An open letter to my team amidst COVID
Rich Chapman, CEO at Bastion Effect and Bastion China, looks at how COVID-19 has impacted work/life balance at the agency and the longterm changes he hopes the pandemic will have on work culture.
I recently reflected on an email I sent my team back in May as COVID-19 started to impact our business.
Six months later and all I want to do is bring the team together in person here in Melbourne, fly up to see our Sydney crew, grab a bite of lunch with a client, go to an event or function, bounce ideas off each other in the office, bunker down in a meeting room and pull together a new business presentation or just sit around and enjoy a drink or two on a Friday afternoon to celebrate the week just gone.
We have experienced a lot of firsts during this time – we have pitched for new business over Teams or Zoom, we have onboarded new team members who we have never met in person, we have adapted our ways of working with our clients and agency partners, we have said goodbye to others without a fitting farewell, there are new dogs, new partners and even a new baby on the way and it’s all those things that we would normally experience together that we have had to tackle often individually and in a very different way.
