Skip to content
Spacebar
Top Content Marketing Agency in Mumbai
Spacebar
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Featured Work
  • In the News
  • Our Clients
  • Services
    • Content Writing
    • Digital Marketing
    • Social media
    • Visual Creatives
    • Performance Marketing
Let's Talk
close
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Featured Work
  • In the News
  • Our Clients
  • Services
    • Content Writing
    • Digital Marketing
    • Social media
    • Visual Creatives
    • Performance Marketing

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

You are here:
  1. Home
  2. Reality
  3. The Things I Didn’t F**k…
Sep32020
RealityAlpana-talking-about-lockdown-journey-of-spacebar

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

Alpana-talking-about-lockdown-journey-of-spacebar

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.

Category: RealityBy Tristan FernandesSeptember 3, 2020Leave a comment
Share this post
Share on XShare on X Pin itShare on Pinterest Share on FacebookShare on Facebook Share on LinkedInShare on LinkedIn

Author: Tristan Fernandes

Post navigation

PreviousPrevious post:What Your Digital Marketing Plan Should be like Until a Vaccine is DevelopedNextNext post:The Power of Community Marketing: How Brands Thrive with Online Communities

Related Posts

Modi-image
The Current Indian Government is a trend-setter for Viral Political Campaigns
November 11, 2020
content writing agency
Silly Homophonic Mistakes Writers Make
March 27, 2019
Synopsis Writing for History and Drama
Synopsis Writing: History & Drama
January 18, 2019
Interactive Content Marketing
Latest Trends in Content Marketing
January 17, 2019
Reviews for
How to Manage Negative Comments and Reviews?
January 14, 2019
A content writing company in Mumbai wants its writers to avoid the writer's block.
5 ways to beat writer’s block
June 27, 2018

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Post comment

  • The Cost of Hiring a Content Writer in India: What to Expect
  • Top Content Writing Services in Mumbai for Businesses That Want to Grow
  • Data-Driven Storytelling: Using Analytics to Shape Compelling Content
  • How to Make Engaging Social Media Posts: Proven Strategies for Every Platform
  • B2B Content Marketing in India for Manufacturers [Revised 2025]
Tags
B2B content marketing B2C Content Marketing being a writer best way to be creative content Content creation Content for website content marketing Content marketing agencies content marketing agency content marketing agency in india content marketing agency in Mumbai Content marketing in India content marketing strategy Content marketing trends content solutions Content Writing Content writing agencies Content writing agency Content writing agency in India Content Writing Agency In Mumbai content writing company Content writing in India Content writing in Mumbai Content writing services Content writing services in India creative Daily soaps digital age digital marketing How to write IT online marketing SEO Small business social media social media for business Spacebar Start up Synopsis Writing Technology TV shows TV synopsis writer Writing
Paris
Paris
Paris

Home


Blogs


About Us


In the News


Contact Us


Privacy policy

Spacebar, 21st Floor, 
We Work, Oberoi Commerz II, 
Mohan Gokhale Rd, Colony No 2, 
Aarey Colony, Goregaon (E), 
Mumbai – 400063
 
support@spacebar.in

Subscribe to our Newsletter

    Paris
    Paris
    Paris

    Home


    Blogs


    About Us


    Contact Us


    Privacy policy

    Spacebar, 21st Floor, 
    We Work, Oberoi Commerz II, 
    Mohan Gokhale Rd, Colony No 2, 
    Aarey Colony, Goregaon (E), 
    Mumbai – 400063

    Subscribe to our Newsletter

      Marketing Budget Calculator

      Download the detailed case study now!

      Learn how they achieved success with our marketing solutions.

        Download the detailed case study now!

        Learn how they achieved success with our marketing solutions.

          Download the detailed case study now!

          Learn how they achieved success with our marketing solutions.