We are all in this together….
You should know by now that we are a tight knit bunch at Fresh Perspective.
We’ve always supported each other both inside and outside of our working environment – that’s a given for the Fresh family – although, in the beginning the pandemic forced us all to think about how we communicate with each other and also how we communicate as a business.
As Lockdown began, we all needed to step outside of our comfort zones, even more so than usual, and look at the innovation opportunities that were available, in order to stay relevant within the lockdown business environment and survive it.
It was an absolute roller coaster of a ride, with waves of emotion, passion and stress! Following on from our previous article here are some of our experiences and thoughts on our innovation at Fresh during Lockdown…
Jane Campbell
For me, business has changed dramatically, and I don’t think it will ever return to how it was prior to lockdown – we’ve become so much more innovative, adaptable and resilient, having to completely change the way we do business at the drop of a hat and move all of our services online.
We now speak to our clients and candidates over Zoom instead of face to face meetings or via the phone – we can gauge their body language and save so much time and fuel without having to travel! Therefore, helping the environment as well as people!
At the start, working from home was tough. It was difficult being away from the team, especially being the close-knit unit that we are. But now, we are all pros! We’ve implemented many tools to make our lives easier and more efficient – from Trello for our to do lists to Slack to keep in touch through the day. We had to be independent and this has done wonders for all of our productivity – we can make decisions for ourselves and don’t need to ask for as much reassurance from Laura & Emily.
As things get better and better and we slowly start transitioning to the office again, we have a newfound efficiency in all that we do. As with a lot of businesses, we are planning to still work from home a couple of days a week as a team after lockdown – this will help the environment, our mental health and save our time, meaning we are able to spend longer working and less time stuck in traffic.
Being able to spend more time at home with family and pets whilst still getting the same or usually more work done is a no brainer!
Evie Skentlebery
Business has changed massively for us during lockdown – we started with a strong a flourishing pipeline of work, which we watched dwindle quite rapidly with a lot of businesses pausing on their recruitment due to the uncertain future! Like the incredible chameleons that we are though, we adapted a lot of our services to online, providing training for clients and candidates on the topics that we have a lot of knowledge in. This opened up a massive window of opportunity for us to get Fresh Training off the ground!
We’ve also changed our sales process, running through our proposals with the client over Zoom to build those trusting and open relationships, which is something we wouldn’t have necessarily done if we hadn’t had to move with the times…
This has innovated the way we’re able to do business – for us recruitment is personal, and we want to get to know our clients and what makes them tick! Being face to face allows us to do this!! Even if it is through a screen! We’re still able to convey our personality and energy this way!
Veronica Finney
I think it was inevitable for businesses to change during lockdown, no one knew exactly what was to come, how to prepare or what this would mean for their business in the long run. But what we have been able to see is businesses adapting and thriving in this time, which is amazing considering at the start, everyone was feeling very doom and gloom and the uncertainty was weighing down on us all.
Through the weeks, Fresh have found ways to fight, to adapt and keep moving, in what at times may have felt like an uphill struggle! I think it’s fair to say that we’ve won this battle, only to come out the other side even bigger and better than before!
Everything we did had to be approached differently – the way we work together, our sales strategies, our candidate sourcing, our marketing and our networking, but through these adaptations and innovations it has encouraged us to try new things and you know what? Some of our new styles of working will be sticking around for good!
As a team, we seem so much stronger and more confident in our own abilities and the video content that we’ve created in this time has been one of our biggest achievements. It’s crazy to think we are now all posting videos daily about different recruitment topics, when before some of us used to shy away and felt as though we had no idea what we were doing! Haha!
I feel we have really found a way to take our social media channels by storm and really been able to utilise our online presence to generate more business and get our message out there to even more businesses; and that for me, is a great innovative achievement that we have accomplished as a team.
At Fresh we will be taking many of our new processes and ideas back into the office! As we have streamlined our communication and also improved our processes to save time!
What will you be taking back into your office from Lockdown? And no… maybe pj bottoms and a smart top won’t be acceptable post lockdown!
Have a wonderful week!
The Fresh Perspective Team!