Executing the COVID-19 recovery
A guide for governments for reopening and restoring their economies
As governments manage through the COVID-19 crisis, they will need to do so while managing through drastic reductions in revenue, surging demand from citizens and businesses, and the need to restart public agencies in a manner that is safe for both public employees and constituents.
There is more to restarting the economy than merely reopening businesses. This isn’t about flipping a switch. The recovery will be about building and executing a plan that will include transitional stages and will involve health, business, education, and government sectors working together. In comparison to other economic crises, governments will have an unprecedented number of roles to play in restarting the economy including developing the reopening plan, enforcing protocols for reopening, communicating progress and setbacks, getting the government workforce back to work, and restarting basic services that were temporarily paused and are now experiencing a sizeable backlog of work.
As we move ahead, governments will need to re-examine its basic operating systems. Governments will need to rethink operations, service delivery, workforce, and safety issues as they sequence the reopening of government offices. This is an opportunity for governments to adopt new tools to enable them to more effectively serve the people with better data, digital workflows, and agility.
In this report we look into some practical steps that governments can take in addressing all of these challenges in an integrated way, these include:
- Establishing a COVID-19 mission control center
- Developing a robust communication strategy to increase transparency and build trust
- Executing through a network of national and local government agencies, the private sector, academia, and not-for-profit-organizations
- Using data and technology tools to accelerate the recovery
