{"id":4667,"date":"2020-09-03T09:22:09","date_gmt":"2020-09-03T09:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spacebar.in\/contentious-old\/?p=4667"},"modified":"2020-09-03T09:22:09","modified_gmt":"2020-09-03T09:22:09","slug":"the-things-i-didnt-fk-up-during-the-lockdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacebar.in\/contentious\/the-things-i-didnt-fk-up-during-the-lockdown\/","title":{"rendered":"The Things I Didn\u2019t F**k Up During the Lockdown"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Things I Didn\u2019t F**k Up During the Lockdown<\/span><\/h1>\n

\"Alpana-talking-about-lockdown-journey-of-spacebar\"<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019re in. If it weren\u2019t for this inherent curiosity, I would have never traveled from IT to consulting to writing to marketing. And I don\u2019t plan to stop here. I hope that by the time I\u2019m a saggy old woman, I\u2019d 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 \u2013 focus on a goal and put your horse blinders on till you get there. Where\u2019s the potential to try something you may be better at? What happens if there\u2019s something else out there that\u2019ll give you far more fulfilment \u2013 but you don\u2019t even know it exists, no thanks to your blinders?<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve 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\u2019t f**k up on the way!<\/span><\/p>\n

Opening scene at the best Content Marketing Agency in Malad (SEO plug-in attempt :P)<\/span><\/h2>\n

When we opened <\/span>the Spacebar office<\/span><\/a> in June (calm down \u2013 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Flashback to March 2020<\/span><\/h2>\n

In the first week of March, the COVID murmurs had already become serious watercooler conversations. Nobody knew how deadly it would be <\/span>(\u201cIndians don\u2019t get affected by these things\u201d) <\/span><\/i>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 <\/span>(\u201cThere\u2019s no question of closing office. How will work get done?\u201d)<\/span><\/i>. Personally, I didn\u2019t want to risk being caught unawares by knee-jerk government action \u2013 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 \u2018we can\u2019t work that way\u2019 syndrome at the cost of employees\u2019 health. Even before the central government called for a lockdown, even before the Maharashtra government called for a lockdown, we locked down our office.<\/span><\/p>\n

All Hail Productivity!<\/span><\/h2>\n

In the first WFH month, I was paranoid about productivity. I didn\u2019t 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\u2019d written <\/span>\u201cFill your work tracker without manipulation. Just because your productivity is showing low, don\u2019t 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\u2019s productivity was impacted due to the coronavirus. So please don\u2019t fudge the data.\u201d<\/span><\/i> I\u2019m happy to say that empirical evidence matched with the numbers on record (a testament to our awesome team).<\/span><\/p>\n

April\u2019s Poached Eggs<\/span><\/h2>\n

There\u2019s not much of a similarity between eggs and employees except they can both get poached. Spacebar\u2019s 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\u2019d 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\u2019s eggs.<\/span><\/p>\n

Collaboration Needs Tech and Tech needs Gandhi<\/span><\/h2>\n

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 <\/span>awesome newsletters<\/span><\/a>, 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 \u2013 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 \u201cremember what the client said the other day?\u201d 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 \u2013 I mean cash, dumbos!<\/span><\/p>\n

The Slide to August<\/span><\/h2>\n

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\u2019t know what\u2019s in store for us, but I do know one thing \u2013 Spacebar will make it through. And I don\u2019t say this as an optimist, because I\u2019m not. I say this because I\u2019ve played all the scenarios in my head and even the worst one has a solution to keep the brand alive.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019re in. If it weren\u2019t for this inherent curiosity, I would have never traveled from IT to consulting to writing to marketing. And I don\u2019t plan to stop here. I hope that by the time I\u2019m a saggy old woman, I\u2019d 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 \u2013 focus on a goal and put your horse blinders on till you get there. Where\u2019s the potential to try something you may be better at? What happens if there\u2019s something else out there that\u2019ll give you far more fulfilment \u2013 but you don\u2019t even know it exists, no thanks to your blinders?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4668,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reality","category-102","description-off"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacebar.in\/contentious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacebar.in\/contentious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacebar.in\/contentious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacebar.in\/contentious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacebar.in\/contentious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spacebar.in\/contentious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4667\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacebar.in\/contentious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacebar.in\/contentious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacebar.in\/contentious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacebar.in\/contentious\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}