The Things I Didn’t F**k Up During the Lockdown

Life has to be exploratory for one to experience joy. Be curious and say yes to new opportunities if you think they can help you pick up a new skill, expose you to something new, or simply break the rut that you’re in. If it weren’t for this inherent curiosity, I would have never traveled from IT to consulting to writing to marketing. And I don’t plan to stop here. I hope that by the time I’m a saggy old woman, I’d have gotten my hands dirty on at least three more professional areas. Sadly, the standard mode of functioning for this world has become very linear – focus on a goal and put your horse blinders on till you get there. Where’s the potential to try something you may be better at? What happens if there’s something else out there that’ll give you far more fulfilment – but you don’t even know it exists, no thanks to your blinders?

I’ve carried this perspective to my management style at Spacebar too. It has allowed us to explore new work opportunities without too much hassle and enabled team members to discover their competencies. Luckily, when COVID and the lockdown hit, it also allowed us to explore new ways of collaborating and delivering successfully. This blog post is about that story of exploration and the things I could have but didn’t f**k up on the way!

Opening scene at the best Content Marketing Agency in Malad (SEO plug-in attempt :P)

When we opened the Spacebar office in June (calm down – for select employees, for a couple days a week), all our office plants may have died but our business was still alive. What a perfect metaphor to how things have been lately! Some pieces have come crashing down but others continue to lift our organization up. 

Flashback to March 2020

In the first week of March, the COVID murmurs had already become serious watercooler conversations. Nobody knew how deadly it would be (“Indians don’t get affected by these things”) or whether the government was seriously planning to take preventive measures. In my network of SME entrepreneurs, I heard statements on how office had to keep functioning (“There’s no question of closing office. How will work get done?”). Personally, I didn’t want to risk being caught unawares by knee-jerk government action – an 8 pm speech has become the norm for throwing us in the deep end of the pool. Additionally, I was averse to the whole ‘we can’t work that way’ syndrome at the cost of employees’ health. Even before the central government called for a lockdown, even before the Maharashtra government called for a lockdown, we locked down our office.

All Hail Productivity!

In the first WFH month, I was paranoid about productivity. I didn’t want people having no work to do (or slacking off) and so we set up a daily call system. Team leads would have a 1:1 or 1:m call with their team members to discuss what was done for the last 8 hours and what was planned for the next 8. Then, I would get on 1:1 calls with each team lead to do the same. Every day for the next couple of months, we followed this process without fail to set the tone. We also have a productivity tracker where people log their time and work; and this helped me look at the overall monthly scenario. I remember one context-setting email where I’d written “Fill your work tracker without manipulation. Just because your productivity is showing low, don’t add hours to projects. Remember I said we have strong processes? These processes rely on accurate data. It would be helpful for me to see how our organisation’s productivity was impacted due to the coronavirus. So please don’t fudge the data.” I’m happy to say that empirical evidence matched with the numbers on record (a testament to our awesome team).

April’s Poached Eggs

There’s not much of a similarity between eggs and employees except they can both get poached. Spacebar’s senior-most egg got picked up by a bigger company (well-deserved jump in his career) and we had this gaping hole at the top of our org tree bang in the middle of lockdown. As providence would have it, though, I was already in the process of doing my own share of poaching by welcoming in a new Associate Director (I’d been exploring that ever since he left Spacebar a few years back) and it worked out just fine. So, while others baked their sourdoughs and brewed their dalgonas, us agency people were all poaching each other’s eggs.

Collaboration Needs Tech and Tech needs Gandhi

Sure, we were using video and Google Drive and what not to collaborate and deliver. But one large project was getting hard to manage during the lockdown. It was a digital marketing retainership that included social media, sending awesome newsletters, running ads, managing SEO and more. I could see milestones being missed and deliverables being forgotten in the barrage of WhatsApp messages. This is typical when you use a chat platform for running a project – messages overlap and priorities get mixed. The problem used to be preempted thanks to conversations in office and meetings with the client in a pre-COVID era. But not being able to have small talk now meant nobody talked about “remember what the client said the other day?” When more and more similar mistakes started cropping up, I was convinced it was a process, not people, issue. I was cautious to explore investments in tech at a time when business was unpredictable, but it was worth maintaining our professionalism. For those still trying to figure out the Gandhi reference – I mean cash, dumbos!

The Slide to August

As I write this blog post, our monthly revenues are 50% lower than what they were in April. The last few months have been tougher than the beginning of the lockdown because of diminishing market hope and confidence. With every passing month, one more client pulled out or paused work. One more client asked for a discount. Some clients shut shop. We may not be bursting with money, but with the support of every person working at Spacebar, we stay afloat. I don’t know what’s in store for us, but I do know one thing – Spacebar will make it through. And I don’t say this as an optimist, because I’m not. I say this because I’ve played all the scenarios in my head and even the worst one has a solution to keep the brand alive.

And so we shall explore this terrain too because life has to be exploratory for one to experience joy. And sometimes, joy is not immediate, but lies at the end of an inconvenient journey where sometimes you f**k up and sometimes you don’t.