Getting to New Normalcy - WFH to RTO

A comprehensive guide to enabling considerations for getting back to a state of operational
normalcy and considerations that organizations would need to keep in mind while restarting
physical operations. It also talks about the new normal and how organizations need to
approach and think towards planning for things that have changed permanently in the mix.

A guide sponsored and created by the team at
www.peoplehum.com www.engati.com

© Copyright 2020 Getting to New Normalcy - WFH to RTO 2

ASSUMPTIONS

What we are facing is not a binary event but an asymmetric non linear progression towards a
battle of attrition and the race against time. The final resolution on the opener and the
series of events to follow can only end with either herd immunity or a cure in the form of
a vaccine. Until then, the uncertainty will prevail and priorities shift between public health
and safety, saving the economy or saving the healthcare system.

This guide has been developed on the basis of our planning and response to the COVID
situation. It is a journey of Coviam adopting two of its products - peopleHum and Engati
extensively to ensure business continuity to its employees, customers and partners
worldwide.

Complexity of definition of the new normal will shift quickly from current thinking with the
prognosis and the resultant depth of damage constantly being reset.

The biggest cost of the uncertainty will probably be felt in the focus on mental wellbeing.
Man was not bred to be chained or to be locked down in his cave. So it is imperative that
organizations start building resilience for the times to come.

The race is not about conquering, since the enemy is invisible, the notion is not about
survival, but how much are we left with when we prevail - to start rebuilding; how deep will
the cuts go, how deep the losses, how intense the ravaging, in this long and extended
journey.

The only sure bet, survival of the fittest and dominance of the resilient - since prevail we
shall, this dark scare from the bowels of nature.

EXPECTED IMPACT DUE TO CHANGING CONSUMER BEHAVIOR

So what is the expected result of the new normal? How would consumer behavior impact
industries?

This view from BCG foretells an increase of opportunity to cater to and reduced opportunity
due to the fear of infection and changing consumer behavior.


The ‘Get back to a sense of the new normal’ operationally

The pandemic has just started. The prognosis looks bleak at this point where agencies,
governing authorities and services struggle to navigate through an economy, shut down
suddenly and wonder how to bring it back up, while maintaining a compassionate balance
towards the people in general and protecting the health care providers at the frontline of
the battle with the virus.

There seems to be no rational end in sight till a vaccine is invented, manufactured in the
billions and made available for everyone to be inoculated. The pandemic will surely make its
presence felt sometimes with force and sometimes in a lull. The flu virus has been around
forever and flu shots have not stopped the flu. Seasons will rise and ebb and so will the
virus. With the onset of monsoons in many countries, the reaction of the virus is yet to be
determined.

While scientific communities and front line workers around the world coordinate to battle the
virus, and governments try not to overwhelm the system and put healthcare workers at too
much risk, the third pillar of the deep impact, the economy, will be in focus.

A large swath of the population survives on a monthly basis with mortgages and loans to
pay. Businesses will do their best to retain but faced with elongated lockdowns, they will

adopt survival techniques and cut back on expenses, which results in laying off employees,
further deepening the economic malaise.

The economic backlash of an extended lockdown will force governments more afraid of
re-elections and retaining power to open up the levers that drive the economy; moving it
away from the bare essentials to allow for increased commercial and economic activity.

Source: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/risk/our-insights/covid-19-implications-for-business


While we play hide and seek with the virus and switch back and forward with the economic
forces that drive daily lives, how does an organization adjust to the variability?

How do we start from zero, with everyone locked down and a 100% WFH, to dialing it up,
getting some semblance of regular operational activity?

What considerations will be required to prepare for a pendulum that will swing for times to
come, between more liberal options to work vs restrictions imposed again?

There is a lot of conjecture about what “normal” will be going forward, but we know that the
global COVID-19 pandemic will change the workplace forever. The opportunity ahead of us
is to make the workplace even better than it was before the crisis.

There are many considerations while planning to resume operations. Many authorities will
allow for dial-up guidelines where a percentage of the organization that can expand on
essential services or a minimum threshold to continue business operations while following
social distancing guidelines will be allowed to do so.

THE PREPARATION TO RTO

Time required: Day 0 + 1 (Day 0 is the green light by authorities to begin part operations)

Important considerations


Facilities pre-check

It would be sensible to check on facilities that have been in a shutdown state before
operations can begin to ensure smooth functioning. There will be a change in operational
norms and tech, connectivity and video will become the backbone for continuing operations
successfully as we ramp them back up.

Check for

Electricals - Test all electricals and switches for any wire damage and operational
functioning

Fire extinguishers - Check gauges on fire extinguishers

Access control - Is the access control system working? Consider switching to face
scanning or non-touch card swipe considerations if affordable

Elevators - Check if elevators, escalators and other equipment for internal transport like
buggies from parking lots or electric walkways are functioning smoothly

Cafeteria - Check if cafeteria equipment is in order; gas, cooking and serving
equipment should all be inspected

Tech connectivity - Check whether all routers, core switches, connectivity, and
network systems are functional

Video equipment - Video equipment will be critical to connect with WFH employees,
customers, and suppliers/vendors. Ensure that it remains in proper working order. If you
have CCTV, is it in working condition and will you use this to monitor social distancing
norms?

Data Center - Check if servers are up, auto failover is working, cooling equipment is
functioning normally

Machines and assembly lines - Check whether machines involved in production go
through the pre-start checklist and are enabled for a pilot run

Stores inventory - Check materials, stores, inventory to ensure production readiness

Backup generators - Test shutdown and restart procedures for generators and
electrical backup operations

Water - Check whether plumbing connections and flush tanks remain functional

Sewage - Check sewage lines

Garbage disposal - Inspect garbage chutes for blockages, remove rotting garbage, and
review garbage disposal procedures with township authorities

Supplier readiness - Contact suppliers and check on their readiness

Maintenance service providers - Check on availability and accessibility to maintenance
service providers.

