A Business Retrieval Plan in the Age of COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis: A Case of an IT Company, submitted to the international journal of disaster risk reduction.

ABSTRACT
The pandemic crisis of Coronavirus/COVID-19 is now endangering not only human life but also the future of businesses. Researchers are endeavoring to forecast different scenarios associated with the impact of such an international crisis on economic sectors and recommend retrieval plans to reduce the ramifications. However, the proposed plans and scenarios are too general and still insufficient towards addressing different working elements of businesses in particular. They also ignored the necessity of considering peripheral in-between scenarios to propel shifting paradigm of businesses from the existing condition to the new one. Further, the scenario drivers of these studies almost centered on the economic aspects while lacking the social facets, e.g., the health of the human resources. This paper is to fill such gaps by approaching the risk of Coronavirus impact on a large-scale information technology-led Company using scenario planning. The main and peripheral scenarios are constructed based on a balanced set of drivers concerning business continuity, employees’ health. and hit rate of the virus, simultaneously. Regarding per scenario, practical action plans are presented to devise the plausible responses of different functional elements of the Company. Finally, a damage management framework is provided to cope with the mental disorders of the employees amid the disease.
Keywords: COVID-19; Business Continuity; Scenario planning; Resiliency; Employee health.