Seven Days Until Christmas

The countdown is on, and we’re taking a look at 2020 and the year that was…

2020 has been a year of change. We are often resistant to change, but during a crisis we are forced to adapt as a matter of survival, we look for opportunities, and we are more susceptible to taking risk.

“If you don’t create change, change will create you.”

— unknown

It’s almost the end of another year, but not just any year, the year of COVID-19, one that won’t be forgotten.

2020 Snapshot

… the things no-one ever saw coming!

• Disruption across the globe

• Faced with uncertainty

• Resilience was tested

• Lockdown, face masks & hygiene front of mind

• Working from home was enforced

• Imposed restrictions on gatherings

• Travel bans & border closures

• Industries, businesses & individuals were all impacted by the Pandemic

• Rising unemployment

• Agility was forced

• Digital acceleration

• Changes to consumer behaviour, preferences & expectations

A crisis is a great catalyst for innovation, “if you don’t create change, change will create you”. Over the course of the last 6 months, Whiteark has been committed to providing you with thought leadership to assist with navigating this period of uncertainty. We look forward to sharing more content with you in 2021 as we recover from the impacts of Covid-19.

If you need a hand as you build your business back up again, get in touch with us for a no-obligation chat.

Top tips for managers and leaders to successfully lead their team through Covid 19

Covid 19 has changed the way we work and lead teams.

It is really important that managers and leaders can recognise the new challenges facing employees.

The isolation of working from home impacts individuals differently and so leadership styles need to be reflected on and adapted to this new way of working.

Communicate, communicate, communicate

• Communicate clearly, often and simply

• Provide a clear understanding of what is expected from your team,  set clear priorities and expectations of roles 

• Be available via regular catch ups individually and team – phone and zoom/Microsoft teams mix it up as people are getting Zoom /Microsoft teams’ fatigue!  Don’t cancel these unless really need to

• A robust performance appraisal process with measurable KPI’s will help with this. But these may need to be reviewed and adjusted, make sure they are realistic

• Share what you can about how the business going

• People are uber sensitive about their job security, so it is important that they have a sense of being informed and kept up to date

Stay true to your values and culture

• Core values inform and reinforce your company’s culture, strategic direction,  recruitment processes and how you interact with your customers and clients

• Acknowledge that the meaning of values might vary with these challenging times, with most people remote working

• Lead by example

• For employees to adapt they need to feel valued. This will assist in their productivity and ultimate success. 

• You want your culture to be one that is supportive, empathetic, inclusive, collaborative, proactive and encourages initiative

• Recognize and reward employees who embrace and live the values, call this out int team forums

Genuinely care about your teams’ well-being

• Check in regularly and ask how your team really are, truly listen

• Be flexible to their person circumstances

• Show that you are human too, be authentic, talk about your fears, answer questions and reassure them about work and personal issues

• Have fun – in these challenging times find ways to connect and have fun…ask the team what works for them

• Promote your company Employee Assistance Program - make sure employees know where to find information, guidance and support for mental health

• Find out from your team what in terms of wellbeing initiatives, some suggestions are 10,000 /day step challenge, 1 hour/ day to do someone that makes you feel good, exercise/cooking relaxing this helps connectedness with employees and increases morale

• Promote the wellbeing initiatives that already exist

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Need a hand building your organisations capabilities to lead through Covid-19?

Let us help. To learn more about building and executing an inclusive strategy for your employees, contact us on whiteark@whiteark.com.au

Article by Phoebe Reid

Resetting your Go-To-Market Strategy during this Pandemic

There isn’t a business in the world, big or small that hasn’t been impacted by the COVID pandemic.

For some the impacts will have been catastrophic, for others they actually have been positive, but for all of us there has been a change and there will continue to be changes both good and bad that we must confront.

The reality is that regardless of where your business finds itself right at this moment, good or bad, you can’t just sit idle, you need to respond to the voice of your customers and to the messages the market is sending you.

The measures businesses on both sides of the impact equation have taken to protect staff, ensuring they are safely working from home, standing up processes that allow this to happen whilst continuing to serve customers, and most importantly ensuring that their mental wellbeing is front of mind has been critical in giving businesses the chance to reset.

Unfortunately, this reset in its own right won’t be enough to ensure that businesses survive or continue to thrive beyond this pandemic.  In order to achieve this your businesses will need to redefine it’s go-to-market strategy to (a) match the market conditions and opportunities right now and (b) to predict what market conditions might look like on the other side.

