This week, we look at the crucial role of food retailers and distributors as consumer behaviors shift due to COVID-19. Plus, how to remain agile when your team is far-flung, and Stanford management professor Bob Sutton on what it’s like to teach remotely. |
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Coronavirus cases globally are now well above three million—with more than a million in the United States alone. And with the lockdowns that have kept those numbers from going ever higher, it’s getting harder to remember a time when going to the store didn’t mean putting on a mask and staying six feet away from others. And there are newfound fears that the food supply chain can’t handle the changes the crisis has wrought. |
What’s changed for grocers. Shoppers continue to stockpile groceries and cleaning supplies even as many countries try to reopen economies. It’s clear that food retailers will have a critical role to play for some time to come. They must protect employee health and safety, prioritize in-store cleanliness, and contend with both historic surges in demand and the supply-chain and operational shocks that follow. |
Pandemic preferences. According to sales data from March 2020, supplies like paper towels, toilet paper, and cleaning products have doubled in sales, while purchases of nonessential items like cosmetics and office supplies have trailed off. The sudden shift in consumer behavior has strained supply chains and created shortages, with retailers and their distributors struggling to match the rapid surge in demand. |
Focus on nutrition—in Asia, anyway. In addition to behavior shifts, the pandemic is affecting consumer attitudes. For all the news about unhealthy eating and drinking in the West, respondents to our survey of more than 5,000 consumers throughout Asia revealed an increased focus on well-being through exercise and healthy eating. In most of the Asian nations surveyed, customers are eating more foods with perceived health benefits, while leaving alcoholic beverages and salty snacks on the shelves. |
Keeping communities healthy and fed. It’s important for retail leaders to protect the health of their employees and customers, stay up-to-date with local demand, and, in the longer term, rethink their business model to make it more resilient to global shocks—for instance, by investing in e-commerce channels and machine-learning platforms that forecast demand speedily and accurately. |
Helping those in need. For many people in wealthier nations, the crisis has turned into one of food scarcity for the first time. In a recent interview with McKinsey, Katie Fitzgerald, the COO of the hunger-relief group Feeding America, discusses how her group has organized to respond to the extraordinary demand for food by the newly vulnerable across the United States. |
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OFF THE CHARTS |
The privacy imperative |
As consumers become more careful about sharing data and regulators step up privacy requirements, leading companies are learning that the way they handle consumer data and privacy can become a point of differentiation and even a source of competitive business advantage. Consumers’ trust levels are low overall but vary by industry. Two sectors—healthcare and financial services—are viewed by consumers as the most trustworthy, our survey showed. |
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PODCAST |
A severe mental-health challenge |
Patrick J. Kennedy, a former Democratic congressman from Rhode Island and the founder of the Kennedy Forum, spoke with McKinsey about how the demand on the mental-health system from COVID-19 “is going to be unparalleled. In a sense, you cannot separate the virus from the enormous devastation and tragedy that this virus is causing all Americans in one form or another,” he noted. “Either through a loss of a loved one, a loss of a job, a fading away of a career or a business, [or] economic insecurity. It’s unknowable, all of the trauma and how that’s going to manifest itself in higher rates of disability, anxiety, and depression.” |
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MORE ON MCKINSEY.COM |
Can you be agile when you’re remote? | Agile teams traditionally excel when their members are in the same place. Here’s how to ensure they’re effective now that COVID-19 has forced them to work remotely. |
A leader’s guide to comms in a crisis | How organizations communicate about the effects of the coronavirus can create clarity, build resilience, and catalyze positive change. |
Why digital strategy is front and center | The COVID-19 crisis has provided a sudden glimpse into a future world in which digital has become central to every interaction, forcing both organizations and individuals further up the adoption curve almost overnight. |
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Needless to say, this has been a very strange period for higher education. How has your pivot to online classes gone so far? |
We started planning even before the last day of physical classes in early March, just because the writing was already on the wall. We actually had to finish up the winter quarter online, with two days’ notice. As I wrote to students, our goal was to redesign classes to be “intellectually and emotionally satisfying given the constraints of teaching a class online with short notice to people who are facing trying and uncertain times.” |
I have taught an intro to organizational behavior since 1981, so the coursework is familiar. But to respond to remote learning, we’ve mixed and matched a ton of material, between live video lectures, some recorded talks, case studies, and guest speakers. I was able to plot out the lessons with my course assistants, who have been amazing. The final will be to design the ideal organization, using concepts we discussed in class. |
I’m really excited about my guest speakers. For instance, we had Bonny Simi, the president of JetBlue Technology Ventures, speak to my class. The students first saw a short film about her—she is an Olympian and national champion in the luge and bobsled, as well as an active pilot—then they watched a talk she gave at Stanford as an “engineering thought leader.” After that, she had a live video conversation with students, including her thoughts on the impact of COVID-19. |
We also had Carl Liebert, who seems like he was involved in every management crisis of the past 20 years. He was at Circuit City during 9/11, Home Depot during Katrina, and 24 Hour Fitness during the 2008 economic meltdown. He spoke with the class about leading through a crisis, and how leaders have to avoid being overcome by fear. |
It sounds like this crisis is providing students with a real-time example of how to improvise a response. |
What is clear is how people and organizations that seemed too rigid just a few weeks earlier changed so much in reaction to the pandemic. My teaching reflects that, it has changed dramatically, and there’s so much more flexibility in the system—and in people—than I ever imagined. |
For one of my classes, a small one on leading organizational change, with 19 undergrads doing project-based work, all the students pivoted to COVID-inspired topics with a couple weeks’ notice. One team is studying “pop-up virtual organizations,” and why a virtual org like US Digital Response has been successful while others have failed. |
Another team is looking into how parents are dealing with the challenge of working while having to teach young kids at home at the same time, and a third is focused on the processes by which Stanford and other universities moved undergrads off campus. |
How do you think your students are doing emotionally? |
A key point is no matter what I’m doing, I always put the students’ emotional well-being first. For my organizational-behavior course, I have 55 students scattered all over the country and the world. One is from Honduras, and she can’t go back there. I also worry about income-equality effects—it’s clear some students are sitting in huge houses in California, while others are obviously less fortunate. Then there’s the hope that job offers don’t fall through for those who are graduating. |
Some students are really rising to this challenge, others are doing fine, and others are definitely struggling. It makes you realize that the informal interactions of college life—clubs, sports, dorm life, office hours, running into folks on campus—are so crucial. We are all anxious—and also curious and optimistic—about working our way back to the new normal. The skills and resilience of my wonderful students gives me much hope, despite the challenges ahead. |
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BACKTALK |
Have feedback or other ideas? We’d love to hear from you. |
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