In a nutshell, organizational behavior is the study of how human behavior affects an organization. Organizational behavior aims to learn how an organization operates through the behaviors of its members. Instead of taking a strictly numerical approach to determine an organization’s operations, it takes a more psychological approach. By understanding people, you can better understand an organization.
Organizational behavior is intended to explain behavior and make behavioral predictions based on observations. If you can understand behaviors, you can better understand how an organization works. In addition, organizational behavior studies how an organization can affect behavior. So, if you think about it, behavior affects an organization and an organization affects behavior. Let that sink in for a second—it’s all connected! They each affect the other, creating a never ending loop between the two. Therefore, in order to have a healthy and successful organization, it is extremely important to understand the ins and outs of organizational behavior!
Evolution of Organizational Behavior
The academic study of organizational behavior can be dated back to Taylor’s scientific theory as we discussed earlier in this module. However, certain components of organizational behavior can date back even further. In this section we will discuss how organizational behavior developed into a field of its own.
Looking back thousands of years we can find components of organizational behavior. Famous philosophers like Plato and Aristotle discussed key components of today’s organizations including the importance of leadership and clear communication. While these seem like very basic and broad concepts today, at the time they were innovative ideas and helped to lay the foundation for organizational behavior.
If organizational behavior were a simple topic, this course would be short and sweet. We could simply say that organizational behavior is how people and groups act within an organization. But it’s not so simple!
When organizational behavior grew into an academic study with the rise of the Industrial Revolution, it began to complicate what could appear to be simple topics. People began asking a lot of questions and started critiquing how organizations operated. Like many academic ventures, people began to deep dive into how behavior plays a role in organizations and why changes in behavior alter the way organizations operate. Along the way, organizational behavior has grown to incorporate components of management, psychology, leadership, personality traits, motivation, etc.
Organizational behavior has grown into its own niche within a wide variety of other genres. This is exciting because it allows us to really investigate each and every aspect of behavior within an organization! Today, organizational behavior is recognized as an essential component of an organization. Scholars and businesses alike recognize its importance and continue to help it adapt to current issues and new findings.
One of the great things about organizational behavior is that it is constantly changing. The rest of this module will discuss contemporary issues in organizational behavior and how organizations are adapting to and learning from these challenges.
McClelland has identified three basic motivating needs, Viz. Need for Power, Need for Affiliation and Need for Achievement and, along with his associates performed a considerable research work on these basic needs.
Definition: McClelland’s Needs Theory was proposed by a psychologist David McClelland, who believed that the specific needs of the individual are acquired over a period of time and gets molded with one’s experience of the life. McClelland’s Needs Theory is sometimes referred to as Three Need theory or Learned Needs Theory.
Need for Power (n-pow): What is Power? Power is the ability to induce or influence the behavior of others. The people with high power needs seek high-level positions in the organization, so as to exercise influence and control over others. Generally, they are outspoken, forceful, demanding, practical/realistic-not sentimental, and like to get involved in the conversations.
Need for Affiliation (n-affil): People with high need for affiliation derives pleasure from being loved by all and tend to avoid the pain of being rejected. Since, the human beings are social animals, they like to interact and be with others where they feel, people accept them. Thus, people with these needs like to maintain the pleasant social relationships, enjoy the sense of intimacy and like to help and console others at the time of trouble.
Need for Achievement (n-ach): McClelland found that some people have an intense desire to achieve. He has identified the following characteristics of high achievers:
High achievers take the moderate risks, i.e. a calculated risk while performing the activities in the management context. This is opposite to the belief that high achievers take high risk.
High achievers seek to obtain the immediate feedback for the work done by them, so as to know their progress towards the goal.
Once the goal is set, the high achiever puts himself completely into the job, until it gets completed successfully. He will not be satisfied until he has given his 100% in the task assigned to him.
A person with a high need for achievement accomplishes the task that is intrinsically satisfying and is not necessarily accompanied by the material rewards. Though he wants to earn money, but satisfaction in the accomplishment of work itself gives him more pleasure than merely the cash reward.
