Crisis Prevention: From Reactive to Proactive with Real-Time Data

Another week, month or year passes and once again you’ve forgotten a few things, birthdays, your annual physical exam, the oil change for your car! As wellness coach Luke Jones says, “We are all guilty of being reactive from time to time, often without even knowing. For most people, it’s the default program.” And why exactly is that? “Reactive people are often affected by their physical environment. If the weather is good, they feel good. If it isn’t, it affects their attitude and performance. Proactive people carry their own weather with them.”

Now, we haven’t yet been able to crack the code on controlling the weather, but the analogy is quite applicable to the place business leaders find themselves in when it comes to ‘weathering the storm ‘of the pandemic and making key decisions affecting their organizations — such as when and how to bring employees back to the office. Thanks to advances in data and analytics, we now have access to tools that can ease this transition, helping both leadership and employees pivot from being reactive to a fault to proactive by default.

Being proactive has always been associated with the idea of success — being ambitious and motivated certainly separates leaders from followers. But there’s no time where formulating a proactive response plan is more important than during a crisis scenario like COVID-19. Per Entrepreneur Magazine, “…crises are everywhere, and countless institutions have been sunk by an unseen bombshell. But in many cases, it isn’t the crisis itself that causes an organization to flounder; too often it’s a leader’s response to the crisis that causes the greatest damage.”

When a crisis strikes an organization, all practicality and rationale can very quickly go out the window, especially as human emotion tends to play a significant role in crisis reaction. Taking the bait and leading through a crisis with emotion or conjecture can lead to miscommunication, confusion, and even reputational harm and damage. When employees’ safety and lives are at stake, there’s no room for anything but the facts to be the crux of a crisis prevention plan.

The right management tool here is really quite simple — data.

According to Deloitte, COVID-19 has proven that organizations that lead with data and are “insight-driven by default” show much higher resilience and are able to tighten their dominant market positions, even growing share value while stock markets tumble.

When data-driven insights inform business decisions during a crisis, you protect not only the health and safety of your employees, but also your own reputation and legacy. At Domo, we have engineered a proactive process for organizations in direct response to this unprecedented crisis. Our suite of tools encompass every area of the ‘get back to work’ process, from temperature scanning to contact tracing to productivity tracking and every step in between.

Want to craft a data-driven proactive crisis prevention process of your own? Below are several best practices we have adapted from our own learnings and from our clients:

1. Establish the facts: After conducting a current state analysis grounded in data (what is the current office layout? Will capacity realistically allow for everyone to come back at once, or will a hybrid model be utilized?), use data to “stress test” different scenarios and use these findings to inform your get back to work strategies.
2. Create a Get Back to Work Command Center: No matter how data-driven your strategies are, they can very quickly become ineffective if data streams are siloed. Establishing a “command center” inclusive of all get back to work activities, protocols and procedures prevents the risk of disparate data overload in a crisis scenario.
3. Maintain executive visibility: More often than not, it’s the CEO who becomes the figurehead of an organization during a crisis, for the good and the bad. Our DOMO CEO App empowers CEOs to get an instant view of all critical data points, so leaders can focus on just the data they need to make rapid decisions on all aspects of their company’s return to work.
4. Communicate, communicate, communicate: Per EY, “Effective communications during any crisis are crucial to maintaining customer trust, restoring employee morale and confidence, and retaining market stability.” All of our DOMO Get Back to Work apps are built with precisely that in mind — real time, continuous communications that inclusively lay out the facts and protocols to all.
5. Ask for help: Crisis is no time to try to handle everything yourself. Focus on your organization’s core mission and leave the technical execution to the experts. After all, suffice to say that most organizations did not exactly set aside time nor budget for the building of temperature scanning and contact tracing apps when forming their 2020 budgets. Collaborate — both internally and externally, with subject matter experts, regulatory and governmental bodies and qualified vendors and consultants.

For more information about our services and how we can help make your company “future forward”, please visit our Get Back To Work site.