Train your staff- Cross-train staff for all essential office and medical functions.

Cleaning needs - Review procedures for office cleanliness and supply needs

Medical contingencies - Contact local hospitals, ambulance services, emergency
contact numbers and review contingency plans for medical evacuations and handling
emergencies


Information needs - It would be important to provide for information needs for your
employees and associates, one place where reliable information is available for them to
follow the crisis rather than chasing fears with different information sources. A COVID bot
would be an excellent thing to have on your channels and intranet webpages. Please refer
below

Fight Against COVID - a multilingual chatbot by Engati

Also, Engati has built a multilingual chatbot - ‘Fight Against COVID’ available in English,
Arabic, Hindi, Italian and German. The COVID bot is a one-stop shop for everything on
COVID-19 and more on multiple channels - Web, Facebook, Telegram, WhatsApp. It also
includes the following:

- Risk Assessment Scanner

- Symptom Checker

- Latest news and statistics by region

- Videos and engagement on myths, precautions (as per WHO)

- Endearing WFH and collaborating with colleagues

- Assistance on mental wellbeing, engaging your kids, food recipes etc.,

Try it out here https://app.engati.com/static/standalone/bot.html?bot_key=3f9fdc6781184e54

Get your own chatbot by using this template to create a new one here
https://botstore.app.engati.com/templates/viewTemplates/9ddcc6de-334c-4014-ab36-e82f0
32f8e83


Considerations

- Ensure maintenance schedules are conducted and checked

- Liaison with authorities for water, electricity, accessibility and garbage disposal

- Coordinate with your suppliers to ensure that procurement can resume functioning or
work out alternate vendors and acquisition procedures

- Make sure your bills for utilities are paid so that service can continue normally

Watch out for

- The need to get into new supplier relationships to continue procurement operations

- The availability of maintenance staff from vendors to ensure continuity and pre and
post-operational checks

- Utilities and the plan for any changes to utility provisions by the authorities

- Prepare for medical contingencies - Prepare lists of contacts for services and invoke
medical emergency procedures

How can peopleHum help?

An end-to-end, one view, integrated Human Capital Management platform that is
specifically built and crafted for employee experiences with AI and automation.

Tasks manager: To plan assign, follow through and get status

Surveys: for location determination, plans, joining back, travel arrangements
needed, WFH aspects, pulse surveys, engagement surveys

Notifications: Use the peopleHum notifications board to keep everything central for
easy universal access. Avoid emails since they are not efficient. Notifications in
peopleHum provide a feed-like interface to stay updated on plans and happenings

Attendance logging: peopleHum can help with attendance tracking and can easily
produce a list of people who are in office on a day to day basis

ChatHum: Stay in touch with facilities procurement. HR and leadership members
and use it as a secure status, communications and collaboration checkerboard
such that official communication stays in your control vs leaks into social media

Ideas/Challenges: to collaborate and ideate on new solutions / innovations for an
organization

Gamification: Use the gamification concept in peopleHum to bring people
together for fun and engaging activities while people may still be remote

Announcements: Can be used by HRs/CEOs and Leaders to send important
communications to a team or entire organization

Policies: Organise and publish your COVID policies

Updating all Employee Information: Enforce 100% Update of Personal Contact
Details. Mandate capture of Employee personal contact details, emergency contact
number so that you can reach them in case of any emergency. Check the current %
availability of this data and drive internal communications fiercely to make them
update this on your HR tech platform.

Update Leave Policies: Enable special leaves (that can be approved by HR team
upon request by employees) or additional paid leaves to cover any quarantine,
isolation or unfortunate detection of cases amongst your employees under COVID.

Amend Work from Home Policies: Change the maximum limit for work from home
to let employees self-quarantine so that isolation helps in stopping the exponential
spread of the virus; across locations.

Online Onboarding: Let your onboarding effectiveness not take a hit. Let joining
day formalities go virtual with peopleHum

Motivate people with Recognition: Recognize teams /individuals to motivate
employees working from home for effective communication & faster SLAs to boost
business continuity while yielding high trust and productivity. This can help avoid
the drop in motivation levels during prolonged virtual work mode and keep
employees engaged.

Continuous Performance Feedback: Use peopleHum to empower employees to
be guided and appreciated through continuous feedback while working virtually.
This will ensure the day-to-day exchange of feedback on work doesn't get missed;
during remote working.


How can Engati help?

Empower your workforce with a chatbot accessible across 14 different channels -
website, mobile app, Slack, MS Teams, Telegram, WhatsApp, Line, WeChat etc.

FAQs : Train the chatbot with FAQs and documents on post COVID policies and
guides as your incoming requests from employees keep rising during this
uncertainty

Fight anxiety: Reduce anxiety and improve well-being by allowing your employees
to use the chatbot as their personal assistant and get help from the post COVID
guides

Share updates: Leverage the power of NLP and allow your employees to ask
questions with regards to the updated policies across various functions and topics

Request service (Employee): Build process flows within the chatbot to accept and
respond to service requests from an employee. Integrate the chatbot with a service
management system to manage them effectively

Log tickets: Allow teams across multiple functions to communicate and collaborate
on functional tasks by logging tickets and assigning them

Response teams: Create a small first response team and allow employees to
interact with them over live chat across channels

Was the list helpful? Please let us know your experience to enhance the guide to help others
- peopleHum comment board
- Engati comment board


Source: LinkedIn

TEST YOUR BCP (BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLANNING)

Introduction

Now, more than ever, there is the need for active and tested BCP. Continuity of business
is top of mind for every organization which has been in a lockdown and is looking to
restart regular operations.

If you did not have a business continuity plan, no worries, you seem to have survived part
1 of the lock down defined by Rush, Regroup and Respond and seem to have survived in
keeping a semblance of a running operation remotely. Now, however, is the time to focus
on building a BCP plan, appointing a BCP plan owner and creating a Rapid Response
team or a task force.

