2020: it wasn’t all bad

by Mark

There’s no question that in years to come, we’ll look back on 2020 and reflect on what will almost certainly be described by historians as a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ experience.

It’s a year perhaps best defined by the annual event of the Oxford English Dictionary announcing their ‘word of the year’. For the first time ever, they’ve chosen not to name a ‘word of the year’, but to describe 2020 as ‘a year which cannot be neatly accommodated in one single word’.

Here at Rambutan, we weren’t immune to the effects of multiple lockdowns and the widespread economic and social impacts of the pandemic. It stands to reason that if our clients suffered and struggled to trade, then so did we. Like many of our clients, we had some difficult commercial choices to make and some of the bunch were furloughed for several months, leaving others to ‘lead the Rambutan ship’ through unchartered and at times, very choppy waters.

Early on in the year, the team agreed on a set of guiding principles for how we’d work together and manage our business. These included:

• we’ll come out of this having done the best we can for each other

• we’ll be even more caring in how we behave

• we’ll have open communication and give each other as much notice as possible on decisions and their implications

• we’ll stay ahead of the game by being agile in how we think and what we offer

These principles were at the core of our thinking in both how we looked after each other and how we worked with our clients. In this article, I’ll focus on three brilliant things we did that were driven by our principles, which, hopefully, prove that 2020 wasn’t all bad!

Webinars

The first big ‘event’ for us occurred in April and May, where we decided, quite deliberately, to offer a series of webinars to whoever wanted to participate. We took a very conscious decision that they’d be totally free for participants and weren’t there to ‘sell’ Rambutan in any way. We always referred to them as our ‘gift to the world’. With topics such as ‘Regaining control’ and ‘Being an effective and cohesive team in this virtual world’, we were literally blown away with both the level of participation and feedback.

In total we had over 1,200 people register for these webinars. After the huge logistical effort to make them a reality, we were cock-a-hoop to hear things like:

“Thanks for organising these webinars and offering them for free. It’s really generous of you to share your time and knowledge. I really enjoyed it.”

“I loved watching the online comments and how people really got stuck in. Kudos to you for creating that environment virtually, and in such a short space of time.”

“Please make these a regular event as they are fab!”

2D and 3D

2020 is also a year which significantly changed our ‘modus operandi’ in terms of how we interact and work with our clients. We had previously operated in a virtual (we call it 2D) world, but as a ‘people-centred’ business, the real world (3D) was where we felt most comfortable. The new reality of Zoom and Teams meant that we’ve had to switch our mindsets and significantly increase our skills and knowledge to ensure that one-to-one coaching, facilitating leadership strategy meetings, employee conferences, lessons from lockdown workshops and skills workshops all transferred seamlessly to the 2D world with the Rambutan ‘magic’ intact.

Our virtual work in 2020 can perhaps be best summarised in the latest in our series of free top tips titled Leading in virtual times.

We’re pleased to say our clients have loved how we’ve adapted our approach to the new 2D reality. We can’t put it any better than Jonathan Higgs, Chief Executive of Raven Housing Trust, who said: “Our senior leaders’ event had lots of ‘firsts’ including being our first large and truly collaborative virtual event. Rambutan created a fast-paced, engaging event that visibly developed our capabilities as the sessions progressed. Rambutan met our challenging brief, remaining agile throughout to accommodate the real-time feedback we provided.”

Relationships

My final ‘it’s not all been bad’ thought would be about the impact the pandemic had on our relationships within the Rambutan bunch. Prior to 2020, we’d only tended to come together in our main office once a month or see each other face-to-face for specific client projects. That’s all now changed. At the height of lockdown, we ensured we had a weekly (virtual) social meeting where we’d have a quiz or sometimes just tell each other jokes. Our team WhatsApp group became (and remains) highly active and a much-needed source of light relief. Our offices, now COVID-compliant, are of course still there for us when 2D doesn’t work so well.

It’s a huge testament to the principles we created at the start of the crisis (and faithfully stuck to) that we can safely say that we did indeed come out of this having done the best we could do for each other.