How has your work changed/been impacted in the past couple of weeks?

We already work for clients all over the world, so in theory it’s fairly easy for our team to work from home. We just had to make sure that everyone had the right laptops and screens – plus the right internet connection, space, and furniture to work comfortably. In practice, though, it’s a different story. It’s hard to keep focused when you’re faced with terrifying news from around the world, and the basic stuff like being isolated from the team doesn’t help. Everything takes a little longer, and that mounts up – and we’ve had to postpone hiring a new copywriter, because we’re not in a position to give them the onboarding support we’d like.

Obviously work has slowed down a bit too as marketers take stock of what they’re going to do next, but in the circumstances that might be no bad thing.

What is your personal and businesses strategy for this period?

We’re doing everything we can to help our people feel connected to the team. We’ve started using Slack for the day-to-day office chatter, and we’re making liberal use of Zoom videoconferencing – somehow, seeing people’s faces makes everything that much better. We’re keeping our client list under careful review, to see who we think might be impacted, and if there might be ways we can vary our service to help them. And after a hectic start to the year with client work we’re trying to make good use of the time to handle some of our own marketing and messaging. We’re also giving our team the chance to get psychological support over webcam, from Craig Fearn at Business Mental Wellbeing; we’re not aware of any major issues yet, but it’s a stressful time and it’s great to know he’s there for us.

Personally, I’m taking it one day at a time. Anxiety about the world, and my loved ones, comes in waves – sometimes I’m really worried, at other times I feel fine. My most important job right now is to make sure our team feel connected and have all the support they need.

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