Key checklist

- Update: Brush up your business continuity plan

- Test: Invoke a full test of continuity operations if you did not get a chance to do so
before operations went into lockdown

- Complete contact lists: Location, primary residence, phone, email, public email,
social tags, status and rejoining dates, any status on issues faced or provisions
needed

- Determine location of employees: Determine where individual employees are
and how they plan to come back

- Invoke call trees: Run tests on call trees for simulated emergency response
- Ensure customer support lines are open: Customers will help bring back the
business, plan around customer service readiness and procedures to engage

- A positive case determination: Run scenarios for evacuation and medical
emergency notifications if a case is tested positive

- Medical contingency and evac: Add and reinforce your medical contingency
procedures resulting in an evac plan activation procedures to your BCP plan

Considerations

- A business continuity plan will be extremely important with the reopen operations

- Keeping the business continuity plan active and tested will ensure that operations
run smoothly during the possibility of further waves

- Appoint a BCP test coordinator overall as a leadership responsibility

- Appoint location level, team level and floor level BCP coordinators depending on
your organization structures to ensure cascades in any changes to procedures

Watch out for

- Updating the business continuity plan - no one planned for an extended shutdown
of the world so all BCP plans need to be updated

- A pre-test of the BCP plan if the notifications for lockdowns change immediately
after reopen and regular testing schedule during reopen to ensure that operations
continue smoothly


- Ensuring BCP team, leadership responsibility and team / floor assignments are
clearly marked out

Source:
https://mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/how-to-restart-national-economies-during-the-co
ronavirus-crisis



specifically built and crafted for employee experiences with AI and automation.

Tasks manager: To plan assign, store BCP plans, follow through and get status

Surveys: for post BCP plan test, readiness and feedback

Suggestions module: For collecting suggestions on BCP plan and keeping it
updated

Employee info: Access employee’s emergency contact information with ease

Announcements: Org wide announcements appear on home page

Notifications: Use the peopleHum notifications board to keep everyone abreast
with the latest updates on BCP planning

ChatHum: to stay in touch with BCP members and use it as a secure status,
communications and collaboration checkerboard



Engati can support your BCP activities with a conversational interface fueled by Artificial
Intelligence. Feed it once and it's accessible across 14 channels.

BCP FAQs: Train the chatbot with FAQs and guides on multiple aspects of BCP.
Build FAQs in multiple languages and equip every employee with the right
information

Quick search guides: Allow employees to lookup employee profile and contact
information as per the rules of the organizational hierarchy

Contingency support: Leverage the power of NLP and allow your employees to ask
questions with regards to first response and emergency response in case of any
contingency

Call trees: Publish call trees for response and allow employees to look up the call
tree for the next course of action. Allow employees to interact with the response
team as per the call tree over live chat.

Request service (Employee): Build process flows within the chatbot to accept and
respond to service requests from an employee. Integrate the chatbot with a service

Log ticket: Allow teams across multiple functions to communicate and collaborate
on functional tasks by logging tickets and assigning them

Customer Support Bot: Deploy a customer support chatbot across multiple channels
that can respond to incoming customer requests in multiple languages.

Remote agents: Have customer service agents logged in remotely and respond to
customer queries via Live Chat.

Multi channel accessibility: Empower your workforce with a chatbot across
14 different channels - web, mobile app, slack, MS Teams, Telegram, WhatsApp, Line,
WeChat etc.

THE PLAN CONSIDERATIONS

Introduction

How does one go about dialing up operations? Who goes in first? Which teams and
functions are important to have inhouse? What are the core characteristics to guide the
creation of a come back plan?

We recommend an operational criticality approach with the following order of decreasing
priority.


What is the new normal? We see organizations re-focusing on survivability and lights on
run functions first to ensure those are operational and can continue without a dip. Next
come the employee functions which can be further classified as business critical and
support. Here the focus shifts on support first to make the core capability employees
succeed. Customers are next, if there are no employees that feel safe and secure then
customers will not be served. And business and commercial functions tag it at the end.


Key considerations

The people imperative

- Who is where: A key criteria is determining who is where in your organization

- Connect points: Cascade down capture points for leaders to connect and check
on wellbeing and rejoin plan possibilities.

- Prioritization plan: That goes across the key critical functions described in the
introduction that will be needed to get your operation up and running

- People identification: Which names go in which buckets to get the operations
going

- Availability: Can the people be available in office to carry out their functions? Are
they in town or will travel restrictions between zones make it impossible for them
to travel?

- Remote possible: Prepare a roster of people who can come in or are remote and
their contact points and publish it to the organization

- Zoning plan: Most countries have identified Red, Yellow, Green zones based on
the spread of the pandemic. Get the zoning from local authorities and understand
carefully what is allowed and disallowed

- Map zoning plan to people plan: Now match up the zoning plan to your people
plan. If people are in a red zone they would not be able to commute and be
available in office and may need to be substituted or arranged for to work
remotely

- Finalize: Now that you have the who is where, when, how and what of the people
plan, finalize and distribute it


The workplace imperative

- Task force: Create a task force to plan out beginning of operations

- Pre-facilities checklist : Review the pre-facilities checklist from above and ensure
readiness of basic equipment, connectivity, operational readiness and workability

- Cleaning: Order cleaning supplies and ensure a thorough scrub down of all
physical premises. Ensure your procurement, facilities, housekeeping and
cleaning crews are aligned

- Operational readiness task force: Appoint a facilities leader to ensure all pre and
prep items for operational readiness are complied with

- Determine high crowd areas: Mark out cafeterias, lounges, coffee rooms, snack
bars, conference rooms, stairwells, inhouse stores, restrooms, huddle areas, sleep
zones

- Zoning off: Closed seating conference rooms might need zoning or closing to
avoid virus spread. Review your zoning, seating, foot traffic, access, cafeteria and
ingress-egress plans for marking off all non-essential zones

- Open office plan: If you have an open office plan then mark out 6 feet separators
to guide people on their seating plans

- Capacity: Determine your office capacity based on social distancing norms that
will apply

- Separators: Consider putting plexiglass separators between seating areas to
avoid physical contact

- Santiziers: Ensure a supply of sanitizer that will be needed at vantage points

- Thermometers : Ensure that there is one individual at the entrance to measure
temperature with a contactless digital thermometer. Plan for at least 1
thermometer for every 30 employees.

