Process reengineering was a massive trend in the 1990s. By focusing on improving either cost, quality, or service, a company could gain benefits in all three categories. Today, the principles that underpin process reengineering can be applied anew, with safety as a core category to improve that will carry benefits across multiple other dimensions. By focusing on improving safety as companies begin to reopen—always while keeping the company’s purpose front and center—companies will gain benefits on four other dimensions. First, they can increase reach, by using virtual connections that attract customers who can’t be physically present. Second, they can create new customer experiences that consumers will want regardless of if they were created to overcome quarantine. Third, they can help re-invent the business as companies see new markets to serve through the lens of safety. Finally, they can improve costs.

At a time when companies are severely challenged, considering a safety reengineering effort may help create valuable new innovations, and revenue streams.

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has tested leaders, especially as it relates to how they lead their workers. As the crisis goes on, many that the author has spoken with have begun to frame it around three distinct phases: The Shelter-in-Place Phase, the Re-opening Business Phase, and the Post-COVID-19 Phase.
At the same time, having spent much of the first phase ensuring health and safety, attention is starting to focus on workers’ other, higher-level needs. Leaders are addressing their teams’ need for clarity and truth, helping them maintain authentic connections, and achieve growth and meaning in the context of social distancing.
By layering these two ideas over each other we’re beginning to see how the best companies are rallying to lead their organizations out of the first phase, through the second, and eventually, through the third. Much of their efforts involve open and transparent communication, mobilizing to support front-line workers, and connecting the company’s purpose to personal meaning. Re-opening likewise will occur through careful planning but also by addressing more than how to safely re-open workspaces. Positive communication with furloughed employees will be especially crucial. Finally, in the post-COVID-19 world, the author hopes companies can see ways to avoid just cutting staff and operating as a smaller company. By engaging in connecting work to the purpose of the company, and not just its current business model–the best companies will find new opportunities emerging from the crisis and may avoid deeply cutting staff.

In these unprecedented times, corporate leaders are being put to the test. Many just last summer had signed the Business Roundtable Statement of Purpose that committed their companies to serving all stakeholders. The pandemic is the first test of these principles. The author is a former CEO of Best Buy, a company that signed the statement, and has spoken with many of those CEOs over the past week. While acknowledging much uncertainty remains, he is largely encouraged by their responses to the crisis as companies look out for employees, customers, suppliers and most importantly, the communities they serve. The author implores those leaders to continue the charge, and asks others to join the fight.