Thriving in times of Corona — A Lesson in Leadership and Strategy
The world is fighting a pandemic. Most of us have never experienced anything like this in our lives. Almost everyone and everything has been impacted. Some industries are fighting for survival and some are trying to find ways to cope with it. And this article is a story of how Al Tayer Digital tackled this challenge head on.
Let me take you through the steps we took to overcome our challenges and continue working as usual.
· Transparent Leadership
· Devise a strategy
· Prepare and be ready
· Final Stage — Remote Working
· Fun activities
Transparent Leadership
In times of crisis, everyone can have their own leadership moment, regardless of their title.
This is one of the core values of our company and our leadership chose to continue doing it even in tough times. Leadership team took it upon themselves to keep the whole company aligned on what is happening and what we can proactively do to combat it. Key take away here — Leaders need to show their human side. They need to build trust that employee well-being is the top priority. Gone are the days where leaders used to communicate through emails. Our leadership team joined our company’s messaging channel and became more personally engaged with employees via face-to-face and/or video interaction with greater frequency.
Devise a strategy
“In Crises, You’ve Got to Learn to Pivot, Not Panic”
We anticipated that in coming days we might have to work from home. Our tech teams are already used to working remotely. We have lots of people working from Istanbul, Sri-Lanka,Ukraine and even Indonesia. Having said that, we needed to make sure that non-technical teams can also continue working seamlessly in case needs arise. The strategy our company agreed upon was we need to make sure that every person in company can work from home. For the functions that cannot work remotely, a plan was created keeping safety of everyone while following guidelines provided by government.
Prepare and be ready
Our company proactively started creating VPN accounts. IT teams started taking necessary steps to enable remote working for everyone including approvals, authorization and readiness. Teams were asked to do a test from their homes and inform in case of issues. A mock drill was also conducted to see if we were finally ready or not to work from home. For the staff that could not work from home such as Studio teams and Warehouse, safety measures were identified. Frequent communications were sent to all employees.
Final Stage — Remote working
Taking note of the ongoing situations a final call was taken. We did it! All teams were able to remotely work. Small hiccups were ironed out. Most important thing we observed was trust. We needed to rely on our teams and they delivered. Managers kept in touch with their team members. We also had non work-related catchups frequently to give moral support. Key words here were — sympathy and empathy. We all knew we are in this together and each other’s well-being was of paramount importance. For faster response in uncertain situation in markets, we also created a “Emergency COVID Support” slack channel. This helped all the teams aligned in case of any emergency activities that we needed to do.
We did our first online townhall with more than 140 people and it was a success.
HR teams kept the morals high. Some fun activities organized by our amazing HR team included
· Home Workstation Selfie Contest, Yoga with team, Group Zumba Class and lot more fun activities :)
Even with all the pressure, we never forgot to thank and give a token of appreciation wherever it was due. This was a lesson for all of us on how we can adapt our strategies and plans with ever changing world. How leaders can have huge impacts and navigate the business if they have support of their teams.
At the time of writing, we are still working from home. Hopeful that this too shall pass and knowing that as Al Tayer Digital team, we are ready to face any curveball that life would throw at us together.
Some Fun Pics below :)
