By Devendra Chawla
Covid-19 crisis has brought in an unprecedented change across the global economy, with brands facing the new normal and struggling with status-quo to remain relevant and productive.
With global focus transforming from ‘business-as-usual’ to ‘leadership-in-crises’, globally brands have been pushed to re-strategise, re-align, re-think all together and spin into action with newer leadership principles. The new normal during this massive-shift needs an unflinching effort to drive ‘transformative yet humane leadership’, bringing the ‘power of people’ to drive change into the forefront.
In-the-midst of leading the change, as an essentials business, our ability to realise the ‘power of people’ has enabled us to pivot and evolve newer principles of leadership, transformative yet humane.
Embrace the new normal and communicate across the board
As an organisation which embraced the new normal, we had to ensure that we communicate across the board, across all functions to drive unified focus and ownership towards a single goal of serving essentials in this time of need. Transformative change requires every function to recreate and realign itself, solve consumers’ issues arising in such unprecedented times.
We established a central communication center for the seamless flow of information and continuous feedback. Our ability to be online 24/7, as each city became a different operation with different timing of operations and local challenges came to the fore. The ownership to serve millions of consumers with daily essentials was embraced not by few but a determined workforce, led by our front-liners who demonstrated un-daunting resolve to serve. For example, some of whom travelling miles to work on day1 of lockdown in absence of basic public transport facility till the next day as we arranged dedicated transport, just to ensure that our unflinching mission of serving the consumers and keeping our essentials stores plus online deliveries remains un-deterred. These times also emerged with un-heard and exemplary instances of people co-operation, collaboration and going beyond the normal to serve our consumers.
In the process, we recreated the Standard Operating Procedures for Staff to train and institutionalise procedures on safety and hygiene for shop floors and home deliveries, with mandatory use of sanitizers, use of masks, daily temperature checks and ensuring Social Distancing and Contactless Delivery norms.
Creating Eco-systems of partnerships
This became a test of adaptability and agility and re-invent the first principles to remain consumer-centric and challenge the business status quo.
We re-invented ourselves, pivoted to our ‘Store-as-a-platform’ strategy. With manpower limitations across the industry, we expanded our ecosystem with last-mile partnerships with Uber, Rapido, Zypp, Delhivery, among others. to pivot our stores into omnichannel hubs extending home delivery to millions of consumers. This was critical to ramp up online deliveries which went up multiples times than before and these partnerships could solve for the immediate surge in demand online.
The strategy was further boosted through close collaborations with major Food & FMCG players to solve reverse logistics, along-side our partnerships to record fleet turnaround times to bring in essentials.
Initiatives like digital hiring, collaborations with leading industry associations, training store and delivery staff on safety measures kept our staff attendance numbers growing consistently.
Crises is an opportunity – People harness it
Organisations are built-in crises, pivoted much earlier. The ability of organisations to pivot to newer and innovative consumer-centric solutions drastically determines their ability to lead the change. However, it’s the sheer ‘People-Capability’ & intensity of being passionately driven towards embracing the opportunity that determines the results of change.
Our ‘War Room’ capability enabled us to get all functions including business, human resources, supply chain, merchandising, sales and marketing on-boarded with intensive exercises to re-invent first principles and problem-solve for newer consumer-centric avenues. Every function acted as a ‘Essentials for consumer-first’ entity, to bring to fruition newer modes of serving consumers, solving manpower, reverse supply chain innovations, adaptive store operations & newer ways to digital consumer marketing.
Double down on Omni Channel
On consumer-centric models, we accepted the ‘New Normal’ for Omni-channel retail, making the physical & digital divide converge much faster than ever. Even here the ability of people and functions to act and think omnichannel has been unprecedented.
The store could double hat as a safe place to pick essentials for consumers with social distancing norms as well as start OOS (out of store) business responding to consumer needs through E-commerce App/ Phone delivery and Whats-App connect with our staff bringing the true community to connect to the fore.
Our ‘Out-of-Store’ business was further boosted with impetus from Digital Connect established through millions of consumers through Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Our store staff ability to activate neighbourhoods, societies and RWA’s through digital mediums for enabling multiple orders, consolidated and home deliveries, enabled the brand to rise to the occasion.
Leadership is action – Action drives Change – Change brings a new normal
Our people also learnt serving in such times means “Onboarding consumers for a lifetime”. In the end, it all boils down to responsible and empathy led leadership at all levels including front line heroes. Leading and setting exemplary standards of dedication, work commitment and openness to change gets driven at all levels when the mission is to serve in unprecedented times. The fact that “Leadership is not a position but leadership is action” came to fore where nothing is more satisfying than that acknowledgement from a smiling satisfied consumer, the transformative yet humane, empathetic leadership that drives us to serve every single moment, every single day, with every single delivery and every single consumer that we continue to serve.
The author is managing director, Spencer’s Retail and Nature’s Basket
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