Today's constantly changing and developing world creates great changes and uncertainties for the business world as well. In this environment, the way to have a sustainable competitive advantage in business life is to be prepared for crises and the changes they bring. However, the "Covid-19" pandemic the world is currently facing was not a foreseeable crisis, and it has left businesses and society in the very middle of a depression — even chaos. To manage this chaos and the stress it creates, businesses need to put forward a sustainable management approach.

Crises are situations that threaten a business's reputation and even its ability to survive. This great pandemic crisis constitutes an important threat to businesses. It is evident that this crisis has the capacity to cause damage primarily in areas such as workforce, operations, supply chain, finance and liquidity. Given its dimensions, the concept of "Holistic Crisis Management" should be addressed at senior-executive level in businesses, together with a crisis management team. What is essential in "Holistic Crisis Management" is to structure the fight so as to be able to intervene quickly, and to be able to define the strategies that will bring success.

To be prepared for rapidly changing situations and to carry out crisis management, companies should make their short-, medium- and long-term strategic plans and gain the ability to fight the crisis. Beyond the strategies made in normal times, quickly defining crisis-specific strategies is the fundamental criterion in the fight. Of course, these strategies should be determined through scenario planning, by forming a crisis management team. Crises have various effects on economic growth, commercial activity and individual behavior in businesses. Businesses need to develop the way they do business in order to minimize these effects and manage them with a focus on the future.

The success of crisis management depends on being combative and future-focused
It is essential for businesses to focus on the commercial operations, finance, workforce and communication that will affect the way they do business. To keep up with the changes the crisis brings and to get through the process with the least damage, they need to structure their own ways of doing business to suit the present and the future. For the sustainability of businesses, it is very important to communicate in a timely and effective way with all stakeholders — internal customers (employees), external customers and suppliers. Considering the great pandemic crisis we are in today, all of businesses' stakeholders, employees first among them, are experiencing different difficulties in terms of communication. In this crisis environment, businesses need to create action plans on cleaning, security, transportation, communication and many other matters, and set up the necessary guidance, in order to keep their employees and work environments safe. The most important point here is to reduce policies and procedures and prepare flexible and smart working environments within the company culture that are effective and allow remote working.

When perhaps the most important concepts in the pandemic crisis we are in are contactlessness and isolation, this has brought with it the move of working environments into homes, or the adoption of practices that maintain social distance in the workplace. Willingly or not, businesses have had to implement the transition to working from home partially, gradually or completely. In fact, even if we had not faced such a pandemic creating an extraordinary crisis, it would still have been quite important for businesses to diversify their working systems in the light of rapidly changing world conditions and developing information technologies.

It is exactly in these days that I would like to share with you the Future Office project, which we prepared and put into practice in 2009 together with an international business for the purpose of effective resource management. Although Future Office emerged with the aim of eliminating resource waste and reviewing the usage of work environments prepared with large investments (meeting rooms, waiting areas, desks, executive offices, etc.), it is a project that fully answers the new needs that have emerged today.

The key words of future office design are usage and necessity. It is therefore essential to conduct various analyses of businesses in terms of criteria such as sector and ways of doing business. Every business should first observe and be able to measure employee mobility, seasonally or periodically. For this, the design is done with a five-stage methodology: entry-exit analyses, mobility and work observations, surveys, unit-based job analyses, and labor-law assessments. There are three basic elements in the future office: the first element is spaces (offices, common areas, meeting rooms, interview rooms, archives, etc.), the second is tools (information technologies, mobile devices, software, etc.), and the third is methods (goals, key results, ways of doing business, workflows, processes, the performance system, organizational structure, the working system, management, etc.). Taking these elements into account, working systems are designed and put into practice to suit the sector, the job family, the unit, the employee situation and legal requirements. These working systems can be structured as head office, satellite office, home office and city offices. Businesses can put a few different working systems into practice, or apply them all together. They can also activate these working systems in different combinations in the light of plans for periods such as normal, crisis and chaos.

Future office practices can be applied in different combinations under the concepts of sector-based flexible working, flexible working in corporate shared units (finance, accounting, procurement, etc.), flexible office with limited home office or, as a fourth option, fully flexible office and home office. Bringing all these working systems and concepts to life depends on the characteristics of the businesses, the sectors they are in and their ways of doing business. This great pandemic we are facing has shown us that putting into practice the strategies to be created for crisis periods is only possible with the right working systems — and that these working systems must not be forgotten as the optimum solution in terms of resource management as well.

Author: Sait Sağlam