Covid-19

Weathering the storm of a global pandemic

Businesses must act

While forecasters warn us of steep lockdown falls in the macroeconomic numbers, the key challenges for swift recovery are at the microeconomic level. Businesses have a vital role to play in the fight against Covid-19 by protecting their staff, maintaining supply chains and innovating to serve society’s urgent needs.

What did you do during the crisis?

Not all will survive, revive, or be recreated, especially amongst the hundreds of thousands of small companies and sole traders. And the wreckage of some industries (notably aviation) will have long-term consequences. But when the disease is eventually brought under control, the bosses of those that do will be asked: “What did you do during the crisis?” And the performance of those businesses will be rated on their answers to four questions:

How did you protect your workforce?
How did you look after your customers?
How did you innovate and redeploy people and assets to meet the country’s most critical needs?
How did you rethink your business strategies to emerge from the crisis fit for the future?

Quotes

When the virus is under control, we’ll remember and reward those firms, large and small, that we know did the right thing

Gus O'Donnell

Chairman

It is ironic how the best crisis response seems to be one which would have previously been unpalatable and would have had no backing pre-crisis…

Dave Foster

Director

Buying bigger baskets made sense if people were worried about not getting out of the house a lot, but in many cases panic buying went much further.

Tara Chapman

Manager

In numbers

25%

estimated fall in UK trade in 2020

90%

decrease in demand for air travel in Europe

50%

increase in fixed broadband traffic in Spain and Italy (Vodafone)

Team Thoughts

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Business update

Read our update to find out what we’re doing to keep things business as usual.

Find out more