Here are some thoughts on where you might start and some of the activities that might help you pivot accordingly:

Stay close to your customers

In times of crisis we naturally retreat and seek to protect our own, our staff, our revenues which is natural. Our customers are being impacted as much as we ae and we must continue to engage them to understand what their situation is, not with a view to selling them but with a view to being genuinely customer centric and showing that value is real. Having this frame of reference will help you to continue to engage with your customers through this pandemic with the trust you’ve built over time, empathy and most importantly on their terms. Engaging customers now will only enhance your customer experience, focus on this as a personal activity, not  as a commercial one.

Be clear on the value you deliver to your customers

Now is not the time to sell aggressively, it’s the right time however to reaffirm the reason and purpose for why your company/product exists. Have your sales and marketing team remind you of this narrative, why your company and/or product exists? Remember you exist because there is a problem or a pain point that you are serving in the market that your customers can’t do without. In this current environment your goal is to be so closely connected to your customers that you understand their pain as it stands in this pandemic and more importantly how you and your team can help them solve them. Now more than ever, your customers are looking to be more than just buyers, they want to partner with people who are partners. There is no better time than now to re-assess your sales and GTM process and establish new targets and goals that are helping address the gaps to your customers problems.

Engage your local community

This pandemic has made life hard for every community, they are all suffering from the lack of connection with family, friends and the even the businesses they love. This is the time to support those businesses who are supporting their communities to get through this, do this because you care about these communities not because you are seeking better sales results or higher profits. This is an opportunity for us to be leaders in our actions, to show goodwill, compassion, lend support to our customers without expecting anything in return. Yours customers will become even greater beacons for your brand and or your product and they will become the community champions for you.

It’s clear that there is no definitive timeframe for how long this pandemic will go on, however it is imperative that you can’t just sit in hope.

Adapting your go-to-market strategy to the reality of this pandemic situation is an action that with deliver returns both now and also for the other side.

We are living with the reality in Australia that each state is responding to this pandemic slightly differently and as a consequence we need to ensure that our response is reflective of these variables and the fact that our customers realities and emotions will all be different.

There’s no better time than right now for your business to check in on your go-to-market approach, reaffirm or perhaps even reshape it so as to help you maintain the advantage you have or reignite the values as to why you exist.

Here’s to a post pandemic reality for your business that shines brighter than the reality of yesterday and today.

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Looking to build your own Go To Market strategy?

Let us help. To learn more about how to build a go-to-market strategy for your customers, contact us on whiteark@whiteark.com.au

This pandemic has changed the way we serve our customers for ever; or has it?

Is that the sound of the end of the night out at the movies? Will any of us ever dare dream of heading to the gym again? Listening to the doom and gloom in this unprecedented time would have us believe that we are witnessing the end of any type of physical engagement with products or services?

The question is that whilst at this moment, customer experience might be suspended do you care enough to start transforming your customers now so that you don’t disconnect in this period of hiatus?

Sometime in recent years it became the height of modernity to have strangers sleep in your bed when you weren’t there or to sit next to you as you drove from one city to another. It felt futuristic to mention that the gym you went to was because you had a membership that allowed you to go anywhere, anytime. It was cool to catch a movie with your partner, order the meal online and be wined and dined in-front of the big screen. This movement was called the sharing economy and it relied upon certain widely held assumptions, such as that it is fine to be near other people and that it is alright to touch what they have touched what they touched, it was also enabled by clever technology and customer experience strategies.

In this age of pandemic anxiety, these assumptions have all but evaporated. The sharing, or peer-to-peer, economy was meant to represent the commerce of the future, the perfect fusion of technology and reality. That destiny now looks shaky at best. What will happen to Fitness First, to the Gold class movie experience, dating apps? What will become of the start-ups enabling us to monetise our health, our travel, our spare time? And, beyond the brands themselves, what will happen to the people who were making some or all of their income from these platforms?

Is life as we know it, over?

Given we have moved beyond bunkering in to wondering what we should do to safeguard tomorrow?

The immediate future for most businesses will surely involve some kind of grey area between house arrest and a version of pre-pandemic freedom. Lockdowns and physical distancing will be escalated and de-escalated by the government like the gears in a car.

Some businesses might suffer greatly in full lockdown but then thrive when movement is even slightly freer if they chose to face into their reality now and see this as an opportunity to improve or transform to tomorrow. I believe that when we open up, demand will be robust because people will be overjoyed to be liberated and if they can afford it, will indulge.

Most expect there to be a post-pandemic behavioural shift. We can expect for example that there will be a new normal around physical distancing. Employees I’m certain will be eager to return to work, but there will need to be a rethink of the workplace and of engagement to incorporate working from home and working from the office.

We will most certainly go back to the gym, maybe even venture out to dinner or to the movies but that too will be different, it will be defined by a new normal one that business must create and start engaging their customers on today. It will be defined by those who have a clear strategy for speaking to their customers now, sharing with them their thoughts and listening to the hopes and dreams of those they serve.

