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CEO Venga
Albert Einstein stated, “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” These words are certainly true today as we start to venture back to the NEW normal. Venga is fortunate to have a culture of working remotely combined with a robust and secure online infrastructure. When Covid-19 hit, we could start looking at the future very quickly.
Here is what we focused on:
Community: staff, clients, partners, family, friends, and each of us individually, we all need to be safe and come together online to stay sane.
Agility: with economic and health uncertainties still impacting us, it’s important to be able to change quickly. Budgets and plans become BI forecasting instruments to guide your company, but not to hold you back.
Opportunity: for change and growth. As the world moved online in days, we all now have more time. This is an important ingredient needed for change in areas like technology, NMT/AI/ML, and M&A.
Future: we know that Covid-19 too will pass, and we must be ready on the other side. Use the time today to invest in you and yours. Start the journey to where you always wanted to be and don’t focus on the difficulties.
In short, the initial negative impact has been outweighed by the many positive opportunities.
We pivoted from a 0 to a 1, but unlike binary code I believe the pandemic will still impact us for a large part of 2021. However, there is one big difference - now we are prepared. Even though Venga was well set up from a working-remote standpoint, in 2020, we had to adjust large parts of our sales & marketing plans. Live events were off the table, so we needed to up our digital marketing, virtual events, webinars, and global communication game. In response, we launched our Global Corporate Citizen Program, a new Venga AI website and suite of tools and services, a new Workday Global Change Management rollout portal, and our new series of webinars and other digital campaigns. By August, many of our customers had adapted as well and we started to sign new clients that we hadn’t met face to face before. I think this is the new reality for 2021. More and more of what used to be face2face can now be screen2screen. In 2021, we are ready to expand and optimize on our 2020 initiatives. We will also take on new virtual initiatives such as launching the “Global Ambitions” podcast as a learning resource for the localization community and preparing for “back-to-normal” activities later in 2021. We remain agile and adaptive and create new opportunities in this new environment.
Those of us that remember the book “Who moved my cheese” know that the sooner you adapt to the new situation the sooner you achieve success and benefit from the new reality. Here are a few points to consider when navigating 2021.
• Everyone’s experience of the Covid crisis is different but we all agree that it is a major shift in how we live our lives. This can trigger big life decisions around location, careers, and relationships. I believe Covid increased the focus towards work/life balance and it is important to be aware and to be open to such discussions with colleagues and staff. Seek flexible solutions and be creative.
• Don’t underestimate the mental strain on you and your colleagues of working from home, maybe alone. The negative impact of not meeting people is real and we need to actively support each other to combat this stress. Consider regular meetings, reaching out for short “camera on” online chats, or investing in more formal wellness programs.
• Covid has shifted larger organisations' remote working environment policies too. Remote working is becoming an expectation when hiring new talent. The reliance on a physical location is gone and everyone is ready to work across borders and time zones.
Covid “moved our cheese” and we better move too if we want to stay strong in 2021 and beyond.