These are challenging times for everyone. First and foremost, the safety and wellbeing of our families, people, clients and community is paramount.  At BRS, we are adapting and finding ways to adjust to our new normal just like the rest of the world and our clients.

All organisations have been impacted, some more than others and we are fortunate to work with so many clients who are embracing technology to be flexible, gain a competitive edge and enable business to continue as much as possible. Of course, this is not without its challenges, but there are a number of strategies that can be put in place to ensure that we are all collectively continuing to deliver infrastructure and other organisational priorities during these challenging times. Maintaining momentum is the key particularly for our government clients as keeping business going is critical to keeping small businesses, your supply chain and people employed and the economy moving.

Some of the strategies you can look to undertake and how we are using them internally and with our clients include:

• Remote working – Use technology to support your people to work from home. Work to ensure that your team have the technology in place to do this well.  Investigate and get familiar with software such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Go-to-meeting. Test headsets and microphones to make sure that they are working.   Grant people access to remote servers so that they can continue to do their job in a collaborative manner.
• Checking in with your team members – Find a way to check in with your team on a regular basis.  Organise an agreed regular virtual catch up daily through a team huddle or a regular check in.  This may only be for 10 minutes, but it helps keeps connection and ensure people are clear on priorities which are changing daily.
• Challenge your ways of working – Look at how you can do things differently and more efficiently.   Challenge your ways of working and where you have been focusing your attention. People need to remain adaptable, and the way we did things before, may not work now and in the future.  Opportunities and by products of this situation may present for you and your organisation.
• Constructive leadership is vital – Your people need support, but now more than ever, so do leaders.  With so much uncertainty and change, leaders are being asked to provide support and role model constructive behaviours.  In order to achieve this, leaders too must be supported during these times.  Continue to offer training, workshops and self-development coaching and mentoring where you can, admittedly in a different manner.  Many of the leaders we coach are embracing a virtual debrief and coaching sessions as it enables them to get clear on their priorities, have a supportive voice in their corner and help define what type of leader they want to be during these challenging times.
• Balance the short term with the long term view –
  • For government organisations, keep procurements and projects moving and on track to ensure that when we recover from Covid-19, there are projects in the pipeline to get people working.  Your role is critical in making this happen for your supply chain partners, service providers and wider community.
  • For contractors, make sure that your organisation isn’t starting from scratch when projects and bids do ramp up.  Get clearer on your winning bid strategies and use the downtime effectively as a competitive advantage.  At BRS, we working with a number of bid teams to keep this vital momentum going.  This means we can still facilitate virtual workshops, one on one coaching on your bids as well as peer review of your submission and the development of other key documents that are critical to winning your bids. This could be the difference between winning and losing an important project.
• Planning, preparations and responses required for different scenarios  –  Covid-19 may have already highlighted where some gaps are in your preparation, planning and response for your organisation or projects.  It is an opportune time to look at your business continuity and risk management processes. We’ve been working with a number of clients across a range of sectors to ensure their organisation is up to date with their plans and that they are equipped to put these plans into action when needed.
• Use the downtime to undertake online training within your organisation as an opportunity – If time has been a constraint in the past, now is the opportunity to equip your people with the skills they need.  We have been ramping up our Learning Management System (LMS) with our clients to enable us to continue to deliver our commercial acumen training to equip your people with the skills needs to better drive commercial capability within their organisation, now and in the future.    This can also extend to leadership, team development, lessons learnt and other scenarios where your people need training and support.

For BRS, we are making the shift from working face to face to working online and we are seeing a number of opportunities.  We feel that companies who can adapt to online working quickly during the next six months can create a permanent competitive advantage.   We have detailed actual examples below of how this is currently being used by our clients to get ahead of the game.

We would love the opportunity to continue to work with you over the coming weeks and months in ensuring that we all get through this period together as one team. We are here to support you in any way we can, so please reach out if we can help.   Our team will be working from home as of 25 March 2020 and moving to a four day week, but we can still be contacted via +61 8 8212 5752 or enquiries@brsresults.com

Thanks again for your support and we look forward to continuing to work with you.