Hence, McClelland’s Needs Theory posits that the person’s level of effectiveness and motivation is greatly influenced by these three basic needs.
Although subtle, there are differences between groups and teams. These are typically the reason the group or team was assembled and the goal they are trying to obtain.
Groups Versus Teams
The words ‘group’ and ‘team’ are, for the most part, interchangeable – at least most people use them that way. But there are distinct differences between groups and teams. For example, we have a football team, not a football group – or we have a special interest group, not a special interest team. While the differences are subtle, they are indeed different, and we need to understand what those differences are.
The main difference is that a team’s strength or focus depends on the commonality of their purpose and how the individuals are connected to one another. On the other hand, a group can come from having a large number of people or a cohesive willingness to carry out a focused action – political reform, for example.
While these differences might be subtle, we have to understand that a group is a number of individuals forming a unit for a reason or cause, and a team is a collection of accomplished people coming together for a common goal that needs completion. The subtleness of these differences are more pronounced when we take these words a step further and look at a work group and work team.
Work Groups and Work Teams
In the business world, we have work groups and work teams. A work team has members who work interdependently on a specific, common goal to produce an end result for their business. A work group is two or more individuals who are interdependent in their accomplishments and may or may not work in the same department. Once again, the differences are subtle, but the main thread is a team works together and shares in the outcome, while a group is more independent of each other.
Additional aspects of work groups and teams are:
Work Team
Work Group
The leader acts as a facilitator.
The leader dominates and controls the group.
The members have active participation in the discussions and eventual outcome.
The leader is apparent and will conduct the meeting.
The team members decide on the disbursements of work assignments.
The leader usually assigns work to the members.
So, as we can see, a work team is much more formal, with a focused goal and objective, while also having its members take a participative role in how the work team functions. On the other end of the scale, we have work groups who work more independently of each other and usually have one leader directing work flow.
Beijing has steadily become Tehran’s economic ventilator, diplomatic prop, and military enabler, and the Iranians need this backstop now more than ever.
When the coronavirus spun out of control in Wuhan this January, Iran ignored the example of many other countries and continued to maintain direct flights and open borders with China. Even after President Hassan Rouhani’s government suspended all such flights on January 31, Mahan Air—a company affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—kept flying between Tehran and four first-tier Chinese cities, leading many to allege that the airline was instrumental in introducing or at least exacerbating Iran’s raging epidemic.
Whatever the truth behind these allegations, Mahan’s policy is symptomatic of a larger geopolitical reality: Tehran has become profoundly, disproportionately, and perhaps irretrievably dependent on Beijing, despite its own revolutionary opposition to reliance on foreign powers. Where diplomatic and economic sanctions have fallen short, the pandemic has succeeded in isolating the Islamic Republic like never before, compelling it to keep its borders to China open.
COVID-19 has also dispelled the notion that Iran’s heavily-sanctioned “resistance economy” still suffices to keep the country solvent. The government has conceded that staying afloat would be impossible if it curtailed cross-border trade, shut down industries, and quarantined entire cities. The crisis is so severe that Iran’s Central Bank has for the first time in decades requested billions of U.S. dollars in assistance from the IMF.
Indeed, according to Deputy Health Minister Reza Malekzadeh, whenever his colleagues questioned why China flights continue, bilateral economic relations were among the reasons given. Two days after the government’s ban on such flights, Chinese ambassador Chang Hua tweeted that Mahan CEO Hamid Arabnejad wanted to continue cooperating with Beijing. Neither man specified exactly what this meant, but the implied message to Tehran was clear given China’s resentment of travel bans. Meanwhile, the Iranian Students News Agency, Tabnak, and other domestic media criticized Mahan for prioritizing profit margins over public health.