- Instruction boards: Create instruction boards of dos and don'ts and place them at
vantage points

- Visitor zones and procedures: Curtail and tighten up your visitor procedures to
eliminate any non-essential walk ins or personal visits. Avoid employees getting
personal items shipped to the office to avoid traffic. Circulate the change in visitor
handling to the organization.

- Elevator markings: Mark yellow box squares in elevators for people to isolate and
maintain social distance.

- Sinks and urinals: Tape off alternate sinks and urinals if they are not 6 feet apart.

- Foot traffic: Tape down stairwells for left-right laning for egress

- Work floor: Implement a one way plan along floor access and walk around areas.
Ensure that people walk only clockwise or anticlockwise on the floor and put up
signs for “This way only” to guide people

- Cafeteria plan: Ensure serving stations have pots and trays that are separated so
that a queue can maintain 6 feet separation between 2 individuals.

- Benberrys separations: Tape off alternate benberrys to ensure 6 feet separations
in the queue

- Leisure areas: Zone off any leisure areas that require close seating

- Cafeteria marking: Yellow box positions as guides for people to stand so that a
safe distance is maintained

- Cafeteria seating: Yellow tape between chairs so that people can maintain a safe
distance

- Interview rooms: Ensure that interviews are concierged and spacing between the
interviewer and interviewee is maintained.

- Supplier hours: Ward off suppliers in receiving zones and communicate hours for
receiving good and for invoicing procedures

- Visitor Hours: Discourage walk in visitors, or if unavoidable, set times when
people can receive visitors

- HR / Facilities / Equipment support Hours: To minimize traffic, ensure visit hours
are confirmed for face to face meetings or support and they happen in a safe zone

- Package drop off: Ensure provision of sanitizing spray or UV lights for any
packages that are delivered to the company to ensure sanitization

- Sanitizing tunnel: If you can afford, consider a sanitizing tunnel at the entrance of
the office to ensure safety for employees

- Desk surfaces: Ensure, if possible, to provide a paper cover to maintain proper
desk hygiene

- Monitoring Apps: Certain countries have released apps which may be useful for
contact tracing at a later time in the unfortunate event that a case is reported.
Ensure all people coming into the office have the app installed with appropriate
settings (bluetooth turned on for instance)

The organizing imperative

- Task force: Create a task force to plan out beginning of operations

- Member leads: Assign leads that can inform, train, act, react and notify to function
as single points for individual floors, teams or functions. This would be important
to allow for information to be sent back and forth, enabling quick notifications and
responses to issues at the task force level

- Training: Organize for training when people report into work for Day 1. Prepare
legible instructions. Notices regarding dos and don'ts, changes to the workplace,
procedures to follow, respect for mutual space and reporting on observations of
untoward incidents will help in the smooth functioning of an organization

- Morning huddles: Create a feedback, day assignments, changes and information
exchange loop by making use of huddles. Let the task force meet daily at the
beginning of the day. Ensure safe physical distance is maintained during these
huddles

- Phones charged and accessible: Ensure to notify all phones are charged and
accessible


- Contact plan: Create a key individual contact list and an alternate contact or a
number to reach in case of emergencies

- Collaboration channel: Create a collaboration channel for task force members,
key operational functions and organizational leadership to stay on top of the
situation and ensure flexibility and resilience

- Reporting channel: Create a simplified format report that gets published to
leadership on site safety, location preparedness, issues, risks and incident
response

- Liability and risk: Ensure the proper receipt and interpretation of local authority
guidelines for beginning and running operations. Ensure that vendors, suppliers
and clients are notified and any contracts are amended to ensure applicability of
new norms that are published

- Commit sheet: Prepare a list of instructions, changes, dos and don'ts and ensure
that after the training, each employee reporting into work signs off on the sheet of
responsibilities

- Legal: Ensure a communications channel to get legal advice in untoward
situations and ensure that risk components of the operational plan are legally
approved and risk mitigated

- Communications: The key to all aspects functioning smoothly is a
communications plan that is clear, robust and consistent. Identify the channels of
communications for leadership, regional, global, associates, functions and task
force that gets aligned to bringing the organization back up

- External: Maintain communications with customers to give them a sense of
business as usual or change in operational and support hours. The front-end
leadership of customer handling functions may need to come up with a customer
communications plan to ensure continuity of the business

- Vendor: Check compliance by vendors to ensure contact, transmissions and
hygiene of suppliers and disinfection of supplies is carried out before and after
receipt to minimize chances of spread


The leadership imperative

- Lead from the front: Visibility to customers, partners, investors, employees,
vendors and other stakeholders is important in the time of reopen

- Regular updates: Ensure regular updates using direct, social media, website and
other digital channels to maintain contact and keep the communications open
with various stakeholders and prospects

- Decision making: Ensure that channels are open and leaders are available to
quickly act and react to contingencies

- Health and wellness: Focus on health and wellness of employees and family.
Make adjustments to policies to ensure that priority is given to employees that are
infirm, have binding responsibilities and need the flexibility to stay operational.
Check on health and wellness of key customers, suppliers, investors and
stakeholders with compassion and empathy

- Be ready to help: A little care will go a long way. Ensure help is provided outside
of normal circumstances to any customer or employee requesting it. The objective
is to come out of this crisis with everything intact and a sense of strong leadership
that does not hide, fear or bend in storms

