As a company, listening to our stakeholders' pulse, leading with empathy, and communicating with clarity are what enable success in a sustained pandemic that disrupts people.

Most companies had risk management teams and thought through contingency plans for responding to a disaster. However, most of these plans assumed compromised locations and were moving work to other sites. They did not consider a global pandemic that disrupts people being able to work rather than just a work location. The human aspect is, therefore, the most critical lens to view this pandemic through.

In the uncertain environment of a long-running, evolving pandemic crisis, the best companies will be those that are nimble and can continuously sense and respond to the evolving situations. The role of communication becomes critical as people adjust to the reality of working from home.

All companies have multiple vital stakeholders. Maintaining connections and having a pulse on existing internal and external stakeholders is hard but critical. Building connections with new ones, however, poses an even more significant challenge.

The virtual world brings in a distance from the organization and leaves employees disconnected from various aspects. Throw in fear of uncertain market conditions, many businesses facing a slowdown, news of job cuts, and salary deductions; the situation quickly starts to raise anxiety. Clear and constant communication is therefore needed to bring clarity and reduce stress across all stakeholders, especially your employees.

Communication needs to be authentic and must accurately define reality, not send mixed messages, and layout steps based on facts rather than speculations and opinions.

Implementing Business Continuity Plan (BCP) as the first communication to guide our staff, their work, and ensure business as usual:

Reacting early to the news of COVID-19 spreading across the world, especially in Europe, where we have a delivery center, we sprang into action to prepare for what was coming. Our highest priority then and throughout this pandemic has been to ensure the safety and well-being of our employees. Next, we took steps to ensure our business remained operational even while our associates are adjusting to working remotely due to physical distancing. Throughout, we made our clients aware of internal actions taken to ensure continuity. The business continuity taskforce worked swiftly to move all our associates, operations, processes, and communications to suit the Work-from-home (WFH) regime. As per our plan, we first moved our already-enabled associates to start WFH, gradually had the rest of our associates WFH, and secured additional hardware as necessary, which was delivered to their homes.

The initial communication, as we took charge of the situation, set a positive tone that continued to serve us well in Lockdown 2.0, 3.0, and now in Lockdown 4.0. As we speak, from Lockdown 1.0 to now 4.0, 95% of our workforce is fully equipped to work from their homes. Multiple support teams are working tirelessly to ensure ease of business.

Easing stakeholders through the transition with a unique series of communication dedicated to work and life during COVID-19:

At SE2 India, we created multiple new channels of communication to keep our employees as well as our clients informed. With our associates, the emphasis remained around updates related to the overall situation at each of our office locations, precaution, and prevention during the pandemic, maintaining the virtual connection through this physical distancing phase, managing self through the challenges of WFH, and leading others through this. With our clients, the relationship managers were in constant communication to share SE2's preparedness and related actions around the COVID-19 situation – this included details around the situation at each of office location, and how are we ensuring associate safety and business continuity. The understanding and collaboration by our 25+ US life and annuity insurance clients have been an example in partnership.

Even within the virtual world, the Leadership ensuring an open-door culture:

Like many organizations, SE2 is continually looking at innovative measures to keep their staff motivated and ensure that they are looked after from an emotional, mental, and physical well-being point of view.

The SE2 India Leadership proactively took stringent safety measures within and around the workplace and continued an open line of communication with the associates and the clients. The leadership team enabled themselves to be available on various communication channels like instant messaging, video conferencing, enterprise social networking tools, and other possible means (including constant 1:1 phone calls between leaders, managers, and employees). Our Leadership communications focus on being fact-based, responsive, and consistent to ensure that our associates and clients feel aware and assured of our decisions. We are lucky that all of our clients are real partners, and they feel aware of how we are making decisions and managing their work and are both supportive and appreciative.

Focusing on positive messaging and overall associate well-being:

One of our communication initiatives was to create an internal campaign focused on positivity and wellness, which was both educational & engaging. The campaign reflected details about the importance of making behavioural changes related to hygiene and physical distancing. All communication rollouts additionally carried information and updates from trusted global and local sources. We acknowledged that managing teams in such unprecedented times require new skills, and we launched a weekly series for controlling while virtual. We quickly created and housed all our COVID-19 communications in one central location in our Intranet so that employees can refer to them as needed. On our enterprise social network, we ran multiple fun activities asking people to share the positive side of lockdown, including reviving their hobbies, spending time with family, serving the needy, etc.

This campaign has helped us in engaging our associates and raising their happiness and trust quotient to the highest level in a short time.

Continuing on our honour commitments to all our stakeholders, including our potential candidates:

All through this difficult phase, we have managed to honour our commitments – not make any job cuts even when working from home has not been an option or very productive for a few of our employees.

We have been actively recruiting for open positions as per our plans and requirements. We have seamlessly e-onboarded multiple new employees and enabled WFH for them that underlines both our preparedness and the availability of technology and processes to do this. We also continue to honour our commitments to our campus recruits, both interns and permanent hires, despite some delays in allowing for the lockdowns.

Overall, our learnings have been that staying focused on our purpose, as a company, listening to our stakeholders' pulse, leading with empathy, and communicating with clarity are what enable success in a sustained pandemic that disrupts people.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article above are those of the authors' and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of this publishing house