Today I want to talk a little bit about how you’ve treated your people, or how we’ve seen some of these companies treat their people during COVID. The transparency that we have into everyone’s business in this day and age has made it really clear that that has been a part of their marketing message.
If you’ve read my article, 5 Marketing Tips to Stay Profitable During A Pandemic, you remember that number 4 on that list was about putting your people first. So what we saw were some of the bigger companies out there were not putting their people first. They were really scared about the work from home remote concept. They felt like they had to really hold on to their people and have them physically in the office to control them and ultimately what that tells us is that that company doesn’t really trust their people. There are so many tools out there like time tracking, etc. to make sure that your team is still really effective even when they’re working from home. There’s absolutely no reason why those companies had to have that mentality. I think when we come back from this, the companies that didn't treat their people as well as they should have and didn’t put them first, are the ones that are really going to have a hard time rehiring and climbing up that marketing hill. Ultimately, because of all the transparency we have into these companies because of social media, etc. we know exactly what their marketing message was and how they were not putting their people first.
A perfect example of how we’ve treated our people - I’ve made sure to ask my team if they’re comfortable, if they feel safe, and the only time we’ll go back into the office is when they are 100% safe and secure because they are the most important part of any company. You can’t build what you want to build, you can’t scale without a team, and you can’t have a team that you don’t trust.
So, just an example of how a marketing message is conveyed maybe unintentionally through these strange days. Ultimately, the takeaway is to put your people first and to make sure that they feel super safe, comfortable and confident.