforces and more robust businesses. We can only speculate, but to us, one thing is clear, nothing will go back to the old normal, at least not immediately, and we ask ourselves how can we create our new future normal, now? Now is not the time to lose sight of the importance of keeping business alive despite the fear, uncertainty and challenges we all face. Within this period of lockdown, we have the opportunity to reflect, rethink and redesign. The time to solidify our future of work is now, not after lockdown, and we make it our purpose to not only continue business as normal during COVID-19 lockdown, but also to improve as we go along to ensure a smooth transition from our current world to the new, once the lockdown has been lifted, and beyond.
What would we like to see happen during COVID-19 lockdown?
Our wish for this time is simple, continuous engagement with you. It will allow us the opportunity to get under your skin, experience the business concerns that keep you up at night and use this time to apply different thinking, focusing on building out of the box solutions to help you manage and ease those concerns. The current time allows us the opportunity to delve deeper into your business with you by our side and look at areas where we could help to improve business operations, and at the same time enabling you to focus on the things that matter to you. How do we do this? Talk to us on Zoom – it is the closest to a face-to-face meeting and has become the new norm for us in the last week or two.
How are we delivering on our commitment during COVID-19 lockdown?
Apart from keeping the network running and ensuring that your workforce can continue to deliver what is important for you as a business, we have designed a number of ready-to-implement solutions to help you connect and secure your remote workforce very easily. This solution allows you to maintain business continuity despite the changing conditions, because our solution auto-scales with your needs. We assure you of our commitment to completely uninterrupted service delivery to you whether you are office or home based.
What is our vision for post COVID-19?
We see a new world where we stand shoulder to shoulder with our customers, because we have used this quieter time during COVID-19 not to relax, but to rebuild, to improve, to thrive. We always thought that we would have ample time to prepare ourselves and our customers for the new world of work, but our plans were interrupted by the sudden outbreak of a worldwide pandemic. Let us learn from this experience and we invite you to join us on our journey in designing and building our own futures during this time, instead of waiting for someone else to dictate to us how our future is going to look like post COVID-19.Our time is now, join us.