In order to assess the future of your business, it’s worth reflecting on the customers you serve and what might change for them?

The truth is that the future is likely to change in terms of the way we engage, our customers priorities might shift or their needs may be slightly different?

Make no mistake, the value shift towards an even more customer centric and   social consciousness will only continue – and part of that is a big vote for the value your organisation places on the customer versus your own needs. The idea that this is the way we’ve done and it’s the way we’ll always do it was radically shifted forever when we pivoted to the sharing economy. Who would have ever dreamed that I could book my car as I was having my coffee and not worry about trying to hail a cab? By providing customers with communications and strategies on how your organisation intends to serve their needs post this pandemic is something you should be working on now.

It’s always been about the customer right, that’s what we all tell ourselves and now that in some industries we are in a position that we can’t serve them we’ve stopped leveraging the time we have to continue talking to them, or have we?

Whatever happens with this pandemic, however long it takes to get to a better place, the sheer force of the technologies that are available to everyone will ensure that those who have a clear line of sight of their customers will most definitely be ready to go again.

It’s conceivable that the new world order may be different, however be clear that most of the underlying principles around customer experience will remain the same.

If nothing else, make this the moment that belongs to someone else, the customers you serve?

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Looking to build your own Go To Market strategy?

Let us help. To learn more about how to build a go-to-market strategy for your customers, contact us on whiteark@whiteark.com.au

Staying on Track & Leading Through Covid-19

On the surface working from home sounds pretty good. Not so much when it’s all day, every day.

Leading your team through COVID is a real challenge and requires the leader to demonstrate genuine compassion and ability to communicate.

Here are some simple tips from the Whiteark team that might help…..

How to turn Ground Hog Day into a normal(ish) day

On the surface working from home sounds pretty good. Not so much when it’s all day, every day. There’s no water cooler relief, no Friday lunches, no direct contact. This can take its toll. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways alleviate WFH fatigue. Here are my top picks. Not surprisingly – they’re all centred on communication.

Keep your team on track

Set priorities and expectations of roles and keep your team accountable. A robust performance appraisal process with measurable KPI’s will help – bear in mind these may need to be adjusted. Accountability keeps the momentum going and ensures your team feels purpose and doesn’t drift off into a WFH abyss.

Make yourself available

Frequent one-on-ones are extremely important. This helps your team feel valued and ensures they know that you know how hard they are working. It gives them a chance to gain your confidence and have a meaningful conversation that can’t be achieved via Slack, email or in a group meeting. Connections like this are so important when we’re operating in a vacuum.

Think carefully about team catch-ups

It’s a fine line balancing the need for open communication vs too much of it. What used to be an informal convo within your team’s pod, is now usually a formalised online catch up. This can cause meeting fatigue and get in the way of productivity. Try to think strategically about meetings. Could one meeting be a 15 minute extension of another? Could your weekly 1.5 hour WIP change to fortnightly with 15 minute morning stand-ups as a substitute?

What does your team need to know?

Right now, people are super sensitive about their job security, so it is important to create a sense of inclusiveness and transparency. As a business owner or executive manager you’re privy to regular business updates. It’s important any nonsensitive business movement is also shared with your teams. Whether they agree with the updates or not, it makes them feel connected to the business.

Stay true to your values and culture

Core values inform and reinforce your company’s culture, strategic direction, recruitment processes and how you interact with your customers and clients. In times of uncertainty it’s very important to identify and reinforce these values to your staff. This provides an anchor to work from and demonstrates the business is on track, strong and stable.

Culture club

For employees to successfully adapt to this new style of working, they need to feel valued within their role. This equals more than a regular check in. It’s also about the broader team culture. You want this to be supportive, empathetic, inclusive, collaborative, proactive and encouraging initiative. Use team forums to highlight employees who have done a great job. Try to give everyone an opportunity to shine. Spread the praise. Don’t forget about the wall flowers.

Be authentic, not perfect

While you’re expected to play a strong leadership role, you also need to empathise with your teams’ challenges. This means you might need to relax a little and expose some of your own vulnerabilities. When running your one-on-ones think about what it means to really listen and care. Answer questions and provide reassurance on work and/or personal issues.

Get your team smiling

This is so important. There are plenty of ways to crack a grin – team quizzes, virtual drinks, step challenges, exercise time-outs, cooking challenges – ask the team what works for them. Try different formats or a mix. Just make sure you have regular time booked each week, where the conversation has nothing to do with work. It’s about relaxing and connecting as a team.

The buck stops with you

As you can see there are many small ways you can make a big difference to your team’s experience while working from home. Not only do these practices help them perform as happy, high functioning, individuals, it will also create a strong, united group – and that’s exactly what you need to do your job.