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We were also fortunate that we had about 25% of our people and 40% of our senior leadership team working remotely from home on a permanent basis before the crisis began, which meant we already had some very productive and flexible remote-working processes in place and we had some lessons learned that we could apply immediately.

That said, we could see clearly this would be a big change for the remaining majority of our employees who had been working almost exclusively in one of our several regional offices, so we conducted a survey of our people asking what was happening for them, what was working and what was not, and what they needed from us. We also asked people about their home working environment to ensure whether they felt it was a safe environment from their perspective. We allowed those who needed to take office equipment home as needed, such as chairs and computer monitors.

We also increased the frequency of our global senior leadership team meetings to ensure we could respond to the rapidly changing requirements in each jurisdiction, and we increased our communication with our frontline leaders to ensure we shared and received feedback relevant to each team and location on a regular basis.

Establish someone who is locally responsible for communication

As an international business with people located in 13 different countries, but a small core team, one of the first moves we made was naming a primary point of contact for each region responsible for the communication about COVID-19 with people in their region. This enabled us to get local assistance and visibility in each of our locations and provided us with localisation of our communications to help manage the situation in the local languages. It also gave us an early close-up view of local legislation and news, as we were seeing that each of our regional offices were being required by local authorities to close at different moments. Our regional reps also helped us to aggregate and understand the safety considerations for offices that remained open and to have better visibility into the productivity and wellbeing considerations for those workers who were beginning to work remotely for the first time.

Be accommodating when an exception can be made

Moving so quickly to remote working was challenging for everyone, but we learned that certain individuals had extreme challenges and not everyone can actually work from home, particularly if their workload cannot be accomplished at home or if there are mental health or family situation factors that make it difficult or impossible to work productively from home. We’ve been able to accommodate some of our people by allowing them to remain working in our offices where safe and permitted by the local authorities.

Be vocal about wellbeing and mental health

We have made a conscious effort to place [an] emphasis on mental health and wellness during this time and we’re learning how each person reacts and responds differently to threats and crisis, moving through change curves at different rates.

We have taken time to discuss and gain an understanding what it’s like, for example, for those people who live in small apartments with kids no longer able to go to school, which means that normal work hours and regular check ins can be challenging. As a global business, we have been flexible in not just where work is done, but when, to help ease the pressure on our people.

Additional Lessons Learned About Achieving Business Resilience in a Crisis:

• Focus on Maintaining Productivity: Authorise flexible-working policies and ensure access to technology.

• Remain Informed: Monitor market intelligence across geographies and your industry. Sign up to free legal updates from your local law firm partners and seek specialist advice where necessary.

• Implement Communication Technology: Flexible communications requires using the right tools for the right groups internally

There’s no single communication tactic or work schedule that works best for everyone, but we’ve placed emphasis on the timely flow of communication from our People & Culture team and from our leadership team as new developments have arisen. We’ve chosen to be as transparent and clear in our messaging as possible, and we have taken feedback from the organization about our communications into consideration to ensure our messaging going forward attempts to accurately reflect what was intended by our Chairman and Founder for clarity and confidence.

Looking ahead – preparing for a return to the office

It’s still too early to know where the dust will settle on COVID-19, especially when we account for the differences in each region. According to a recent Gartner HR survey, 41% of employees are likely to work remotely at least some of the time post-pandemic. Similarly, we’re asking ourselves here at Soprano whether there has been a fundamental shift happening in our business to a greater percentage of our workforce working part-time or permanently remotely.

Our lessons learned from the lockdowns during this period and any productivity gains we’ve observed from increased remote working should not be lost if we’re to not only survive but thrive through the next big challenge.