ECONOMIC VENTILATOR Since the Trump administration pulled out of the 2015 nuclear agreement and reinstated unilateral sanctions, Iranian trade has declined precipitously all around, including with the EU and major partners such as China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey. In 2019, Iran-China trade fell by over 34 percent to $23 billion compared to 2018, according to Chinese customs data. In addition, U.S. sanctions bedeviled currency transactions to the point where Iranian exports were disrupted in late 2018.
On the energy front, Beijing continues to load Iranian crude despite U.S. sanctions threats, justifying this as back payment for prior assistance in developing Iran’s Yadavaran and Azadegan fields. Yet its overall crude imports from Iran dropped from more than 3 million tons in April 2019 to under 600,000 by November. At the same time, geopolitical uncertainty has shaken Beijing’s upstream energy investments in Iran—late last year, the China National Petroleum Corporation pulled the plug on a $5 billion contract to develop Phase 11 of the South Pars natural gas field, leaving it to the domestic firm Petropars.
Despite this turbulence, however, and despite China’s near-term inability to offset Iran’s freefalling trade with European parties to the nuclear agreement, Beijing remains Tehran’s single most important trade partner and oil client by far. According to Kpler, an intelligence company that tracks commodity movements, China also remained Iran’s sole liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) client as of December. Other indicators tell the same story. During the fiscal year 2018/19, the renminbi was second among all subsidized currencies that the Iranian Central Bank allocated for importers (the euro was first). And cheap Chinese goods have cornered Iranian markets in recent years due to sanctions-induced barter trade, palliating if not gratifying domestic consumer needs.
Tehran likewise places a premium on its part within China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Last September, Beijing announced plans to invest $400 billion in Iran’s energy, petrochemical, transport, and manufacturing infrastructure over the next quarter-century. The news came at a time when foreign direct investment in Iran had dipped to such lows that Petroleum Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh subsequently set his sights on domestic funding instead. Among the few infrastructure projects still managed by foreign firms is the Tehran-Qom-Isfahan high-speed railway constructed by China Railway Group Limited and financed by Chinese credit. In contrast, Russian Railways announced its withdrawal from the Garmsar-Inche Borun rail electrification project last month under U.S. sanctions pressure. Each of these developments underlines the fact that Tehran needs Chinese financial resources and expertise far more than China needs to invest or supply them.
Notably, the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force reinstated Iran on its blacklist in February for not ratifying conventions on terrorist financing and money laundering. Such decisions will further complicate Tehran’s ability to legally conduct financial transactions with FATF member states, including China and Russia. Central Bank governor Abdolnaser Hemmati expressed concerns about this scenario; likewise, parliamentarian Shehabeddin Bimeqdar has described how Moscow previously informed Tehran that it would not be able to continue economic cooperation if the FATF blacklisted Iran. Annual trade with Russia hovers around a mere $2 billion, however; Tehran is far more concerned about a response from China, which so far has been mum.
DIPLOMATIC PROP Beijing remains one of Iran’s two major power patrons, especially at the UN Security Council, but is seen as less unreliable than Moscow. Both powers openly oppose Washington’s reinstated sanctions on Tehran, particularly in view of the current pandemic; they have also criticized Britain, France, and Germany (the E3) for invoking the nuclear agreement’s dispute resolution mechanism after Iran removed all remaining restrictions on its uranium enrichment program.
If Tehran violates further nuclear limits (e.g., by resuming enrichment to 20 percent fissile purity), the E3 is expected to unfreeze the deadlines for ultimately referring it to the Security Council. In that event, China’s role, alongside Russia’s, could be critical—the nuclear agreement is structured in such a way that a single veto suffices for international sanctions to snap back, yet it also ambiguously calls for a final, negotiated outcome.