- Stay organized: Things change. Stay organized and abreast of all that is
happening internally, externally, with governing authorities and stakeholders

- Promote local: A lot of the local businesses have suffered in the crisis and are
nearing closure. Adopt a neighborhood perspective by giving business to vendors
locally or in the neighborhood to enable them to stay afloat and support a return
back to vibrancy

- Regular connect points: Maintain connect points with teams, other leaders,
executive management by ensuring a constant communication cycle through
video calls and other collaboration channels

- Be responsive: respond quickly to requests for help and issues. A quick response
can save your organization in these times of uncertainty


- Stay alert: Stay watchful on your team, on the floor, internally and externally for
any issues, abnormalities, events and triggers to avoid a cascade

- Be resilient: Talk to your teams about resiliency. A resilient organizational culture
will enable you to display confidence to your employees, customers and suppliers.
The long term vision and the strength in the brand and its people and will lead to
long term gains during and after recovery

- Watch out for emerging leaders: In times of crisis, some of the old leaders will
devolve to advisory positions, while there will be new leadership that will arise
from the ranks. Can do, mentally strong and unafraid to get their hands dirty.
Watch out for this opportunity

Considerations

- The key imperative to running a smooth organization that gracefully recovers from
a crisis is the resiliency of leadership. Planning for the knowns and being prepared
for the unknowns will be the key approach

- The art of the survival, staying nimble and flexible is the key approach to ensuring
a normal functioning

- Be ready for the new normal, The world has changed forever and rebuilding of
markets, business, job, supplier and customer segments will be needed

- Remember there are no sacred cows anymore when a lot of businesses are
looking down the cliff

Watch out for

- Mental health and wellness: will become a critical factor in ensuring productivity
of an organization

- Change perspective: from business-centric to people-centric. A more humane
approach with the confidence of resiliency and a can do, problem solving attitude
will go a long way to ensure recoverability

- Choose wisely: from the doers and the talkers. Both are important but being
ready to respond requires a closer identification of the doers. So identify your
strong doers and build dependability and trust.

- Trust people: to band together and do the right thing when all of humanity is
under attack by an invisible enemy.

- Break silos: get teams to collaborate. A siloed culture will find it very difficult to
adjust to new normals and will result in chaos.

- Banish tribes: there are no tribes anymore. We are bound as one, under attack.

- A pre-test of the business continuity plan if the notifications for lockdowns
change immediately after reopen and regular testing is scheduled during reopen
to ensure that operations continue smoothly

- Ensure that BCP team, leadership responsibility and team/floor assignments
are clearly marked out



specifically built for crafted employee experiences with AI and automation.

HRIS: The who, where, when of people. Everything in one place and easily
accessible from mobile, chatbots, web browsers. Available 24x7 on the cloud

Tasks manager: To plan assign, store, follow through and get status and stay on
top of all actions, tasks, dependencies and follow-throughs needed

Surveys: for people, suppliers, customers, vendors, investors - survey pulse, get
feedback - enable decision support, show that you care for their opinions

Suggestions module: For collecting suggestions on closing gaps in your
operational plans

Announcements: For keeping teams, local offices and entire organizations,
updated. Notify people in one central place in an easy to use feed format. Step
away from emails and ad hoc communications. Save time, energy, bandwidth and
resources

ChatHum: collaborate instantaneously, with teams, functions, task forces, project
groups, PR and communications, legal and others

Goals: Change goals to enable success in the new normal. Use the goals module
to add, modify vision and strategy changes and drive the organization together to
work as a unit to achieve the goal of surviving through the crisis

OKRs: The rebuilding cycle would need elective support and interest-based
involvement. OKRs provide the ideal platform for people to take accountable
ownership of needs or responses to evolving circumstances and situations.


1-on-1’s: The more you meet people the better the sense of connection. Schedule
1-on-1’s for leaders, skip levels, key customers and other stakeholders.

Hire: Keep hiring going in this time of need to meet up short term demands with
peopleHums hiring model

Dashboards and analytics: Get insights, nudges, sentiments, quick broad view of
how your whole organization is responding to enable quality decisions grounded in
data and how people feel in the most important constituency of your business -
your people. Create a people experience for your organization in a crisis that
makes managing it simple.


Engati’s AI-powered conversational interface can be of immense help here.

Multichannel accessibility: Empower your workforce with a chatbot across 14
different channels - Website, Mobile app, Slack, MS Teams, Facebook Messenger,
Telegram, WhatsApp, Line, WeChat etc.

FAQs: Train the chatbot with FAQs and guides on multiple aspects of
organizational functioning. Build FAQs in multiple languages and equip every
employee with the right responses

Employee Information: Allow employees to lookup employee profile and contact
information as per the rules of the organization hierarchy

NLP: Leverage the power of NLP and allow your employees to ask questions with
regards to first response and emergency response in case of any contingency

Call Trees: Publish call trees for response and allow employees to look up the call
tree for the next course of action. Allow employees to interact with the response
team as per the call tree over live chat.

Service Requests: Build process flows within the chatbot to accept and respond
to service requests from an employee. Integrate the chatbot with a service


Ticket Logging: Allow teams across multiple functions to communicate and
collaborate on functional tasks by logging tickets and assigning them

Customer Support: Deploy a customer support chatbot across multiple channels
that can respond to incoming customer requests in multiple languages.

Remote Live Agents: Have customer service agents logged in remotely and
respond to customer queries via Live Chat.

Engage: Leverage the power of conversational intelligence to constantly engage
with your customers, partners, affiliates. Equip them with solutions that solve their
issues leveraging conversational intelligence.

Conversational Templates: Empower your customers and partners with ready to
use conversational templates across 150+ use cases.


ADJUSTING TO DAY 2 OF THE NEW NORMAL

Introduction

Performance management set earlier needs to be adjusted. Goals reset, OKRs redefined,
vision and policies reset, In this situation, the Standard operating manual of the whole
organization would need to be recalibrated to adjust to the new normal.

