Leveraging the Paycheck Protection Act – Team Based Process Re-engineering

In the next few weeks, companies with under 500 employees will start receiving payments from the Paycheck Protection Act and all companies will continue to make important decisions on how to structure themselves to deal with the current downturn and prepare themselves for the future (Here is one view of the future from Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari). The recovery will be very different in each industry with some coming back sooner than others. It is likely that the industries that service large gatherings (theme parks, sporting venues, airlines, hotels, conventions, etc.) will take much longer to recover than others.

Companies will continue to employ the minimum number of employees required to maintain operations at the appropriate level during an uneven recovery. That is the easy part of the decision. The tough part is developing answers to the following questions:

1. What about the rest of a company’s employees?
2. With employees sequestered for the near term, what will you have them do?

Every company has inefficiencies in their business processes and usually don’t have enough time or resources to improve them. Some of your employees, in teams, should work “on the business”. Through the utilization of improvement teams, consider fixing business processes that are broken or that could be more efficient.

The pandemic is causing a Significant Emotional Event (SEE) for everyone, both personally and professionally. SEE’s create a Change Management environment where people want to make and embrace change. It provides the ability for people to look forward and discuss the future of the company and the processes they are responsible for.

Teams of leaders and process owners can focus on re-engineering business processes through a technique called Value Stream Mapping. Group50 uses a virtual Value Stream Maps platform to identify waste, shadow systems and bottlenecks in business processes. We then work with the teams to identify short-medium-long term improvements for that process. The low hanging fruit we find generates most of the ROI and the solutions are inexpensive to implement. Companies should choose to do Value Stream Maps of the 7 Critical Business Processes that Companies Live or Die By. We use similar platforms for Cost Takeout, Restructuring, Strategy and other important planning and decision making activities. 

Making these processes more efficient will get you in better shape for when the economy comes back. Done virtually, you don’t have to worry about the health of your employees and your business will realize long term benefits.

Feel free to call me at (909) 949-9083 or drop me a line if you want to discuss how you can get some of your employees working on the business discuss tactics and strategies for the balance of 2020.

Best wishes to you, your family and your employees.

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