Beijing’s diplomatic influence is likewise evident in Iran’s handling of the pandemic. As the crisis grew, Tehran reportedly instructed Mahan Air to dispatch humanitarian assistance to China. And in lockstep with Chinese government-affiliated media outlets, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards have gone so far as to accuse the United States of waging biological warfare on both Iran and China. At the same time, domestic health officials have linked the disease’s appearance in Qom—the beating heart of Iranian Shia Islam—with the presence of Chinese workers and seminary students; Deputy Health Minister Alireza Raisi even asserted that there is an epidemiologically proven link between Chinese nationals and the pathogen. In the end, however, Mahan’s ongoing direct flights with the People’s Republic (which may or may not be for emergency purposes) could indicate Tehran’s need to placate Beijing at all costs.
MILITARY ENABLER After a series of bilateral naval maneuvers that began in 2014, Tehran held unprecedented trilateral drills last December with China and Russia. These exercises may have been Beijing’s way of dissuading the United States from attacking Iran at a time of high tensions or otherwise destabilizing trade in the oil-rich region; if so, Tehran likely saw the move as further proof that it was not so isolated.
More broadly, Beijing has been a major arms conduit to Iran for nearly forty years, even briefly eclipsing Russia in sales between 2008 and 2012, when Moscow’s reset with the Obama administration accompanied a deterioration in relations with Tehran. China has contributed significantly to Iran’s missile development, showing more willingness to share crucial defense technology than Western or even Russian suppliers. Many of Iran’s short-range missiles and artillery rockets are based on Chinese models, while its longer-range ballistic missiles have benefited from Chinese upgrades. This February, the United States sanctioned three Chinese firms and one individual for allegedly assisting Iran’s missile program. Beijing was likewise Iran’s leading partner for nuclear technology up until 1997, helping it establish key elements of its current civilian program.
INDISPENSABLE CHINA Iranian leaders have repeatedly called for comprehensive and strategic relations with China, a compliment Beijing has returned in principle. Yet Chinese leaders have been more circumspect toward Iran’s calls for an anti-American bloc and its requests for full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, an organization often viewed as fulfilling that same purpose.
Domestically, Iran faces swelling challenges related to regime legitimacy, socioeconomic instability, violent unrest, the coronavirus, and other problems. Externally, it must deal with a backbreaking battery of economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and military tensions—and China is the only state that is willing and able to help with all three. In the midst of a pandemic, Tehran needs that backstop now more than ever.
Kevjn Lim is a PhD researcher at the School of Political Science, Government, and International Affairs at Tel Aviv University, and a Middle East and North Africa contributor for IHS Markit.
Research to date on leader behaviors such as justice rule adherence, abusive supervision, and ethical leadership has found a clear linkage between such behaviors and employees’ work attitudes and performance. Historically and surprisingly, an understanding of what initiates these impactful leader behaviors is much more limited and only recently have scholars begun to examine their antecedents. Thus, the goal of our integrative review is to advance cumulative knowledge of why leaders are fair, ethical, or non-abusive—which we refer to collectively as principled leader behaviors. Our review is structured around a framework of four theoretical lenses that elucidate what initiates and perpetuates such behaviors: interpersonal motives, focused on relational explanations; instrumental motives, centered on these behaviors as a means to some end goal; moral motives, which characterize these leader behaviors as an end in themselves; and self-regulation and disposition, focused on leaders’ automatic inclinations and capacity to enact these behaviors. We not only synthesize previously fragmented findings of what shapes principled leader behaviors, but also highlight areas of overlap and distinction across them. Extending our framework, we highlight the interplay of lenses and critical research avenues to better understand why leaders treat followers in beneficial and not harmful ways.
In light of what is happening globally as a result of the Coronavirus Pandemic, the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management will host a webinar on leadership in times of crisis. Panelists who have published widely on the topic of leadership in times of crisis will share their opinions on how to lead in times of crisis, which leadership approaches are most effective in times of crisis, how leaders might support team members in times of crisis and how leaders should lead virtually in times of a crisis.
