What I Learnt About Continuing Business During A Pandemic.

Even during the best of times, looking out the window can be hard to resist at work. But when the world comes to a near-complete standstill at the hands of a pandemic, Resisting that urge becomes impossible. The oft-quoted “We are witnessing history” has never felt more relevant than now. For many of us – myself included – the impact felt due to COVID-19 is one of a kind.

Consumer’s habits completely changed at an overnight pace, most businesses were suddenly unable to carry out their services as normal and opportunities across the board were suddenly closing left and right. But despite everything Covid-19 threw at many of us, we still had companies to run, teams to work with and clients to serve.

Now, on the other side of lockdown, I find myself reflecting on some of the things I’ve learnt so far regarding how I kept business as close to usual whilst going through a world-stopping event. And whilst NZ might’ve gotten back to relative normalcy (albeit it, a new normalcy), the rest of the world doesn’t have it quite so lucky – and this is continuing to affect businesses with dealings across national lines. And as we tentatively await what the term “normal” will even mean post-Covid-19, I thought I might take this as an opportunity to talk through a few things I picked up about running a business through a pandemic (now that I can say I’ve done it).

One of the major things I found to be particularly helpful was to always keep things in perspective – being informed about vital updates and safety practices was absolutely necessary, but fixating on every single tweet put out on the subject became a sure-fire way to become consumed with overwhelming stress.

It was important to keep reminding myself that the virus was being handled by those qualified to do so, and obsessing over possible futures wasn’t going to change a thing. This was equally true of the ways the pandemic affected our work as well. It became clear that the best thing to do was to concentrate on the things I could control and not fixate on what I couldn’t. I couldn’t control the market, I couldn’t control how customers behaved and I couldn’t ultimately control how my clients reacted to how those customers behaved. What I could control, however, was my own communication throughout the pandemic – both with my team, and our clients.

I discovered that boiling my communications down to a single, simple message was key. People already had a lot on their minds – such as how their personal lives would be affected and how uncertain the future was looking. During our daily team meetings, communication was kept constant, consistent and simple. Furthermore, I requested that my team refrain from placing any new Covid-19 news in our group chat as to keep anyone from becoming overwhelmed by a constant barrage of virus-related news. Essentially, the (virtual) office became a space to just focus on whatever work we had at hand, and by extension, a respite from the 24/7 spectacle the constant flow of Covid-19 information (and misinformation) had become.

It became crucial to incorporate a strong sense of empathy for how others were dealing with the pandemic into my communications. People across the board were having kneejerk reactions to the pandemic, and whilst the subsequent decisions they made because of this didn’t always make logical sense, it made a world of difference to understand what frame of mind people were in when making those decisions.

I also came to realise that the tried and true method of reframing a difficult problem could be applied to businesses dealing with the effects of Covid-19 too, including our own. When broken down, everything we do in business is solving problems. How to be more efficient, how to grow, how to gain awareness. It’s all problem-solving. And it helped my own frame of mind to view the pandemic through a similar lens. Sure, Covid-19 and its effects on the market was a particularly big problem but really leaning into the problem and embracing it as a new challenge to overcome took it from an ever-impending doomsday scenario and reframed it as an opportunity for innovation. During a crisis of this magnitude, client activity was always going to slow down (if not shut off completely) – however, the extra time gave us a rare opportunity to examine ourselves as a business critically and uncover new opportunities, both internal and external.

For instance, something we noticed quite quickly, based on the steps some of our customers were taking in the wake of the lockdown, was how a lot of clients were not always basing their decisions off of what the available data showed. This gave us the idea to develop a best-of-breed program that collated all the data (including Google analytics and API’s) relevant to any given business and presented it in a way that takes our customer-focused design principles into account to make it super easy for businesses to make informed decisions. So far, the feedback has been fantastic.

Even after Covid-19 has been relegated to history, and worldwide lockdown becomes a memory, as opposed to a present reality, there’s a good chance that things may never truly go back to normal. Though things may be starting to seem a little more normal on this side of the world, the pandemic is far from over, and we have yet to see the full extent of the pandemic and its effects of the global economy, but clear, concise communication, embracing challenges and coming together as a team has so far served us well, and hopefully, these lessons might help you to do the same.