How we hire (if you have hiring plans), how we onboard, how we engage, how we set
goals and measure them is all going to change. How do you manage all of these in one
place?

The hiring imperative

- Clean up plans: Review hiring plans, ensure business continuity and take a
prudent view in hiring. Review backfill, business growth plans, funding and capital
available to ensure that the hiring plan fits the needs

- Think remote: With organizations still undergoing a metamorphosis and figuring
out the what, when, where and why of business, budgets, people and locations -
one safe assumption is that people will be remote in cycles. Ensure hiring plans
can be fulfilled with people being remote

- Think automation: Unavailability, absenteeism and sickness can derail your plans.
Automation can help. Set it up once and let it run based on rules. Technology
application will be useful here

- Be selective: A downturn causes mayhem; a forced lockdown in an already
worsening economic environment pushes the pedal faster towards the crash. The
talent market will grow sober, so be selective

- Accelerate to win: Organizations that take a long term view will grow stronger out
of the crisis based on the strength of their business model, or the viability of their
business and will look to power ahead. Consider whether you can accelerate to
win


- Focus on candidate experience: A sane and casual approach driven more by the
notion of long term thinking, confidence and resilience will give candidates the
imperative to choose to join you. Engage and leverage this

- Remote interviewing: Video interviewing technologies are prevalent and will
become de facto for screening and selection

Considerations

- Hiring will be key to grow out. Of course this is after the knee jerk reaction to
slashing costs has been completed and short term layoff cycles. Hire selective, the
talent wars might be cooling down since the brakes on all types of economic
growth has been so sudden

- Talent might be available at a reasonable cost since market opportunities will be
limited

- Businesses who survive and come out stronger, with long term vision, operating in
growth markets and with stability will attract the best talent

Watch out for

- Technology advancements to automate, liberate and maintain quality standards
while maintaining social distancing norms

- Talent brand building for attracting talent that is now really nervous

- Crafting an onboarding and a candidate engagement experience that stands out

- More decision support with social media pulls and mental health checkups will
become the norm



peopleHum HIRE: All you need to use the power of AI and automation to Hire the
right candidates. From resume parsing to automation in scheduling to integration
with talent sites and job portals and scoring, find it all in one place for you to track
your hiring funnel and effectiveness

No tedious reporting: all available on the platform to generate and print at the
click of a button

Nudges, insights and other decision support help to make hiring a breeze.


Hiring bot: Engage talent with a hiring bot that answers all their queries, 24x7.

Corporate FAQs: Use conversational intelligence for a bot to answer questions or
share information about the hiring process

Follow throughs and queries: Leverage conversational intelligence to automate
responses to follow throughs, application status updates, scheduling, changes,
notifications for hiring

Candidate engagement: Utilize the HR bot to engage with the employee prior to
the onboarding.

Employee assistant: Let the bot act as personal assistant to your employees,
helping them with answers to their queries, process lookups or team related
information within the first 30 days of joining the organization.

Extensible Integration: Integrate the HR chatbot with your Human Capital
Management systems to enable employees to manage their tasks with greater
efficiency.

The employee engagement imperative - The Huddle and the hustle

Employee engagement will morph to allow for more flexibility with a portion of the
workforce either in rotating shifts or permanently working from home. The imperative will
be to have a central place to communicate, collaborate, recreate, suggest, get feedback
and interact with one another, the social connect either through presence in the
workplace or remote will gain primacy. More important will be the frequent shifts of
expectations of lockdowns and waves to come if any.

While preparing for such waves of uncertainty and planning instability, it would make
sense to keep engagement digital and in the cloud as the least common denominator.
So, search for tech solutions and platforms that transform and are resilient.


- Three months back we would have been localized face to face in desks and
offices, but every organization on the planet now has some sense of remote

- Remote access WFH practices have now become the new default with
organizations scrambling to align to new reality and needs

- The de facto Digital connect is going to continue as organizations need to stay
closely engaged, communicating almost real time, to respond to any crisis or turn
in events.

- Think remote : With organizations still undergoing a metamorphosis and figuring
out the what, when, where and why of business, budgets, people and locations -
one safe assumption is that people will be remote in cycles. So leverage
technology to connect and engage

- The experience change: Organizations would need to work from being more
business centric to more people centric. Employee experience and a sense of
connectedness to the brand, teams, support functions and vision and strategy
would need to be provisioned for remotely. Consider an end to end engagement
platform like peopleHum for your engagement needs.

- Decision support: With distance ad-hoc communications get reduced to the
written word or when i can connect on video. While spoken word is more efficient
in close proximity, effectiveness goes down when it switches to video or written
hurriedly over exclusive collaboration or communications channels. In this regard
data accumulation and analysis to produce feedback, nudges and insights gain all
the more criticality. A platform like peopleHum provides for capture, analyze,
interpret, nudge and insights.

- Pulse and engagement: Engagement surveys, pulse surveys at various levels of
the organization ensure you get the beat on what people are feeling. Specially
more important in a mixed mode or remote scenarios

- Communication, communication, communication: For a dispersed workforce in
uncertain times it will be essential to know what is going on and stay on top of
happenings even if it is a simple alls well kind of note. Over communicate, on
multiple channels. Keep notifications in a feed like format. Use collaboration and
chat channel and groups to stay in touch

- 1-on-1’s: The need for 1on1s for direct reportees, skip levels and catch ups has
never been more important than in lockdown, or part WFH environments

- Suggestions: Keep a close watch on suggestions from your employees. Each one
will go through a different experience trying to navigate lockdowns, childcare,
cooking, cleaning, essentials and work. Suggestions help craft a fair and balanced
employee centric policy to keep people engaged.

