Increasing labor productivity (LP) is an actual task of the Russian economy and management of enterprises. Today, the country has a growing productivity gap between the most efficient and lagging companies. The aim of the study is to identify the key factors which determine the magnitude and growth rate of this indicator in the interests of revealing promising areas and ways of managing its growth. The paper describes the analysis of financial and economic indicators that are factors of sustainable growth in LP at domestic industrial enterprises, leading in this indicator in the period 2017–2019. The methodological basis has been the provisions of the production factors and productivity theories. The research method is based on the theorem of statistical hypotheses. The object of this research has been 94 Russian leading companies in terms of LP growth under reviewing period. An economic and statistical model of LP growth factors has been developed and the conditional probabilities of hypotheses have been calculated that characterize the ranges of growth of this indicator upon the occurrence of events corresponding to an increase in the values of financial and economic indicators. The key factors and the ranges of their change are highlighted for four ranges of the productivity rate: small, moderate, high and record. It is shown that the determining factors of a low rate are a revenue growth in the range from –23 to 57%, a decrease in the duration of an operating cycle to –7% and a growth in asset turnover up to 37%. The factors of the record rate of LP growth are revenue gain in the range 97–297%; operating cycle reduction in the range from –42 to –88% and the turnover of assets gain in the range 114–342%. The capital-labor ratio gain is considered with low probability as a factor of the moderate or high LP gain in combination with an increase in revenue and asset turnover. High correlation of the operating cycle reduction and increase the asset turnover can serve as an indicator of LP increase programs success. The proposed approach allowed to identify significant factors of LP growth at leading companies that had not been obvious during applying a regression analysis.

The innovative nature of an engineering company has such indicators as the presence of innovative products on the market; developing/acquiring innovations costs; the number of patents applied for during the year. In addition to these external innovation properties, the existence of emergent quality of the company determines a whole range of internal and external factors. The relevance of this paper is to study them. Also, the main purpose is to identify the most common obstacles that arise in the way of innovative growth of national companies. The research methodology consisted in conducting a survey of representatives of the top management of engineering companies and analyzing the answers. It allowed to outline the general problem of innovation management in the national economy, as well as to identify the most significant factors that determine the innovation of companies to a greater or lesser extent. As a result, the article provides a meaningful interpretation of these factors and formulates hypotheses about their quantitative measurability. Practical testing of the proposals made on specific economic entities will allow to form a source data set for engineering of a standard management model of the company’s innovative growth. In turn, such model can be used as the basis for the appropriate corporate standard development.

The subject of the research is the system of methods of financial management of a company, in which a contradictory situation of conflict of goals of its development has developed, with the obligatory occurrence of systemic crises on the one hand, and the rule of constant preservation of a low risk of financial destabilization, on the other. The relevance of the study is due to the significant distance of system analysis in its categories from strategic financial analysis. Systemic destabilization of active investment outwardly looks the same as the end-of-life bankruptcy crisis, which significantly distorts the perception of potential investors in the industry in general. The scientific novelty lies in the substantiation of a method that makes it moving from a simple identification of the transitional (crisis) development stages of an unstable system (company) to the substantiation of the parameters of a strategic program, including within the framework of anti-crisis management. The aim of the research is to adapt analysis methods of the system’s crisis states to the provisions of the most system-oriented financial analysis techniques have being applied to disclose the unstable states of the “system-enterprise”. The system analysis has been chosen as the research method in various areas of its manifestation: from a general philosophical description of unstable system with characteristics of a company’s life cycle to a model for assessing the company’s financial stability for strategic purposes. The result of modeling the financial condition of such unstable companies taking into account provisions of the system analysis, was the formulation of a new category of strategic financial management — the Strategic zone for the financial stability transformation, which serves as the basis for a long-term program for the transformation of the financial condition. As a conclusion, it can be noted that applying of the financial analysis method for strategic purposes (“Fregat” model) in a single connection with the system analysis provides the possibility to identify the most dangerous crises from the standpoint of the identification complexity and consequences of the cochirid stage crises of the system development. Also, this allows to separate the investment (justified) destabilization from instability which could be the cause of wrong actions of the company’s management. All this makes it possible to objectively assess the macroeconomic indicators of the hospitality industry in general.

