New business strategy key to growth

Business need to adopt strategies that will help to stir forward the multi-cultural diversity and talent pool.

Most businesses in the post-Covid era have responded to the new normal with aplomb, adopting work from home cultures and making the most of virtual offices.
What does this mean to HR managers? The challenge to get that right talent or retain those to drive the organisation forward as every sector under goes digital transformation and up skilling remains key to growth.
As most HR managers gear up to set up recovery measures to put their organisations back on track and propel them forward, industry stalwarts inform that laying off staff - no matter how easy and tempting - is certainly not a solution to balance economies of scale.
Dr Kiran S Nair, assistant professor of management, Abu Dhabi School of Management, said: "There's no denying the pressure on businesses resources post-Covid. However, it isn't insurmountable or one that cannot be calmed. First things first, UAE businesses have to determine their cost management objectives. In other words, they optimise their scarce resources to meet their needs. This may or may not involve cutting costs. One such way is eliminating redundancies and low-cost activities."

Businesses should make cost management an ongoing thing. Experience should teach them where to cut costs and reallocate spending (shift spending) where cuts will have the least negative impact on business value.
"The purpose of optimising cost and shift spending is to improve efficiency and productivity. By employing strategic enterprise wide approach to cost management, they can preserve funding for more critical projects that deliver impressive value," said Dr Nair.
 "In designing recovery setup, businesses should factor several possibilities like a second wave of the pandemic and a slow economy rebound. Businesses have to establish their priorities quickly to place them in the right shape to exploit the never-diminishing talent pool. Hence business need to adopt strategies that will help to stir forward the multi-cultural diversity and talent pool."
During the Covid-19 outbreak particularly it was very crucial to nurture well being of employees and hence it makes mandatory to boost the confidence among the workers.
Hyther Nizam, President MEA, Zoho Corp, said: "Any organisation is only as good as its best people and in any industry, fighting to retain the top talent is necessary for continued success. So, despite how overwhelming the road ahead may appear, it is particularly important for businesses to establish timely initiatives to engage the talent pool and boost workforce confidence."
Take the case of Dubai-based, Tradeling, a hyper-growing eMarketplace focused on business-to-business (B2B) transactions in Mena region, which was launched at a time when market confidence was at an all-time low. In fact, the platform was ready to hit the market with two verticals - food & beverage and office supplies. Both the sectors were severely hit following the pandemic. For Tradeling, it was a crucial moment: Delay the launch or realign priorities and business model? And the platform realigned their business and introduced a vertical - health & wellness that is relevant to the market realities of now.
"We capitalised on an opportunity at the right time, creating a digital marketplace for business buyers to trade in masks, gloves, sanitisers and protective equipment. In short, we did not panic and resort to inaction but remained tactical, saw the 'big picture' opportunity and executed our long-term vision," said Muhammad Chbib, chief executive officer of Tradeling.
"To highlight the confidence that we have in our business model and my own philosophy that laying off and restructuring businesses must be the very last resort for a business during any crisis we did not lay off a single person. Today, we have gone from 40 to a team of 70+, and we continue to hire. So, the key has been to build market confidence - and that meant taking decisive measures that supports all our stakeholders: Our investors, partners and customers." - sandhya@khaleejtimes.com

Sandhya D'Mello

sandhya@khaleejtimes.com