- Idea campaigns: When people are not in their comfort zones or are going through
new experiences, ideas come through. Open up your innovation cycle by putting
together ideation campaigns where your teams and organization can contribute
on

- Online games: People need breaks. They need the social connect and something
to take their mind off of the uncertainty or the work aspect of productivity. So
organize game sessions to catch up in a non-working environment with people.
You will realize that people associate the digital channel with most of their work

colleagues and will appreciate the notion of connecting with people who they
work with remotely day-in and day-out outside of work, task or delivery
expectations is refreshing to them

Considerations

- You will find people being more productive when connected from home since
work distractions are fewer

- Give them buffer time to walk around or run errands between meetings

- Care with connect and listening to them will become more important as you focus
on employee centricity

- Asking their opinions on issues and resolutions or changes will keep them
engaged. They will feel they have a voice and are not forgotten since they are not
in close proximity to walk over to leadership or attend meetings in person


Watch out for

- Access, the right tools, the platforms to keep everyone together

- Clear, concise, consistent and timely communications

- Grievances and addressing them remote could become a challenge

- The nature of trust if you impose strict monitoring or manage by objectives or
outcomes will determine how your workforce engages

- New ideas have a possibility to surface since everyone is living through a new
normal so watch out for the opportunity to do things differently


Ideas/Challenges: to collaborate and ideate on new solutions or innovations for
an organization

Gamification: Use the gamification concept in peopleHum to bring people
together for fun and engaging activities

Motivate people with Recognition: Recognize teams/ individuals to motivate
employees working from home for effective communication & faster SLAs to
boost business continuity while yielding high trust and productivity. This can help
avoid the drop in motivation levels during prolonged virtual work mode and keep
employees engaged.

The peopleHum dashboard: A gist of everything happening with respect to the
above



Empowerment: Empower managers and leaders to engage and manage their
teams through automated conversational intelligence.

Cross-functional Collaboration: Allow teams across multiple functions to
communicate and collaborate on functional tasks by logging tickets and assigning
them

Employee Requests: Build process flows within the chatbot to accept and respond
to service requests from an employee. Integrate the bot with a service

Streamlining tasks: Integrate the HR bot with your Human Capital Management
systems to allow employees to manage their daily tasks.

The performance measurement imperative

- Reset vision: Whether it is cutting back to survive in business, just living through
2020 or growing to come out stronger and better from the crisis will require you
to reset your vision

- Reset goals and objectives: Goals and objectives need to be reset to keep
market realities, operational constraints and commercial aspects

- Reassignments: Any medical or other contingency in a team could lead to a gap
that needs to be filled in with remote hiring or via an internal move to keep
operations going which will need reassignments.

- Set goals: It’s difficult enough to achieve business results when together in close
proximity, so the discipline of setting goals becomes important for operational
schematics. Reset goals to match the new vision and reality.

- Set 1-on-1s: If you do not have the practice of setting up 1-on-1s, this would be the
time to consider it since communicating and getting agreement on goals, setting
objectives, communicating and ensuring alignment across various levels in an
organization will be important. 1-on-1s are a very effective way to handle
assignments, follow throughs and status

- Delivery agility: Agile has the concept of morning start huddles. Consider it every
morning so that the whole team can be together and be in sync for what needs to
happen for the day

- OKRs: Allow you the ability of realigning goals, setting up objectives and a better
alignment with people's interests. Consider implementing them in your
organization as you are resetting business and people objectives.

Considerations

- A single platform that allows you to set up goals and OKRs to redirect the
organizational directions. Ascriptions of weights and measures to reach such
goals

- The resetting of the performance management process to ensure remote ability to
track, monitor and calibrate will become important

- 1-on-1s are key and essential to keep everyone aligned to the goals and key items
being delivered effectively despite the remote nature of work


Watch out for

- Effective setup of goals and OKRs and how they can get communicated to each
and every impacted employee

- The communications aspects on the change in goals, expectations and how they
are going to be measured for remote work

- Consideration and flexibility for individuals performance and constraints due to the
remote nature of work


Goals: Change goals to enable success in the new normal. Use the goals module
to add, modify vision and strategy changes and drive the organization together to
work as a unit to achieve the goal of surviving through the crisis

OKRs: The rebuilding cycle would need elective support and interest-based
involvement. OKRs provide the ideal platform for people to take accountable
ownership of needs or responses to evolving circumstances and situations.


1-on-1s: The more you meet people the better the sense of connection. Schedule
1-on-1’s for leaders, skip levels, key customers and other stakeholders.

No tedious reporting: all available on the platform to generate and print at the click
of a button

Nudges, insights and other decision support help to make performance a breeze.


Automate Performance Evaluation: Chatbots can automate objective performance
evaluation by pulling data from Performance Management Systems.

Automate Rewards and Recognition: If an employee performs above his/her
target, the bot can confirm this with the Performance Management System, send a
congratulatory message and mark the employee for a bonus.

Goals: Use the chatbot to communicate new goals to team members.


The technology imperative

Technology has been the enabler and saviour for countries that have come up in the
fight against the virus. It will continue to be the most important differentiator in
determining the winner in this continued war over the coming months and years, not only
for countries but even in the enterprise and corporate world. This is your time to invest
and build a tech ready organization for the future. The successful companies of the
future, at least for the next 10 years will be ones that have invested in their people and
focussed on automation.

There’s been a lot written about the future of work - could it be that a microscopic virus
along with technology solutions will force the world to move to the new future of work?

- Connectivity: Make it easy for people to connect to corporate networks. Ensure
that VPN inbound infrastructure has redundancy provisions, since it will become
the critical backbone of organizations operating remotely. Ensure you are ready
with connectivity for laptops, desktops, tablets, and mobile devices.

