It's never too late to get your business continuity plan in place: GlobalSignIn CEO Veemal

As restrictions on social interaction and business activities increase, companies are having to make more and greater adjustments to how they operate. But this can be problematic for smaller companies, which may not have the resources to implement measures such as alternative teams, and for companies whose operations simply cannot be carried out remotely.

People Matters asked tech expert Veemal Gungadin, the Singapore-based founder and CEO of international event tech company GlobalSignIn, what the situation is like for smaller companies and what they can do to ensure business continuity while maintaining health and safety restrictions. Here are some highlights of the conversation.

What would you say is the current situation for SMEs, as far as business continuity plans go?

The smaller you are as a company, the more reason you have to put some kind of BCP in place. Most SMEs with 10 or more people have already implemented some form of BCP. Even if they have not, it's still not too late to do so. We are looking at this situation going on until the end of the year, and there are even predictions that it might continue beyond that.

What are some things SMEs can do, especially the smaller ones that might not have the manpower for alternative teams?

For teams that are too small to split, the alternative is to have one or two people working remotely, the rest in the office, and perhaps they can switch around. The core of it is to avoid social contact. If the nature of your work allows you to be remote, do so. We've seen some small companies, design agencies and similar businesses whose work is computer-based, which have just completely stopped coming into the office.

If you absolutely have to come into the office, practice social distancing. Avoid sitting close to each other, avoid going out for lunch together.

Companies can also choose to convert their events into hybrid events, with a small core group of people who are physically present and a much larger group accessing the event content online.

And depending on the nature of the project, companies might also be able to hire short-term staff to replace someone who has been quarantined or is otherwise unable to work.

With the shift to remote working, how do you see it affecting productivity?

We are fundamentally people-oriented. Even though coming to office might have seemed like a chore, now that people have to work from home, they find themselves craving that human connection. And since they cannot get it in person, they are expressing it online.

What this means is that the online interactions we're seeing these days are becoming more engaging. For example, when lecturers take their lessons online, students ask more questions. In meetings, people who used to access the meeting remotely would take advantage of it to interact less, be less active, basically escape from the meeting. But not any more. Right now, people are being more engaged and making use of the online tools.

For our own events, we used to have to prepare seeded questions to boost the audience engagement. But now, even with a small audience of just a hundred people, the quality of engagement that we see is really improving.

What about those essential roles that absolutely have to be on-site?

That's where you have to bring in all the health and safety best practices. Have personal protective equipment, especially for roles in clinics, where the assumption is that you are going to have someone who is infected coming in.

Ensure that every visitor who comes in is registered and all the right information is captured, so that contact tracing will work. It's even possible to integrate the information capture system with SingPass (the online account management system used for accessing Singapore government e-services) to ensure the completeness and accuracy of information.

Information capture does come with some privacy and cybersecurity challenges. Any pointers for dealing with these?

The Personal Data Protection Commission has somewhat relaxed its rules just for this period, so you can collect, use, and disclose information without consent for the purposes of contact tracing. As to how much information should actually be collected: you should be collecting information about your employees and your visitors. But we don't recommend collecting information about employees' families. At the most, you could ask whether any of the employees' family members has been in contact with somebody who has been infected, or has been overseas. That's a fair question to ask as part of the precautionary measures.

Cybersecurity requires you to have the right tools in place. But you also need the right equipment and setup. I know of some situations where the SMEs have only one server in the office, and when they shift to remote working, they open it up for employees to use and then suddenly realize that the server holds information about the payroll.

Thankfully, today there are a lot of solutions in the market today, proven and tested ones from providers who can offer an end-to-end setup and implementation. And there is government support for getting these solutions in place.