In the fifth week of lockdown, I have now found myself waiting with much built up anticipation of the speech tonight and what the outcome will be. I am sure I am not alone in this either.
Whilst it may be challenging, it is important to see the positives in a situation where many businesses have felt the negative ricochets of Covid-19. This way, lessons can be learnt, contingency plans can be put in place and organisations can learn and grow.
In a time period where we have been forced to slow down and adapt to new ways of living and working, it becomes a great opportunity to rest, reset and recharge. Whether this be in working life, mental wellbeing, or physical health – all three are important elements to evaluate at this time.
Seed and Remote Working
As an overview, at Seed we have integrated remote working really well into our current daily lives. We are a digital agency with the platform, tools and capabilities readily available to go remote. Therefore, when the situation arose and we had to adopt a remote way of working, the transition was pretty seamless.
This is not to say that we haven’t had challenges along the way. There is a lot to be learnt from being forced to change your working habits and working environments almost overnight – and that is exactly what we have done.
Make good habits
Pre Covid-19, many felt like life was flying away, constantly saying “can you believe it’s February already?!” Now, as we have the chance to take a breather and slow down it is a great time to make new habits that can be continued after quarantine.
Whilst the 21 day habit theory is great to fantasise about, not everything can be embedded into your life within 21 days and that’s okay because now we have the time!
At Seed, we are all thinking about things that we can do to improve our service offering, that would benefit our clients, and individual milestones to complete for ourselves. We want to challenge ourselves, get better and stay ahead of the curve.
We have used this time to audit each of our individual services, SEO, PPC and Paid Social to look at which areas are working and how can we capitalise on this? What areas need improvements and how can we make sure this happens?
These continuous improvement plans are all imperative to ensuring that we are delivering the best for our clients, but also up-skilling and improving in individual service areas that we each individually passionate about.
Communication is key
We are all a close knit bunch at Seed and socialise with each other outside of work. After the first week of lockdown, without the hourly tea shout outs from Adam, the funky office music from Arun or hearing how far Lance had managed to run in his lunch time – we all started pining for each other.
Without the regular face to face brainstorming sessions, the quick 5 minute chats, or the strategy meetings it can become easy to lose communication on a project. This can lead to confusion, loss of motivation and oversight on the end goal of an account or project.
At Seed, along with every other remote working businesses our face to face meetings have turned to Zoom calls, and our brainstorming sessions have turned to phone calls and collaborative documents. Being aware of keeping everyone in the loop on a project has never been more important and therefore has become a habitual practise that we all now follow and ensure we are all up to date.
Good morale is more important than ever
As well as prioritising communication throughout our team on projects, a big part of the ethos of Seed (and a huge part that Nick and Robin work on) is boosting team morale and encouraging camaraderie. Although we are all further apart from one another at the minute, the current situation has brought the team closer together than ever.
We have jumped on the bandwagon with the “hang upside down like a bat” Tik Tok craze, we have done handstand challenges, we have even run a marathon together (separately) to ensure that we are still doing fun things as a team! On Fridays we get together for a weekly quiz hosted by one of our Seedlings – all with beers in hand (that we would normally enjoy at Price George in Brighton together)!
It is great to work for a company with such amazing people, ones that I can call colleagues and friends too. Boosting morale and checking up on colleagues who are living alone, or finding it difficult during lockdown is really important. At Seed we have used team building games to bring the team closer together and survive lockdown!
Life after Lockdown?!
Enjoying the local park or visiting a pub garden with friends seems like a lifetime away now, but as restrictions ease, the idea of all of this becomes more realistic.
There are many things to be learnt from the Covid-19 pandemic as I have listed above some of the ones that we have learnt together at Seed. In amongst times like this is where fab teams pull together and thrive and that is certainly what I have seen from working at Seed.
People are now realising the benefits and ease of working from home and that brings huge opportunity. Who knows what working environments may look like post lockdown…
