Introduction
Strategic management is the process of continuously planning, monitoring, analyzing, and evaluating all of the resources a company needs to accomplish its goals and objectives. In particular, the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic called for new strategic changes in business settings; hence firms needed new reevaluating tactics to realize success. Therefore this article will provide an insight on strategic management approaches deployed by organizations in assisting their operations for the foreseeable future despite the presence of the deadly virus.
Management and the Economy
Plan for Geographical Separation of Roles and Activities
The COVID-19 epidemic left affected locales and businesses inaccessible for extended periods. To guide future mitigation strategies, organizations assess the interdependencies and responsibilities of people, data, technology, and infrastructure. Consequently, planning should prioritize the geographic distribution of these vital services and activities (Huang & Farboudi Jahromi., 2021). Indeed, it is important to diversify your customer, supplier, and third-party service base to reduce the organization’s sensitivity to regional outages and geopolitical crises.
Invest in Remote Work and Virtual Collaboration Technologies and Infrastructure
Workers must remain home to reduce exposure and disease transmission during the pandemic. As a result, the virtual working program is becoming a standard option in enterprises. Despite an unusual weather disaster requiring some employees to work remotely for an extended time, COVID-19 caused many staff to work for a prolonged time. (Huang & Farboudi Jahromi., 2021). However, it may increase traffic on distant connection networks, affecting capacity and load access. Companies must invest in robust technologies to facilitate the processes hence enabling efficient operations.
Relying on Third Parties to Build Robust Plans
Organizations comprehend third, fourth, and fifth parties’ resilience programs and build backup plans, such as insourcing techniques. Additionally, businesses verify the synchronization of their alternative methods with third parties, offer solutions for geographically dispersed enterprises, and assist with basic internal procedures throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. (Huang & Farboudi Jahromi., 2021). During a market contagion, peers and rivals may seek the same third parties for help, resulting in concentration risk. Companies must evaluate third-party capacity and bandwidth in light of these market relationships.
Marketing and the Economy
Organizations have employed new marketing strategies to ensure the reach of products to clients.
The Use of Social Media with Influencers and Endorsers
Brands must guarantee that influencers and endorsers only provide accurate and authentic material, including messages from workers’ families. Further, brands must also remember that when utilizing an endorser, influencer, or employee to promote on behalf of their firm, they must declare any significant link between them (He & Harris, 2020). A consumer may accord adequate weight to the substance of a promotional message where the necessary link disclosure is plain, obvious, and inescapable.
Use of Promotional Devices
COVID-19 has negatively affected the prizes and contest sector as marketers do not want to maintain contact with the epidemic. Tips, competitions, and freebies allow firms to engage customers in uncertain times despite the hazards. In addition, gift cards to restaurants and stores or supermarket gift cards to frontline organizations might improve client goodwill and loyalty. Therefore, companies must verify they comply with all relevant federal, state, and local regulations. These include, among other things, following conditions creating formal rules, lottery regulations, and disclosing the reward and entry methods. These restrictions, which vary by state and promotion type, may be highly complicated.
Cause-Related Marketing and Commercial Co-Ventures
Brands naturally want to help millions of COVID-19 victims. Companies increasingly combine their products and services with social impact initiatives like supporting COVID-19 victims. Brands should also be aware that over 30 states govern commercial co-ventures, with some needing additional registration and bonding. These guidelines often require brand-charity commercial co-ventures and stipulate charity name, maximum donation amount, and advertising restrictions. Then they must comply with all state and federal accounting requirements.
Data Analysis and the Economy
Data analytics can help businesses recover, adapt, and prepare for the new normal.
Understanding Consumer Opinions
Manufacturing and industrial automation firms that collect external data and simulate numerous situations may categorize clients according to their economic status, future production plans, and other indications representing customer demands. According to Biddle et al. (2022), new service or product offerings and alternative financing mechanisms may develop. When consumers are under financial restrictions, they may investigate adopting less expensive alternative solutions. In that regard, the organization may provide tailored financing solutions that allow customers to complete the transaction; and increase digital sales or reset pricing.
