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14 / 12 / 20

We were ready for COVID-19

Way back at the start of the year when the whispers of the COVID-19 pandemic in China began. I remember not taking it too seriously and just carrying on with life as I knew it.

With the news of the virus spreading like wildfire, in the best interests of our team within the business, we made an early decision to shut up shop. A decision that was actually one week earlier than the official government shutdown, to protect the team’s welfare. We began working from home, for what we expected to be a month…

For many businesses, it has been a constant challenge of not knowing what direction the World has been going in. Forever changing rules, social distancing, having to learn all about “zoom”, two lockdowns and three tiers – it’s awfully hard to really deliver structure for your team during these times.

Digital Agility

With the amount of uncertainty going on in the World and the change to our very way of life, you may think large scale changes were required here at Formation.

We have always had a digital mindset. It is engrained into our culture. Digitisation is what we deliver to our clients, and we practice what we preach.

All of our processes are paperless, and the entirety of our business can be managed from anywhere in the World using our own, in-house developed software platform and CRM, Glowt. This truly delivers a structure to our team that gives them the security of knowing what they are working on and the current status of jobs.

Glowt delivers structure

  • It is our ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system
  • We manage the life-cycle of our jobs across 7 departments from client brief, studio scheduling, producing the work, to completion and invoicing
  • Production and project management
  • Human Resources dashboard including holiday booking system
  • Sales tool enabling leads to be generated, tracked with the ability to create online quotations
formation culture graphic within our COVID-19 article.

This digital infrastructure has allowed us to continue working and completing numerous projects across a range of industry sectors including:

We are very proud to announce Formation has made zero redundancies of our twenty-person team during these testing times. In fact, we have recruited and employed two further team members:

  • Web Developer, Azeem Khan
  • Junior Software Developer, Hector Van Smirren

You may say “we are lucky”. But we aren’t, this isn’t chance. We were ready for this. Above all, our digital platforms, team of competitive winners and our ISO 9001 certified processes are what has allowed us to thrive during this pandemic.

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This article is part of a 3-part series on our pro-active culture at Formation Media during COVID-19. They initiated after getting some great feedback from the team after an engagement session – a lunchtime online quiz which has now become a weekly occurrence! I thought initially the topic and theme would be about how difficult life has been during the pandemic. I then realised that thanks to the digital structure, combined with an engrained culture of agility and learning, it has allowed us to thrive as an organisation.

Dan
Written by Dan Studio Manager