The subject of the present paper is the perspective of blockchain technology application based on the experience of the Russian and foreign companies, financial institutions, and public authorities. The purpose of the article is to study trends, identify areas of application, and analyze the risks and benefits of blockchain technology application in corporate governance. The author used the methods of generalization, synthesis, comparative analysis of the approaches applied to determine the role played by blockchain in corporate governance, studied appropriate recent scientific publications, and also conducted the comparative analysis of the corporate governance goals and key characteristics of the above technology. The author has exhaustively analyzed the prospects of blockchain technology implementation in corporate governance taking into account the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, which forms the novelty of the present paper. The author proposes to follow the below recommendations pertaining to certain issues of implementing blockchain technology into entity’s operations: to include the issue of suitability of blockchain technology integration into the entity’s operations in the meeting of the Board of Directors’ agenda, develop and approve at the Board level in-house documents to regulate the technology application within the entity as well as the strategy of its using to be followed by its integration into the entity’s general business strategy, approve the entity’s risk-appetite to use the technology within the frameworks of the overall entity’s risk management strategy, analyze the impact it may cause on the entity’s activities at the Board level and also ensure improving the employees’ training and competencies with respect to using blockchain technology. The author concludes that nowadays blockchain technology will be most intensively used in areas where it is a more effective alternative to existing systems in their current state. The conclusions and results obtained may be used in the course of developing Russian corporate governance practice as well as in the analytical and practical work performed by the public authorities and the business community.

The paper discusses the essence and features of telecommuting, communication costs and the problems of implementing compliance procedures to reduce the costs and risks. The paper’s aim is to analyze the risks with the introduction of telecommuting procedures in Russian and foreign companies in the period of lockdown caused by the new coronavirus infection COVID-19. Today, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to have a negative impact and create a critical situation in all spheres and industries, which causing destabilization of the economy and the labor market. One of the main recommendations of the World Health Organization is a physical distancing, limits of movements freedom, closure of some companies that are not vital, etc. Judging the above, the employer has to learn not only to carry out his activities, but also to survive in these conditions. This is the reason that many companies have to switch into the remote work process fully or partially as a temporary or alternative way of organizing work. The paper focuses on the directions and complexity of the tools choice for building connections between a workforce and management. Also, it analyzes the use of compliance to regulate communication relations, control communications and manage risks that arise from violations of the legislation, the regulations of regulators, the rules of self-regulatory organizations and internal documents. The authors compare a conception of compliance control, goals, processes, stages and effects of the use of the regulatory mechanism in the pandemic. Also, the authors give the respondents’ answers regarding the importance of compliance control, digital competencies for the high-quality performance of functions and communication at telecommuting. The results led to the conclusion that freelancing is not only a powerful incentive for changing employee’s behavior in conditions of uncertainty but also it brings an additional risk for all companies. Various digital monitoring tools aim to reflect the balance between security and personal freedom in the society infrastructure.

Knowledge management is among strategic tasks of a modern company. However, there is a gap in the literature considering the mechanisms of organizational knowledge intensification and its transformation into company competitiveness. The paper presents the knowledge management model based on the vector of proactive employee behavior, which is formed with the help of organizational and motivational mechanisms, including flexible organizational structure, transformational leadership, and a culture of knowledge. According to elaborated model proactive behavior of employees is oriented to knowledge intensification and active participation in the processes of organizational development and learning, which in turn determine innovation activities and financial performance of a company. The model has been tested using the database of 110 Russian companies that had been participated in the survey in 2019. Empirical results have been estimated in the software smartPLS using the method of structural equations and had confirmed the validity of elaborated knowledge management model. Obtained mediation effects allow making a conclusion about complementarity of the knowledge culture, transformational leadership and flexible organizational structure; therefore, these mechanisms should be implemented simultaneously for the successful transformation of knowledge into a company competitiveness. Also, the practical implication has an empirical evidence of the highest impact of transformational leadership on innovation and financial performance, determining this mechanism as a key one for Russian enterprises.