- Platform: Consider getting a cloud platform to get all aspects of the people cycle
in one integrated view to make it easier to engage, measure, hire and manage
your people cycle. Get real time information on collaboration and insights into
what people are doing, feeling, suggesting and circumstances performing under
to keep productivity going

- Move to cloud: Consider moving support systems, production platforms and
supply chains platforms to the cloud for ease of management, access and
providing continuous operations. You may have already experienced difficulties in
these last couple of months, if servers in the data center conked off, and you
needed your IT personnel to get there physically to fix it. Now’s the time to
accelerate the move to cloud

- Automation: The variability in the availability of human resources will push a lot of
organizations to explore automation technologies to keep processes working and
customers being served

- Conversation intelligence: Explore self service for customers to avoid the remote
call and chat support channels. A chatbot platform with built in live chat like Engati
can help with the conversational intelligence and automation needs for any
function that has aspects of self service that can be provided

- Continuous Online Training: If you haven’t already, ensure you are signed up
with the millions of online courses across online platforms like Udemy, Coursera,
Pluralsight, and many others and provide the opportunity to all employees to take
and learn online

- HR bot: Consider getting an HR bot from Engati and peopleHum for your
employees that provides for query based interface and comes integrated with
Slack, MS Teams or any collaboration software you use


- Collaboration tools: If there’s anything the last 2 months has taught the corporate
world, it’s the need for collaboration tools like MS Teams, Slack, and video
conferencing tools like Zoom, MS Teams, or Google Hangouts. Ensure you
continue investing in this and buy your future tools and platforms, such that they
integrate with these tools easily and effectively

- Usability: While everyone talks about usability of the software and tools, this is the
time to ensure that all technology you invest in is easy to learn, easy to use, and
focussed on the employee. Especially when it comes to legacy platforms like HR
systems, which are often forced upon the employee by the HR department, are
good avenues to potentially replace with new age and user friendly software

- Data and AI: As it came down to decision making even in the last couple of
months with regards to the virus, it was very clear that countries that had accurate
data, could make the right decisions. Hence, continue your investments in this
space of building out Data platforms across all functions of business. And, by
crunching this data, AI will prove to be a huge business enabler.

- Invest in Supply Chain and Optimization: The last 2 months have shown how
dependent the world was on China and a single threaded supply chain. Evaluate
your entire network, identify single points of failure, and move towards a more
balanced and future ready supply chain.

- Remote Troubleshooting: Ensure you have the tools required to troubleshoot
remotely when a C-level executive calls in with troubles of his or her device or
connecting to a network

- The Internet of Things: As you plan to open up your offices, the need to have
your smart sensors, smart bulbs, energy management systems along with facial

recognition to open up entry doors and many other technology solutions could be
important to look into

- Security: While continuing to invest in technology, growing access & connectivity
to all, ensure you do not forget the important aspect of security and privacy.

- Reduce costs: Reach out to service providers, bandwidth suppliers, hosting costs
and help the organization in reducing the operational costs.

Considerations

- Tech, digital and automation will soon become the backbone of every business.
With millions of touchpoints and interactions, automation is a sure shot enabler.

- A cloud first based approach will become the de facto way to run and manage
your business’ needs.

- Cost reduction and doing more for less will be the operational standard


- Virtual technologies be it collaboration, video conferencing, chatbots, people
management, supply chain platforms, ERP’s will be relooked at for ease of use
and management

- Tech fests will either no longer be in fashion or move online

- Data and AI will become critical and central in decision making

- Social will penetrate the organizations with people platforms providing a social
experience based approach to people management

Watch out for

- Cost escalations as technology budgets ramp up

- Security and privacy policies that need to be put in place as boundaries blur

- Contingency planning and BCP in the age of uncertainty

Conclusion

The road ahead is bumpy. The uncertainty - high. But an approach of resilience will see
any organization make it through stronger. Breed a culture of can do, will surmount and
will prevail.

Like death and taxes, there will be a second wave and a third. And when we conquer
there will be others. The world is now too closely connected and from discovery to
shutting down the world in 3 months is the pace of this attack from nature.

We have to evolve, we have to adapt. Right now we look like cavemen - bound by the
cave around us, but man was not born to live in a cave forever. Prevail we will.

The guide above hopefully gives you some guidelines to evolve. Thank you for
registering for our website. Our 2 platforms Engati and peopleHum are aligned for setting
up an end to end customer experience and employee experience respectively, to get a
one view ground up of your business cycle, whether it be onsite or remotely or part
mixed. It comes inbuilt with everything you need to manage a business function. Not
slivers that you try to connect and never succeed. Moreover being new age and built
ground up it comes inbuilt with AI and automation with accessibility through mobile apps
and through chatbots.

Give it a shot, they are the best priced, most open and robust award winning products on
the market.


Fight Against COVID - a multilingual chatbot by Engati

Also, Engati has built a multilingual chatbot - ‘Fight Against COVID’ available in English,
Arabic, Hindi, Italian and German. The COVID bot is a one-stop shop for everything on
COVID-19 and more on multiple channels - Web, Facebook, Telegram, WhatsApp. It also
includes the following:

- Risk Assessment Scanner

- Symptom Checker

- Latest news and statistics by region

- Videos and engagement on myths, precautions (as per WHO)

- Endearing WFH and collaborating with colleagues

- Assistance on mental wellbeing, engaging your kids, food recipes etc.,

Try it out here
https://app.engati.com/static/standalone/bot.html?bot_key=3f9fdc6781184e54

Get your own chatbot by using this template to create a new one here
https://botstore.app.engati.com/templates/viewTemplates/9ddcc6de-334c-4014-ab36-e8
2f032f8e83

Reach out to us at
Engati - contact@engati.com
peopleHum - connect@peoplehum.com

And we would love to walk you through what we can do for you.

In the meantime, if you find the content of this guide useful we would appreciate it if you
could share it on your social media handles, email it to your friends or associates or share
the URL with them to download.

Thank you for reading - stay safe and stay resilient!


Contact us
Engati peopleHum
contact@engati.com connect@peoplehum.com
www.engati.com www.peoplehum.com


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