For the past few weeks, we’ve been adapting wildly, learning as we go and putting things in place to make our new working life a little smoother wherever possible, we shared some of those things in this blog, but as we progress we’ve also realised some key things about our business that will be changing. For the better.
It’s a decision a lot of businesses will be really pondering at the moment, having been out of their physical location for a couple of months at least (whilst probably still paying for it!) and seeing their teams remain fully functional across multiple locations – why keep the office at all? That’s the conclusion we’ve come to at Yobah, despite the fact we’ve always operated in a flexible way, we have also always had a physical office but the stark reality is ‘we just don’t need it’ it doesn’t impact productivity, our clients feel no difference and so we’ll be closing the office door for now from July 2020.
With the departure of the physical office, we can no longer rely on seeing each other there as our means of social interaction as a team. We’ve actually got really good at staying connected during lockdown with virtual team lunches and other online social stuff but when we can actually meet in person and maybe even go for a beer or two! – we’re definitely going to be doing more of that and spending quality time together rather than just grabbing five minutes over the monitor in the office.
To be clear, it’s not like anyone ruled us with an iron fist before but like many businesses, we had a lot of meetings in the diary, that were just there. Running a business requires communication and regular interaction of course but lockdown and working 100% remotely has taught us that not everyone needs to be at every meeting and nor do meetings need to be mandatory, sometimes people are in full flow with a project and that meeting is just an unwelcome interruption to their day and sometimes things are just ticking along nicely and that meeting just doesn’t need to happen, so from now on, they won’t.
We’ve always been a business that has face-time with our clients and whilst we’re still pretty restricted at the moment we’re putting plans in place to make sure we do more of this post lockdown. We’re adopting even more fluid ways of working than we ever have before, which means we can spend time on-site with our clients, immerse ourselves in their business and also have the benefit of meeting existing clients and prospective ones in locations that work for everyone involved – based in Liverpool? let’s meet there! want to meet somewhere in the middle no problem? We’re here to provide solutions and location will simply no longer be a barrier to client relationships.
Lockdown has and continues to be incredibly challenging for a lot of businesses and we make no light of that but we’re also quite excited to approach the post lockdown world with our new working practices in place and to feel the continued benefit of doing things which perhaps fall outside of the norm. Lockdown has created opportunity – no we haven’t learnt a new language or become amazing at Yoga, but we have been given the opportunity to take a look at how we do things and to find ways to do things better, ways which suit our modern growing business and our lives too!
What changes are you making in your business? We’d love to hear!