Yanie Durocher is founder of POMPOM Creative, focused on lifestyle brands for China’s marketplace for PR/social/content. IG @YanieYanson
getty
2020 was a huge catalyst for change, disrupting not only the way we work but also the future plans of how we thought a business should operate.
I remember one of my good friends telling me last year: “Yanie, this was bound to happen, but the pandemic just accelerated and fast-forwarded the process radically. Maybe you think the time isn’t right, but there will never be a ‘right’ time for drastic changes.”
Nevertheless, I must admit that this past year has been extremely challenging. However, it has also opened areas of opportunities like never before, along with building the power of resiliency and perseverance.
Given that the law of power around the universe is made up of positive and negative atoms and energy, it’s really training us to rethink the way we believe situations to be. Every positive has a negative and vice versa.
The biggest challenges our agency, POMPOM, has faced from an operational standpoint this year has been low employee morale and turnover. Similar challenges may also affect agencies abroad once the pandemic stabilizes like it has here in China.
MORE FOR YOU
The reason? After being home for such a long period of time, many employees are rethinking their goals and how they want to live their lives. In our experience, many of them have decided to take 3-8 months of rest to reassess what they actually want to do for their future. This also happened to be during the agency’s turning point with the repercussions of Covid.
Small medium entreprises (SMEs) are being forced to change directions and adopt new tasks and skill sets due to new behavioral rules the pandemic has caused. For example, at our own agency, we added new services to our scope of work, including strategic planning and focus group workshops, in order to cater to a more fluctuating and uncertain marketplace. We also began exploring things like digital 3D rendering with digital influencers, social-driven mini clips and video-focused services. We learned this under a five-month timeframe. This has led to a hefty change in employment, culture and morale. Since things have been happening in the same way up until now, there will likely be a certain level of controversy internal of the organization creating change.
Hence, the role of the agency’s behavior in a time of uncertainty becomes crucial to either maintain the status quo or activate a drastic change. For us, we experienced the latter — a full-scale employment change. This is similar to something that McKinsey actually forecasted this year: a significant transformation in talent and resources will lead to a crucial turning point to change around the agency.
What does this mean?
Of course, during the initial period, there will likely be tension at the agency — for us, complications emerged all at once. Seriously, when its rains, it pours. But I did realize that strengthening our branding and positioning in the market, in terms of culture, people and processes, was a good opportunity.
It’s important to understand what happened, learn from it and go forward. I also believe that speed and adaptability are crucial, so if something is too complicated or if someone becomes irreplaceable, an event such as the pandemic — when panic hits the fan — is where things start to become clearer, and where the peril may start.
Here are four things we’re focusing on to rapidly onboard employees during a high-conversion period:
1. Automation With Free Tech Apps
SMEs must understand the potential of new technologies in order to maximize client offerings and improve business performance internally. Adopting new technologies can give organizations additional tools to help scale, permitting more efficient and repeatable processes at lower costs, and allow entrepreneurs to improve the delivery time of any task while reducing the human error factor. For example, at POMPOM, we use Tencent Meeting for calls, DingDing for internal HR operations and QiYe Wechat for business processes (i.e., taking leave, overtime, additional expenses and reimbursement, HR reports, etc.).
2. Finance Integration in Strategies
We’ve started creating bi-weekly and monthly meetings with our finance director. This integration of finance into our strategies helps everyone understand our wider goals and timeframe. Finance has to be involved in an organization’s wider goals in order to provide value to the activities, by implementing strategic plans and advice on how we’re doing and where we’re going.
3. Better Delegation
Increasing the trust factor in a business is important in order to create effective teamwork and delegation with an 80/20 mindset. Creating a strong management structure capable of keeping total control away from owner-managers is key. And if done right, it can boost SMEs’ trust. This is where succession plans, good processes, housekeeping, programs and a “home rules” guidebook can become very handy.
Also, defining a clear purpose and vision across the company, and ensuring staff is committed to it, is important for the long-term.
4. Succession Plans and Process
In Shanghai, there’s currently much more demand than supply for talent in agencies. Hence, talent management and succession plans with a strong pipeline of talent have become a priority for us, where process-driven ways to seek talent have become more of value. Over coffee recently, I was told by the HR director of a talent management agency that SME agencies are booming in Shanghai. To stand out from the competition, candidates will be looking for a mentor hero or a strong company culture.
To conclude, the pandemic is an unprecedented territory for everyone, but with the right vision and mission, businesses can grow and scale faster than before; it just depends on how we look at it. Is your glass half-full or half-empty?
Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?
Go to Source
Author: Yanie Durocher, Forbes Councils Member
