Harvard Business School Professors: How COVID-19 is changing business practices

Harvard Business School professors recently spoke out on how the COVID-19 pandemic is changing how companies do business. E6 Solutions can help transform your company. We take a 360⁰ view into your operations and customers. With the right business intelligence (BI), we enable your company to adjust its operations for ever-changing conditions.

The best leaders will break out of silos and improve workplace culture

Companies with the strongest stakeholder and partner orientations are best able to survive and transcend crises, because they can plan together, gain local knowledge from each other, and draw on good will to get back to business quickly when the crisis abates.

Civic engagement and social responsibility can go from nice-to-have to essential. Encouraging the growth of local and regional suppliers through regional economic development and job training strategies enriches the local ecosystem. A pandemic makes clear that there is a business interest in contributing to solving problems, such as the adequacy of the public health system, disparities in access to health care, availability of emergency child care, universal broadband and Internet access, or educating people in life skills such as resiliency and adaptability as well as tech skills.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter (@RosabethKanter) is the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration

Businesses will help customers be more helpful

By identifying concrete ways in which customers can be helpful, providing clear instructions about what they can do, and designing transparency into why their partnership will make a positive difference for everyone involved, business leaders can improve interactions among their customers and employees, and help us all achieve better things together.

Ryan W. Buell (@ryan buell) is the Finnegan Family Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Technology and Operations Management Unit

Remote work will become strategic

How do we survive this time and even get something positive out of this? One of those positives could be the use of all these cool tools that we should be using anyway.

Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury (@prithwic) is the Lumry Family Associate Professor in the Technology and Operations Management Unit

Leadership will engage people to work together creatively

Depending on how long the current state lasts, we may see a shift away from static organizational structures toward dynamic team forms. This only works well under conditions of psychological safety, when leaders have made it crystal clear that every team member is welcome to speak up with ideas, concerns, and yes, bad news.

Amy C. Edmondson (@AmyCEdmondson) is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management

Employees and buildings will be healthier

Organizations will realize that indoor air quality—notably involving fresh air and filtration—directly impacts productivity of healthy people and helps mitigate the onset of sick people. As Dr. Joseph Allen of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and I argue in our forthcoming book, Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity, more money will be spent and should be spent on fans, filters, ductwork, chillers, heat exchangers, and dehumidifiers—and on the energy to run them.

John Macomber (@cleantechcities) is a senior lecturer of business administration in the Finance Unit