Host:
Alex Newman, Chair, OB Division Global Committee, Deakin University, Australia. Panelists:
Michelle Bligh, Claremont Graduate University, USA David Carrington, Aston University, UK William Gardner, Texas Tech University, USA Stefanie Johnson, University of Colorado Boulder, USA Kevin Lowe, Sydney University, Australia Ethlyn Williams, Florida Atlantic University, USA
The COVID-19 pandemic presents a serious threat to people, businesses and economies across the world. Gartner’s recent Business Continuity Survey shows just 12 percent of organizations are highly prepared for the impact of coronavirus. Smart leaders must focus on how they can best protect their people, serve their customers and stabilize business continuity.
During times of crisis, business operations—the intelligence engine of an organization—are more important than ever. Business continuity and disaster recovery plans are being tested by rapidly evolving challenges, such as travel restrictions, and as large-scale remote working becomes a reality.
Just 12%
of organizations are highly prepared for the impact of coronavirus, according to Gartner’s recent Business Continuity Survey.
32%
of senior executives rarely update their operating model, according to initial data from an ongoing Intelligent Operations survey by Accenture and Oxford Economics.
Act now
Organizations must respond rapidly and robustly to maintain business continuity. Accenture recommends the following:
PREVENT: What to do now
Take immediate steps to ensure the safety and well-being of employees. Prioritize actions that put your people first and exploit the capabilities that global business services offer:
Enable people to work and connect with colleagues from diverse and secure locations and create safe working environments through regular sanitization.
De-densify workspaces, curb large meetings and ensure that protocols are followed in canteens, elevators and areas of common use. Limit all non-essential business travel and client visits and align with local health and safety guidelines.
PREPARE: What to do next
Identify priority processes and establish a command center. Take actions to meet the needs of your key stakeholders:
Identify priorities and critical processes, including functions such as employee payroll, healthcare and supply chain (to keep goods moving and services ongoing); also, highly important processes and other services such as payments, and necessary services in healthcare, insurance and banking.
Establish a command center for a virtual workforce to measure quality, productivity, compliance, insights and intelligence, people engagement and workforce well-being.
PREDICT: What to do for the longer term
Be proactive and create a customer-oriented plan that is sustainable. Prioritize actions that help you pre-empt the impact of volatility:
Bring together highly skilled, distributed teams that can log in anytime, anywhere and deliver on customer commitments at scale.
Build a broader ecosystem around the organization’s workforce to enable collaboration across a broader set of priorities—including healthcare and childcare. This will lead to improved morale and engagement levels resulting in better business outcomes.
Remember, empathetic leadership and communications are two key areas that aid human resilience in difficult times.
Where next?
Here are five ways to help your organization achieve intelligent, resilient operations:
1. Establish a resilient culture
Organizations should continue to execute work in a collaborative manner—with critical knowledge workers augmented by digital capabilities.
2. Create broader ecosystems based on social collaboration
Move beyond employee workspaces to broader ecosystems that employees can access, such as healthcare or childcare.
3. Employ agile, elastic workplace models
The best combination of working from home and the office, depending on the nature and type of work and relevant skills required, can be enabled by technology, data, security and cloud computing.
4. Build a human+machine workforce
Make transactional processes more digital and focus on value-led, proactive operations driven by data and analytics to reduce stress on operations.
5. Adopt a distributed global services model
Use a mixture of service models to de-risk the organization in a volatile world. Distributed global services mean that high performance can be delivered anytime, anywhere.
As governments make significant interventions in response to the coronavirus, businesses are rapidly adjusting to the changing needs of their people, their customers and suppliers, while navigating the financial and operational challenges.
With every industry, function and geography affected, the amount of potential change to think through can be daunting.
Systems resilience in times of unprecedented disruption:
In the unfolding COVID-19 crisis, systems resilience is being tested like never before. IT and business leaders must ensure that their organizations can continue to operate through this unprecedented disruption by quickly addressing the stability of critical business processes and underlying systems.
Systems resilience describes a system’s ability to operate during a major disruption or crisis, with minimal impact on critical business and operational processes. This means preventing outages, mitigating their impact, or recovering from them. Our definition of systems includes applications, architecture, data, cloud, infrastructure and network.
