Rethinking Process Post Pandemic

As COVID-19 reshapes business, accelerating trends already in the works, at least one silver lining may be emerging.

by Mike Winkleman

As a turnaround specialist in the publishing industry, John French has frequently found himself scratching his head as his new reports explain to him that what he wanted done couldn’t be done because of processes that stood in the way. “Why do you do it that way?” he’d ask. “Because we always have,” they’d answer. And then he’d proceed to blow it up, break down the barriers, dismantle the teams, rethink the processes, and get the job done.

On many levels, throughout American business, the pandemic has done French’s job for him.  While such structural changes wrought by COVID-19 (but simmering below the surface long before the virus emerged) as streamlined workforces and decimated retail stores have received the most notice, another victim has clearly been process, at least the type of soul-deadening, innovation-sapping, playing-it-safe, inertia-prone process that has kept so many organizations from moving forward in the sorts of directions French has espoused throughout his career. 

Consider one Connectiv member for which the move to a remote workforce has finally provided an opportunity to push forward on initiatives that had languished for years. Pre-COVID, an executive at that company reports, solid, innovative ideas would be proposed at meetings, excuses would be made for why acting on these ideas was impossible, and someone would be assigned the task of evaluating the ideas’ potential. The next time the committee would meet, often months later, other priorities had intervened, no research had been undertaken, and the ideas, despite their merits, were shelved if not discarded.

But now it’s different. Faced with cancelled trade shows, the company has an urgent need to quickly identify and exploit new sources of revenue. Enabled by such tools as Slack, the company has not only streamlined its process for identifying and green-lighting innovative ideas, it’s also been able to reinforce accountability, encourage innovation, and remove the shields behind which many employees used to hide.  

Process as Protection

It’s those shields that French identifies as the primary enemies of progress. “The biggest supporters of too much process are fear and job protection,” he says. “It’s easier not to make waves, not to do anything bold.” So many of the companies with which he’s worked, he says, “are like battered families. People don’t know if they’ll have a job tomorrow. So, they figure, ‘I’m not going away from process. It’s what protects me.’”

That’s not to say there’s never a role for process. French notes that having the right process in place—provided it’s sensibly streamlined—is what makes it possible to put together a show or a magazine or a website. And French’s partner in the new consultancy French + Elliott, Jim Elliott, whose other company, James G. Elliott Company is a leading national ad sales rep and consulting firm, points out that process is also what guides small companies and startups as they move up the curve of creativity. The problem, he suggests, happens on the other side of the curve, when process becomes additive, even addictive, and works to slow down the creativity that moved the company forward to begin with. 

The Roots of Process

It’s critical, French and Elliott note, to look at the roots of the process as you’re looking to tear it out of the ground. Was there a logical reason for imposing it? Could the goals the company was hoping to achieve by creating it have been accomplished some other way? The notion of process, they say, isn’t bad on its face: it’s how and why it exists to begin with.  

French tells a story, for example, from his days running Cygnus Business Media, where he found that his salespeople were demoralized because of the amount of time it took to get reimbursed for expenses, largely because of a process through which their expense reports kept being bounced back to them every time there was a question, every time a receipt was missing. Instead of pounding the pavements looking for sales, the salespeople were spending what felt like an inordinate amount of time filing, refiling, and waiting to get paid back. When French asked the people in finance why this was happening, they explained this “is our process.” Pressed further, they complained that salespeople were sloppy and said the process was designed to teach them a lesson and get them to change their habits. Though French understood the issue, he saw another carrot-and-stick approach: Pay the salespeople when they first file their expenses but alert them to problems if they exist. If the problems are not rectified with the next report, deduct the amount in question from that payment. Assume innocence, he told them. The new limited, non-punitive process improved morale, improved bookkeeping, and, in the long run, because it also gave salespeople more time to focus on their primary responsibilities, improved sales. 

Swimming Naked 

For the past several years, French notes, many publishing companies have hidden behind processes and still succeeded, not because the processes ensured success, not because the companies were necessarily well run, but because, in a good economy, many otherwise undeserving companies benefited from “a rising tide that lifted all boats.” With the pandemic pulling the tide out, it’s easy to see, in the words of Warren Buffett, which companies have been “swimming naked.”

For those companies—and even those more appropriately attired—say French and Elliott, the answer may lay in a rethinking if not a scrapping of processes. French goes back to his eternal question: “Why?” Elliott notes that process, rather than being a shield, is a tool. “Bring it in when it’s valuable, when you really need it,” he says. “You don’t need process for the sake of process.”   

The Connectiv member that found a way toward innovative action once the pandemic had pushed the team out of conference rooms and onto Slack wasn’t abandoning process. His company did, in fact, institute a new but streamlined type of process through Slack as well as through a series of “Shark Tank”-style discussions of new ideas. But, as Elliott notes, they were using process as a tool. It wasn’t keeping them from moving forward; it was enabling them. 

There’s not much good that can be said for a pandemic that has wreaked such havoc on both lives and livelihoods. Many of the changes wrought throughout the business landscape have been painful if not devastating. But many were just an acceleration of trends already in the works. One of those may be the reinvention of process. And if that’s the case, say French and Elliott, that’s really a silver lining. 

Mike Winkleman is president and chief creative officer of Leverage Media, a B2B multi-channel content marketing firm based in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY. A former board member of AM&P and a former president of The Content Council, he writes and speaks frequently on topics related to sponsored content and native advertising.