Be Financially Agile During Economic Uncertainty
CrucialLearning tackled The Four Crucial Moments For Uncertain Economic Times. It aims to help organizations to be financially agile in these trying times.
We summarize it for easy reference. Here are the 4 crucial conversations:
1. Debate Dithering and Denial
When a team is confronted with financial data that may or may not signal a crisis, teams can often disagree over the urgency of the issues and how to handle them. Basically, a team that is unable to discuss their difference can delay the decision allowing the crisis to deepen while teams that are able to discuss disagreement can take action within a few hours or days and resolve the issue faster.
2. Undiscussables
In many organizations, managers are aware of huge potential savings but just can’t talk about them due to politically sensitive cultural practices; even more, cite times when the barriers were leaders’ pet policies or topics.
3. Silent Collision
Everyone is asked to make tough decisions. But most are skeptical about whether their peers will really pony up. So they watch and wait—refusing to make hard choices until they see others dive in. One major cause of this is accountability. Only one in ten respondents said that peers were willing to hold each other accountable for their cost savings commitments.
4. Irrational Slashing
The result of failure to address the previous three. Senior leaders rose up through the ranks seeing failures in the previous three Crucial Conversations. They themselves often dithered rather than acted. They felt stifled in their ability to raise undiscussable when talking about sensitive cost-cutting options. They participated in silent collusion—forestalling tough decisions until they witnessed real accountability.
These crucial conversations should not be a hurdle to financial agility. Here are some key ways for businesses to become more flexible, efficient and come out of the year in a stronger position.
1. Understand your business better
When you have clarity on your business and workforce data, these conversations can easily be discussed within your team to improve efficiencies and address potential concerns.
Knowledge is power and if you know how your business will react to a change in circumstances, you will be able to set in place some plans to best deal with the situation.
2. Rolling Forecasts
These are strategic approaches to financial forecasts as they are guided by key business drivers. This makes them an important tool in agile financial planning.
Rolling forecasts offer a way for your organization to quickly correct financial warning signs. It also provides a consistent horizon, which gives finance leaders like yourself the confidence to make critical business decisions.
3. Enterprise integration
It’s paramount that managers have the ability to see the entire financial situation with the right information at the right time. Integrating financial modeling reduces preparation time, while simultaneously reducing the risk of error by removing numerous data handling touchpoints. The result is managers and analysts making decisions on controlled, trusted information in a much shorter space of time.
At Bilflo, we aggregate all of your workforce data from various systems into comprehensive business intelligence giving you access to real-time reporting.
This helps organizations have business clarity and make data-driven decisions.
See how our integrated solution works by checking out our resources:
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