The immediate challenge: Operating in a new reality Companies are operating under a new reality that puts great strain on their systems.
Business continuity risks including supply chain disruptions, shifts in customer touchpoints, unavailability of critical resources, and gaps in business continuity protocols.
Surges in transaction volumes (for example, because of a shift from physical to digital purchasing) or precipitous declines in demand.
Monitoring, reporting, and decision-making with real-time data to respond to immediate business needs in a dynamic environment.
Workforce productivity challenges due to employees working remotely, associated with connectivity and security.
Security risks including countering bad actors who will inevitably seek to take advantage of individuals and organizations.
Most companies face a significant gap Based on our research, most companies are already starting with a significant gap in systems resilience. In 2019, Accenture conducted a vast survey of 8,300 companies that revealed only a small minority have cracked the code on systems resilience.
Only the top 10% of 8,300 companies surveyed have cracked the code on systems resilience.
For the rest, the gap has become more acute. Now is the time to take action to address systems resilience issues today and lay a foundation for the future. The leaders today and those who act quickly to address the immediate challenge will successfully navigate the crisis and emerge stronger.
Mobilize: Prepare to take swift action
CIOs and IT leaders play a central role in ensuring their organizations can continue to operate through disruption, by taking the following steps in the first 72-hours:
Establish a lean governance structure with representation from business and technology for dynamic prioritization and decision making. Create an empowered resilience response team that immediately mobilizes resources to focus on business continuity in critical areas. Proactively identify vulnerabilities and quick wins to address current challenges using toolkits such as the Accenture Systems Resilience Diagnostic.
Now: Apply the six building blocks of systems resilience
Accenture has identified six resilience building blocks that will enable a quick response to critical systems vulnerabilities.
Accelerate existing automation investments to mitigate the impact of systems disruption, free up human resource capacity and streamline IT workforce management.
Identify and prioritize bottleneck areas.
Implement automation to immediately resolve high-volume tasks by leveraging techniques like machine learning and AI models.
Augment that which cannot be completely automated with digital co-workers.
Optimize the deployment of human talent to focus on high touch activities.
New behaviors will transform the industry’s future
The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed the world as we know it. People are living differently, buying differently and in many ways, thinking differently. Supply chains have been tested. Retailers are closing doors. Consumers across the globe are looking at products and brands through a new lens.
The virus is reshaping the industry in real time, rapidly accelerating long-term underlying trends in the space of mere weeks. Our research indicates that new habits formed now will endure beyond this crisis, permanently changing what we value, how and where we shop, and how we live and work.
Even as this crisis continues to evolve, by exploring the changes that are happening now, we can consider what consumer goods businesses should do today to prepare for what’s next.
Getting to know the consumer in crisis
Consumers are deeply concerned about the impact of COVID-19, both from a health and economic perspective. People are responding in a variety of ways and have differing attitudes, behaviors and purchasing habits. People across the globe are afraid as they strive to adapt to a new normal. Fear is running high as individuals contemplate what this crisis means for them, but more significantly, what it means for their families and friends, and society at large.
Consumers are responding to the crisis in a variety of ways. Some feel anxious and worried, fueling panic-buying of staples and hygiene products. At the other extreme, some consumers remain indifferent to the pandemic and are continuing their business as usual, despite recommendations from government and health professionals. CPG companies will need to understand how their own consumers are reacting, and develop customized and personalized marketing strategies for each. The days of one-size-fits-all marketing are over.Consumers are more fearful of the economic impact of COVID-19 than for their health
Source: Accenture COVID-19 Consumer Research, conducted April 2–6. Proportion of consumers that agree or significantly agree.
New buying behaviors in this new normal
Why, what and how consumers buy is changing due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Consumer priorities have become centered on the most basic needs, sending demand for hygiene, cleaning and staples products soaring, while non-essential categories slump. The factors that influence brand decisions are also changing as a “buy local” trend accelerates. Digital commerce has also seen a boost as new consumers migrate online for grocery shopping – a rise that is likely to be sustained post-outbreak.
