The former CEO of Intel, Andy Grove, once said, “Bad companies are destroyed by crises, good companies survive them, great companies thrive on them.”
I agree with this 100%. The last eighteen months has been a challenging time for everyone but it’s essential to view these challenges not as problems but as opportunities. It’s the only way as a business leader that you can continue to take your business forward.
If you don’t, you’ll be beaten before you’ve even started.
Over the years, I’ve run businesses through recessions, depressions, and downturns, including through the Three Day Week in the 1970s when we couldn’t even supply our businesses with power or electricity. There was no furlough scheme, government grants or modern technology to help us get through.
But we survived. The important thing is to see the opportunity in the challenge and find new avenues to explore.
At Peninsula we’ve continued to invest in our management team during this period and we’ve not made any redundancies. As a result we aren’t scrambling to hire staff now things are moving back to normal.
We’ve also invested further in our Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) to ensure our staff are looked after. That’s something all businesses can do just for the price of a cup of coffee per employee per day.
We invested heavily in our IT programme, both to ensure we could maintain service levels during the pandemic and to make us more efficient and productive going forward. That’s paying off now too.
And we’ve invested in new features on the Bright HR platform to make sure we could respond to our customers’ needs quickly in an ever changing business environment where new issues arose every day. For example we came up with and developed our VaccTrak product to help businesses monitor which of their employees have had the vaccine and to help educate them as to the benefits and reasons why they should get vaccinated.
This product has been a game changer for many businesses as they try to encourage all their staff to have the jabs.
As a consequence of treating the difficult situation of the past eighteen months as an opportunity rather than an obstacle, we’ve come through stronger and more efficient, providing an even better service to our customers.
Obstacles are there to be overcome.
Whether you’re interested in learning more about an EAP for your employees or VaccTrack, then speak to your advice team today.