Streamline Sales Processes
Businesses affected by the pandemic may preserve and increase revenues inside their networks by collaborating with distributors and sales agents to identify unexplored possibilities. Therefore, perception and expertise are less relevant in an uncertain market, and sophisticated analytics can help organizations willing to be flexible locate the most potential opportunities (Biddle et al., 2022). They can realize this by adapting sales and marketing methods to market changes, making more stringent modifications in response to data by specifying predetermined readjustment criteria and examining proven desired outcomes.
Enhancing Integrity in Supply Chain Management
The organization should be well conversant with its supply chain; as such, acknowledging the more than six tiers in the supply chain to its first is crucial. Notably, understanding the suppliers’ sustainability in the market enables organizations to assess the chain in faultiness (Biddle et al., 2022). Hence, external data will provide a conclusive insight on bargaining and collections, for example, mapping the movement of essential components across the supplier’s network, recalculating lead times for replacement, and reassessing existing stock levels.
Accounting and the Economy
Employing Soft Skills Needed to Manage Unprecedented Change
Finding individuals with crucial soft skills might be as vital as technical competence in the post-pandemic economy. For example, finance and accounting employees must work x innovate, lottery regulations, and change quickly. Virtual teams need strong critical thinking and cooperation abilities. According to (Rinaldi. 2020), difficult circumstances demand sympathetic, accessible, and comforting supervisors. As new business models emerge, progressive facilities and administrative firms prioritize soft skills in their people strategy
Flexible Staffing and Outsourcing Increase Post-Pandemic Resilience
Finance teams are under immense pressure to convert into strategic partners for their firms in the post-pandemic economy. Moreover, teams need finance and accounting organizations that can give clarity in the face of ambiguity via real-time data and facts and assist them inadequately in considering the immediate and long-term implications of strategic choices.
Demand for Tech-Savvy Employees is Increasing
COVID-19 problems increased the urgency for financial businesses to accelerate efforts in machine learning, automation, predictive analytics, and cloud computing. Therefore, it is recommended that a better percentile of finance executives exacerbate that their department must become much more digitalized to increase important business activities’ scalability, resilience, and cost-efficiency.
Retaining Valued Employees
Accounting departments help firms recover from the destruction caused by COVID-19, and keeping valued employees is a priority. A more considerable percentage of accounting managers are worried about employee retention (Rinaldi et al., 2020). The loss of even one team member might imply severe budgetary issues. Rinaldi et al.’s (2020) study demonstrate legitimate grounds for alarm. The frameworks are critical to retaining effective staff who will enhance activities in the firm despite a pandemic.
Finance and the Economy
Deploying the Right Technology Stack
The COVID-19 crisis ushered in years of change in the way businesses of all sizes and industries does business. Enterprises have advanced the digitization of customer and supply chain contacts, as well as internal operations; as a result, it is critical to use long-term remote working strategies facilitated by Zoom technology (Terjesen, 2021). The outstanding technology capabilities in organizations stand as essential aspects of determining success throughout and after the crisis.
Harmonize Billing to Increase Client Retention
The post–COVID-19 has affected desperate circumstances, and the pandemic has created financial vulnerabilities that have affected consumer buying power. According to (Terjesen. 2021), firms have extended special offers such as discounts and gift cards to ease the burden and maintain customers. Since this is the moment to ramp up incentives that will increase business while also ensuring that clients feel secure and valued, it will ultimately be beneficial in attracting new clients.
Improving Leadership, Communication, and Cooperation
The worldwide epidemic altered ow operations are undertaken in firms in an instant. Robust finance businesses use the platform to study COVID problems and emerge more triumphant than before. Terjesen (2021) demonstrates how the instability of 2021 is transforming certain finance businesses. Instead of reverting to the status quo, forward-thinking finance executives are re-engaging their workers and reimagining their workplace by enhancing renovation and collaboration.
Adaptable Employment and Outsourcing Help
Businesses rebuild their resilience in the aftermath of a pandemic. Finance teams are under immense pressure to convert into strategic partners for their firms in the post-pandemic economy. Executive teams need finance and accounting organizations that can give clarity in the face of ambiguity.