In times like these, our need for the basic necessities of life takes precedence. It comes as no surprise that personal health is the top priority for the consumers we surveyed, followed by the health of friends and family. Food and medical security, financial security and personal safety were other leading priorities.
New—and everlasting—shopping habits
The outbreak has pushed consumers out of their normal routines. Consumers are adapting new habits and behaviors that many anticipate will continue in the long term.
The virus has accelerated three long-term trends:
The ever-increasing focus on health
CPG brands should heed this change and make it a priority to support healthy lifestyles for consumers, shoppers and employees. Having a “health strategy” will be a strategic differentiator for the foreseeable future.
A rise in conscious consumption
Consumers are more mindful of what they’re buying. They are striving to limit food waste, shop more cost consciously and buy more sustainable options. Brands will need to make this a key part of their offer (e.g. by exploring new business models).
Growing love for local
The desire to shop local is reflected in both the products consumer buy (e.g. locally sourced, artisanal) and the way they shop (e.g. supporting community stores). CPG brands will need to explore ways to connect locally – be it through highlighting local provenance, customizing for local needs or engaging in locally relevant ways.
Consumers expect their shopping habits to change permanently
Source: Accenture COVID-19 Consumer Research, conducted March 19–25 and April 2–6
The social impact
The COVID-19 outbreak has slowed the pace and changed daily life for many consumers, and this is having a profound impact on the way we view personal hygiene, health and how we engage with our communities, friends and families. People are embracing technology more than ever to support all aspects and consequences of isolation. There is also positive evidence to suggest that this crisis will build communities, rather than separate them.
80%
of consumers feel more or as connected to their communities
88%
of consumers expect these connections to stay intact long after the virus is contained
The ways in which people spend their leisure time are changing because of the outbreak and related social distancing measures, and again, these habits are likely to be sustained. More than half (61%) plan to continue watching more news after the outbreak, while 55% will prioritize more time with family. Entertainment, learning and DIY have also seen a rise.
This trend is reflected in the types of apps that consumers are downloading, related to entertainment, news, healthcare and education. Underlying consumer needs (e.g. to connect, to be entertained, to learn, to be informed) remain the same, yet technology is changing the way it happens. CPG companies must increase their focus on digital vs. traditional tools to engage with consumers and improve experiences.
A new virtual workforce
People are working from home as businesses close doors and encourage remote work. Many employees who have not worked remotely before—or not often—plan to do so more frequently in the future. High percentages of employees feel they have the right environment and tools for remote work, but some miss social contact. Overall, employees feel their employers have taken the right steps to protect their health and keep them well informed.
Employees who now find themselves working from home are broadly positive about the experience. Unsurprisingly, those who worked from home previously are more likely than newcomers to feel they are more productive at home and feel they are more professionally satisfied than they are in the office . CPG companies that have a virtual working strategy will strengthen their employee value proposition and show that they are in-touch with their employee preferences.
46%
of people who never worked from home previously now plan to work from home more often in the future
Change in work-from-home frequency from pre- to post-outbreak
Source: Accenture COVID-19 Consumer Research, conducted April 2–6, N = 1,118 respondents working from home
Staying connected with consumers
COVID-19 is a health and economic crisis that has a sustainable impact on consumer attitudes, behaviors and purchasing habits. CPG companies can adapt to these changes by taking action to respond, reset and renew to be positioned even stronger for the future.
Respond
Stand up a cross-functional command center with KPI tracking
Create an Elastic Digital Workplace task force
Reshape your marketing plan around new demand and brand purpose
Reset
Redefine relationships with consumers, customers and employees and reimagine your organization and ways of working
Rethink and redefine relationships with ecosystem partners
Reconsider your product and service portfolio
Renew
Accelerate the move to an intelligent data-driven operating model
Reprioritize enterprise investment plans for post-COVID era
The Real World is Here 