Simply Rebounding Isn’t Enough

The global pandemic has forced companies across the globe to adapt quickly to a massive threat to their businesses. But it has also served as a wakeup call to many executives, prompting them to take a closer look at climate change, health-care costs, competitive pressures, changing consumer needs and other challenges that could disrupt their operations in the future.

Take S&P Global Inc. When mandatory lockdowns kept S&P Global employees at home, the provider of credit ratings, benchmarks, data and analytics addressed the immediate need to transition nearly all of its roughly 23,000 employees to remote working. That included supplying 4,000 laptop computers to workers and rolling out enhanced benefits and wellness programming to help employees cope with the new way of working.

Amid those changes, S&P Global, a client of global professional services firm Aon, had the foresight to begin having larger conversations about the future of the company. The company is focused on innovation, its customers, talent development and business objectives through three workstreams: how the company serves customers; where the company’s employees work; and how the company’s employees collaborate and work together. Executives are considering process and operational changes to address everything from S&P Global’s real estate footprint to shifts in technology.

“It’s part of providing long-term solutions for the biggest threats the company faces,” says Dimitra Manis, S&P Global’s Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer. “We were able to make decisions quickly and flex, as an organization, during the pandemic. Now, we’re thinking of how we can continually flex in the long term so we can respond to our customers — and to changing business needs.”

S&P Global is an example of how the pandemic awakened a sense of urgency in long-term thinking among many executives who are now focusing on the range of risks they could face in the future. Executives aren’t simply looking to a return to business as usual after the pandemic; they aim to build for the future, not just recover what was lost in the past year. Indeed, a recent Aon survey of 800 C-suite and senior-level executives in the U.S. and EU found that 60% are reevaluating their strategy and operations so their company can be even stronger than before the pandemic.

“Everybody’s trying to adapt quickly to what’s happening with the pandemic,” says Eric Andersen, Aon’s President. “But the smart companies are planning for the future, too.”

Looking beyond the pandemic to prepare for the unexpected.

Many companies — both big and small — are shoring up their businesses by first assessing the risks, disruptions and threats that their operations could face in the future. Indeed, according to Aon’s survey, although we’re still in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, at least a third of big companies are preparing for other potential threats, including future pandemics, financial crises and disruptive technologies.

Planning for unknowns in the future is critical to operating a successful business, says John Bruno, Chief Operating Officer at Aon and CEO of the firm’s Data & Analytic Services unit.

“It’s not necessarily about the specific risk itself, it’s also about thinking through the ability to ensure that you’re managing volatility to the best extent possible,” he says. “The truth is the best-performing companies in the world manage risk better because they think through scenarios, they prepare for different types of variables. Then, when something happens, even if it’s not directly what they anticipated, they are able to respond faster.”

The planned combination of Aon and Willis Towers Watson will have a keen focus on addressing the pressing needs of companies during the pandemic – and beyond. As a combined firm, Aon will offer innovation through market knowledge, enhanced analytical capabilities and world-class talent. This will enable Aon to deliver new sources of value to clients to address their most intractable challenges, from underinsured long-tail risk to workforce resiliency.

Andersen, says that the combined company will be equipped with the tools to help firms better assess and prepare for potential disruptions, and threats that they may not even be aware of. That knowledge puts clients in a position to come out on the other side of disruptions in a better position than they were before.

“Companies have to reorient risk, their awareness of risk and how they prioritize resources to address things that have the possibility of damaging the business,” Andersen says. “Whether it’s looking at a pandemic, or cyberattacks or climate change, companies are reorienting the list of what can damage a business. That will be the long-term lesson — actually reevaluating the tail risk of things that you don’t think can happen every day, but you have to plan for. Many companies weren’t as prepared as they would’ve liked to have been with the pandemic.”

Develop a strategy to manage risks and jump-start future growth.

For S&P Global, the decision to rethink the company’s operations was a natural one as the events of 2020 unfolded. Despite the challenges of the year, Manis says the company has proven that it is able to successfully work remotely, deliver consistently for its clients and support its employees during the pandemic.

S&P Global rolled out many new initiatives to help employees during the pandemic. Among them, the company expanded its global care leave to six weeks, increased minimum sick leave to two weeks, extended its employee assistance program and began offering employees a technology subsidy as well as a well-being reimbursement for enhanced work-from-home support.

“We had to think about how we could operate and continue our business in ways that accelerated planning and work we’d been considering for some time,” Manis says. “It’s tested our agile methodologies and approach. We’ve proud of the ways we’ve been able to support our people, our customers and our community in an incredibly challenging time.”

Manis says the lessons learned while responding to the challenges at hand caused the company to reevaluate its longer-term strategy. The resulting changes, she says, are just the beginning of the initiatives the company is considering for future growth.

“We’re rethinking changes to our processes, to our real estate footprint, to the technology we use — all of those things,” Manis says. “We’re always going to have disruption. We’re always going to have change. We’re thinking about how we should approach the future.”