Ethics and the Economy
Protection and Prioritization of Employees
The distribution of limited resources in disaster and worker’s emergency procedures usually prioritizes critical individuals based on fairness to those assuming the higher risk for the organization’s benefit. Significantly, employees in organizations, some regulations restrict important personnel priority to preventative measures like immunizations and medical treatments against the pandemic.
Employees’ Moral Distress
Related choices and practices such as overreliance on achieving organization goals may create moral distress, forcing organization workers to go against their profession’s basic ideas and principles to realize the mission. According to Donthu and Gustafsson (2020), when executives agree with a policy or decision’s goal and regulations, they may feel emotionally and psychologically. Nevertheless, making and executing triage choices is challenging enough. Pandemic care may cause depression, sleep disturbance, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder among organization staff.
Financial Vulnerability
While some organizations continued to operate throughout the COVID-19 pandemic to satisfy consumer demands; as a result, workers’ income has been cut. First, to contain COVID-19, organizations have decreased their services, reduced revenue and operational budget, and furloughed employees to save expenses (Donthu & Gustafsson, 2020). Moreover, when companies are forced to terminate their employees’ contracts due to the COVID-19 epidemic, the ability of individuals to pay for their primary daily demand becomes difficult.
Data Privacy
One notable aftermath of COVID-19 was the increase in digitalization as the pandemic has affected a new normal. The change involved a change in business operation, which entailed online job operations. In this regard, organizations have grown prone to cyber-attack vulnerability (Biddle et al., 2022). Thus, companies utilize cybersecurity strategies to counter such situations to prevent the financial and reputational harm caused by a data breach.
Making Connections
Strategic management is critical in business operations since it enables a corporation to identify opportunities for process improvements. They may often follow an analytical approach that identifies possible hazards and possibilities, or they might adhere to broad standards (Fuertes et al., 2020). Hence, organizations employ cross-sectional design to define a research objective and the specification of the variable to be measured. For instance, the program is fundamental in various ways.
Better Cross-Functional Cooperation
Product and marketing coordination may make or break a firm. Creating a solution that addresses all client needs is unachievable if marketing focuses on obtaining corporate customers and salespeople are rewarded for quickly closing small agreements (Poberschnigg, 2020). If a company wants to present itself as a business tool, marketers may work with sales agents to develop sales methods. Assigning accounts to cross-functional teams assists in creating customized corporate client experiences.
Process and Product Innovation
Discovering and executing changes is challenging when firms function in silos. According to Poberschnigg (2020), organizations may then train additional cross-functional teams to increase organizational cohesiveness and effectiveness. Further, the approach enhances teams to develop more creative and extensive answers to challenges than any single functional group could. Not only do cross-functional teams foster innovativeness, but they also foster the development of more innovative products.
Cycle Time Reduction
Cross-functional teams assist firms in identifying inefficiencies and enhancing their capacity to discover practical solutions. By deploying the approach teams in this manner, cycle times for any reoccurring pain point may be significantly reduced (Poberschnigg, 2020). Thus, rather than sending a client request from silo to silo, the team may collaborate to handle it as rapidly as feasible, resulting in a much-improved customer experience that suits consumer demand.
Conclusion
The never anticipated COVID-19 pandemic adversely affected businesses as some became non-operational. In this regard, to counter the disease menace, organizations employed approaches and tactics that accentuated adopting the new management strategies, such as economic and others. Ultimately, to efficiently manage and cope with the new typical environment, it has reverted to using a cross-functional approach to complement services and enhance ease in operations.
References
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Rinaldi, L., Cho, C. H., Lodhia, S. K., Michelon, G., & Tilt, C. A. (2020). Accounting in times of the COVID-19 pandemic: a forum for academic research. In Accounting Forum (Vol. 44, No. 3, pp. 180-183). Routledge.
Terjesen, S. (2021). Entrepreneurial finance: Research, practice, and policy for post-Covid-19 economic recovery.Journal of Risk and Financial Management, 14(1), 18.