The left behind becoming out of sight and out of mind.

The left behind have no desire to catch up. Could this be the time for you to address inequality?

Key thought:

There is a significant risk that if organisations pursue an aggressive transformation strategy, this could run counter to the 'levelling up' conversation that is currently being had. There is an opportunity to enhance reputations for wellbeing and equality by targeting customers and service users that have low levels of accessibility or have been more negatively impacted by the pandemic and find new and innovative ways of reaching them. For example a supermarket may be better served by electrifying its van fleet and doing mobile rounds to sell from the van in hard to reach economic areas, than offering price discounts to attract customers back into large stores.

There is a correlation significantly between those who feel they are not being helped through COVID-19 by their communities and those who see no value to be added by the organization or sector against which they have responded.

This could be a cynical hard-to-please group, but some of the verbatims imply that for some organisations, COVID-19 is in danger of causing a wider gap between those who can access services and those who cannot.

For organisations where equality and levelling up is consistent with their mission, they could find this group and concentrate service development on improving accessibility to products and services.

Whilst this may not deliver to short term economic goals, it may have a positive impact upon reputation and open up new opportunities to work to wellbeing oriented goals, for which there may be stronger stakeholder support.