“You mean apart from home-schooling you two, trying to keep you entertained and attempting to get some work done?”
Broadly, people had 2 options during the lockdowns: sit around and fester or do something new. Most people I know got on with the latter and I was amazed what they came up with from writing books, building boats to new business ideas. Some of this was driven by necessity as they had to earn money to support their families, but the ingenuity and energy were formidable – particularly as they had their children at home most of the time, too.
I had been working on Belmont Leisure for over 2 years: we had launched a product, spent months getting authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority to lend consumers money (become a bank!) and then worked on a complete rebrand to something that we thought had real potential for the future. Then, the month after launch, Covid arrived and pretty much destroyed the product.
So, time for a plan B.
Despite working in the leisure market, I had kept up with what was going on in the people and leadership space, so I started thinking about the impact the pandemic was going to have on work, organisations, leadership and people. I was watching real time as people close to me were grappling with the challenges of systems that were never designed for the internet age and the issues raised by family priorities, isolation, quarantine and the ever changing landscape of restrictions. I realised that life was never going to go back to the way it was, pre-Covid, and that a real revolution was happening in front of my eyes. Did this structural shift present opportunities? Could we spot a gap in the market? Could I launch something new? I called Felix Spender, who had the same thought and we started to pull together our ideas on the workplace revolution. “Place people at the heart of business, enable them to do the job and trust them to do it.” In short, a model built on output, autonomy and trust, rather than bought hours and fixed labour.
The result is our collaboration, Springboard to the Future, designed to enable your organisation to thrive in whatever the “new normal” will become by capitalising on the workplace revolution, unlocking the power of your workforce and increasing collaboration which will improve profits and make your organisation more agile and resilient. And this agility and resilience is going to be ever more important as Covid moves from being a pandemic to being endemic.
We know some organisations are hoping that once the pandemic has passed, they can return to how it was before, which is maybe how people thought during the First World War. Why not accept that there will be change and embrace it? Go forwards, not backwards.
We also know that many businesses have already got part of the way there, have got something working to keep operating. However, to continue for the longer term they will need to fine tune how it works and make it stick – things are going to be very different for a good while yet. Until now, they have been relying on the social capital that they built up before Covid arrived but teams change, circumstances change, the market changes. They need to answer the questions about how they innovate, how do they build and maintain their teams, deliver change, grow and deal with conflict whilst not being able to be together in person.
We are looking forward to working with businesses that want to go forward. If you want to find out more then please visit our new website.
For our free guide “The 10 keys to Organisational Success”, then please click here.