The global pandemic of coronavirus has forced most companies worldwide to adapt to the new reality by adopting new habits in their working environment. A substantial but temporary change is that workers and those working in the same place are “prohibited” from coming into physical contact with each other.
In some other cases where workers work in places with critical infrastructure of the company are first forced to disinfect, then dress in special uniforms and then enter the workplace. When they do complete their work, they should be thrown into the trash by consumable materials such as uniform, gloves, etc.
by Thanos S. Chonthrogiannis
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Work from a distance (teleworking)
However, these changes are temporary and when the vaccine for coronavirus is found, workers will stop and being brought back to normality. However, the biggest change that occurs with a permanent nature is the forced application of the use of work remotely, i.e. teleworking.
Photo by Phillips, Source: Phillips,
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Teleworking is nothing new appeared timid in the late 1990s and began to become increasingly used mainly by multinational companies through which their executives could work together in real-time when they were at different addresses around the world.
The main objective of teleworking was to reduce the operating costs of enterprises, naturally following other measures of this type such as the selection of smaller business premises, fewer jobs, a reduction in the number of movements etc. that, among other things, all these measures and changes in the working environment were also intended to reduce the overall environmental footprint of a business.
Due to the pandemic of coronavirus, thousands of companies operating mainly in the field of service are forced to adopt teleworking in a violent way. We should not forget that the degree of productivity in such forced changes in the working environment always falls short in relation to the degree of productivity they suffer when all employees had to be in the offices of the business.
However, this remote work (teleworking) cannot be adopted by companies active in the production sector where the presence of staff is extremely necessary for the achievement of the production objectives.
The fact that thousands of companies active in the services sector are being forced to adopt teleworking for their staff leads to a drastic increase in demand for portable PCs creating conditions for increasing their production and a drastic reduction in reserves in its retailers.
Revisions of Business Continuity Plans (BCPs) of the companies
In today’s times and amid the pandemic of coronavirus the most common measures taken by the companies themselves and businesses are regular microbiotas in workplaces, the placement of disinfectants and wipes respectively in offices and in jobs in general, the encouragement of those who do not feel good not to come to the office but to remain in house arrest.
The executives and employees of companies coming from abroad should remain in preventive quarantine for at least 14 days. Of course, all these preventive measures are implemented by the general guidelines given by each state apparatus and do not necessarily require the existence of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) by businesses.
The Business Continuity Plans is the process of creating systems of prevention and recovery to deal with potential threats to a company. In addition to prevention, the aim is to enable ongoing operations before and during the execution of disaster recovery.
Based on the above definition, in the BCP should be included any event-threat that could negatively impact operations such as supply chain, interruption, loss of or damage to critical infrastructure (major machinery or computing/network resource etc.). This type of threats includes epidemic, earthquake, fire, flood, cyber-attack, sabotage, Power, IT, Telecoms outage equally, Terrorism/Piracy, War/civil disorder, supplier failure, data corruption etc.
As such a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is a subset of risk management. A BCP outlines a range of disaster scenarios and the steps the business will take in any scenario to return to regular trade.
For the implementation of the company’s BCP, responsible is the crisis management team of the company that undertakes with the implementation of BCP the operational continuity of the company. The decisions of this group are obliged to apply all the employees and executives of the company without exception.
As a rule, Eurozone and US banks are required to have BCP. In addition, all large companies and multinational companies have BCP. It is commonplace that all the BCPs of the companies to date do not foresee situations of intense “siege” brought about by an epidemic globally. The up to date BCPs concerned events of disaster with short duration, such as fires, floods, earthquakes etc.
The pandemic of coronavirus is also unprecedented as an event and will likely last several months. Given these findings, the various existing BCPs are considered insufficient and should be reviewed day by day and hour by hour.
