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How businesses can reopen and reinvent themselves amid coronavirus outbreak

Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi and Heidi Chung speak with Accenture North America CEO Jimmy Etheredge about how business leaders can rebuild their companies to succeed in a post-COVID-19 world.

Video Transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: Staying on our Road to Recovery theme here at Yahoo Finance, let's bring in Accenture North America CEO Jimmy Etheredge. Jimmy, good to see you this morning here.

Now, I understand Accenture is out with a new report this morning offering up some suggestions on how businesses could reopen successfully after the pandemic. What did this-- what did you find in this report?

JIMMY ETHEREDGE: Great. Well, Brian, thanks for having me here. We're excited with a report that we've provided today. It really encapsulates a lot of what we have been talking to our clients about and hearing from our clients with what's important.

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As you can imagine, everyone is now shifting from what has been this period of we call the now but kind of getting through the triage of the change with the crisis to starting to look more about reopening and what's coming next.

And so what we really talk about here are a couple of scenarios as to how we think that's going to play out and some key steps that we think for our clients to go focus on.

BRIAN SOZZI: Jimmy, in terms of success, how should-- how does a company think through successfully reopening their business? You know, office spaces are getting redesigned. To me, I get why companies have to do this, but doesn't the productivity of a business go down?

JIMMY ETHEREDGE: Well, I think there's a number of factors that our clients are taking into account. The first I will tell you is the productivity does not necessarily go down. Just taking us in a point here, we track all of our go lives. We track all of our service levels that we're providing to clients. We actually saw improvement in April over what our traditional metrics had been in January and February. So the power of collaboration technologies enables a lot of things to happen virtually without having the productivity drop.

But as you said, Brian, for clients that are thinking about how do I reopen? they have to be thinking about the health and safety of their employees. They've got to plan for that. They also have to think about the health and safety associated with their clients or customers because a number of them have field-sales or field-service employees that are interacting with them. So these are all factors that go into the timing of the reopening.

But the other thing which we stress in the report, it's all about reimagining. And in a period where you're going to have more uncertain growth, how do you reinvent your business and leverage some of the lessons that you've learned in this period of the last two months?

HEIDI CHUNG: Hey, Jimmy, it's Heidi Chung here. So this whole entire COVID-19 pandemic really peeled back the curtain on just the health of overall corporates, whether it's small or large. And this earnings season, we learned that a lot of companies, no matter how big they are, actually were faced with weak balance sheets. So when we're taking a look at the future here, how important is it for corporations to prioritize having a strong balance sheet for the long term, for the unknown?

JIMMY ETHEREDGE: Well, Heidi, great point. There's no question cash is king right now. And a lot of the clients that I talk to are really looking for how can we leverage technology to drive structural cost savings? This is where I think you're going to see the winners in this process accelerate their migration to the cloud. There's a lot that can be offered in the way of taking structural cost out. That's going to help preserve that cash that they're going to need to get through this uncertain period of growth.

BRIAN SOZZI: Jimmy, when you talk to clients, what's your sense on how fast they will bring back their workforce from furloughs, you name it? And then do you think there's a certain level of permanent unemployment? Because to your point, we are using technology to communicate like we never had before. Maybe you need a few less employees.

JIMMY ETHEREDGE: Well, Brian, on your first question of how fast, I think, you know, it really depends. A lot of the companies are looking at how well they have been able to survive in a virtual mode, and the better they're able to do with that, the longer they want to wait and see how the track and tracing is going to work. You know, they're talking to their-- if you're at home in an office environment, they're talking to their real-estate teams to look at, you know, really simple things like if I've got five floors in a 50-story building, how do I get up to the elevator? How do I coordinate people coming in and coming out? So there's a lot of planning activity going on for office environments.

I think where people are really trying to look at moving the quickest is where they've got more of the manufacturing or production-type facilities where they're really, you know, kind of shut down, less able to work virtually. Those are the ones that I think are going to try to move the quickest to kind of get their production back online.

Your second question was is this going to create-- I guess my words would be more institutionalized unemployment? Are we going to find people that are not going to have roles to go back to? It's pretty early to really say. Without a doubt, for some of the roles that before were already going to be a challenge with the future of AI, roles that can be done through machine learning, I think for some of that you are going to see companies looking more and more at how technology can do some of those roles as opposed to dealing with the workforce. But I think a lot are also looking at how can we do retraining of those workers to have them do some of the things which are going to be even more important in this environment where we're going to be kind of virtually disconnected from our customers?

BRIAN SOZZI: That's a real interesting insight. Let's leave it there. Accenture North America CEO Jimmy Etheridge, good to speak with you, and stay safe out there.

JIMMY ETHEREDGE: Thanks. Wash those hands, Brian.

BRIAN SOZZI: So true. I've already did it 20 times today.

JIMMY ETHEREDGE: Cheers, man.