A Year into the Pandemic: The Impact
Anindya Widita, B.A., M.A.
It has been a year since COVID-19 pandemic officially hit. Many lives changed. People changed. Organizations changed. Relationship changed. If we are to talk about its impacts, it can be pages long essay. However, let’s dive a little into how it has affected business and industry in general. We all know that all the health protocol and strict social distancing and mobility restriction or lockdown have forced businesses to hold its operations. Some managed to get by because of enough financial supports and resources, however, the rest are not so lucky.
In food and beverage industry, those trying to survive have to limit operations and provide only take-out or delivery service, in hope that they will still gain enough income. In hospitality and tourism, which have been greatly affected, many places closed down temporarily due to lockdown and number of visitors decreased drastically.
When discussing impact, certainly we cannot only talk about business operations since there are also people involved in it. There are concerns of the workers’ condition, not only financially but also mentally, which organizations also need to tackle in this tough time. Alonso, et al. (2020) highlighted how the pandemic created not only financial problem, but also health and wellbeing concern towards the workers. Organizations are faced with challenges in finding out the best strategy to navigate the pandemic for their survival as well as managing their own people, who are likely also struggling with uncertainty.
On the other side, it was observed that the pandemic has improved the business implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) through the way they have been showing awareness of the issue to the public, as well as the shift in consumers behavior (He & Harris, 2020). CSR certainly can help with organization’s branding effort. Especially in this period, to show that a company cares about the public’s health concern is an important matter. Many have shown their goodwill in providing health supplies from masks, hand sanitizers, and other essentials to communities. Some hotels allocated their facility to become accommodation place for medical worker (Deloitte, 2020) and provide catering service for hospitals (Diayudha, 2020). Nevertheless, smaller company or business cannot rely on such strategy since they need to survive and keep the business running by trying to find other ways to do that.
After a year of trial and error, organizations may have implemented various strategies dealing with the pandemic crisis. What needs to be highlighted is their crisis strategy to try to recover and adapt with this new era. The multiple creative strategies created during these times, from branding to a change in business model, were certainly made with the same objective in mind, a hope that it will help the business or organization performs better and retain the customers.
We are going to look at some of those examples in the next article, hopefully. In the meantime, make sure to stay safe and healthy.
References:
Alonso, A. D., Kok, S. K., Bressan, A., O’Shea, M., Sakellarios, N., Koresis, A., … & Santoni, L. J. (2020). COVID-19, aftermath, impacts, and hospitality firms: An international perspective. International journal of hospitality management, 91, 102654.
Deloitte. (2020). Impact of COVID-19 on the hospitality industry. Available at: https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/nl/Documents/consumer-business/deloitte-nl-consumer-hospitality-covid-19.pdf
Diayudha, L. (2020). Industri perhotelan di Indonesia Pada masa pandemi Covid-19: Analisis deskriptif. Journal FAME: Journal Food and Beverage, Product and Services, Accomodation Industry, Entertainment Services, 3(1).
He, H., & Harris, L. (2020). The impact of Covid-19 pandemic on corporate social responsibility and marketing philosophy. Journal of Business Research, 116, 176-182.