How International Leaders are Rebuilding During COVID

[Music] so [Applause] so [Music] in this period agency life has been put under lots of pressure pitching from from home with your daughter calling you because it's time to play together it's not as easy like preaching in a super duper office uh doing an appraisal via screen by a video conference uh separated by a screen it's not like doing an appraisal or giving an appraisal face-to-face but i believe that we have all learned much more than this for instance we have all learned to work around our own clock why for example an early bird person like myself has to devote the most productive part of the day being stuck in the rush hour traffic there is no sense i can easily organize my agenda differently having the first video call before getting into the car so maybe i can get into the car an hour later and avoid the horrible traffic jams that are common around all the major cities around the world and that one is not a detail that one is a fundamental change that we all we can all learn this one is something that is happening is not just for leaders it's happening for everybody and this new agility and this new model will change for good the way we will work of course don't get me wrong there are things that are not negotiable there are lots of things that we can do from remote but some things are not negotiable major client presentations are not negotiable needs to be delivered in person because we are human beings we are not just a bunch of pixels major pitches made like exactly like major client presentation i will always stress that all those kind of activities will be delivered in person i want my christmas party to be in person i don't want a christmas party via whatsapp or something like that no way i want my annual convention to be a physical annual convention and all sorts of things but to summarize what we have learned in all this process i can definitely say that as a ceo now more than ever our role is no longer the chiefing commander the man who decide what's good and what's wrong we need to be much better at becoming a chief enabling officer ceo chief enabling officer because our people have demonstrated a huge deal of responsibility passion for the company passion for the clients passion for themselves and their colleagues and this is something that really makes me proud of my agency in over these uh very turbulent unexpected and scary period that finally seems to be over so 2020 will be a year to remember for good and bad reasons we will definitely have a 21 so as i always say to my people let's go through this 2020 together let's employ this time use this time to be better and be ready to restart faster and get back at our usual growth that we have demonstrated to be able to deliver to our to our stakeholders and shareholders over the last uh six years kavi entered my consciousness on january 30th when we had the first two cases of chinese tourists diagnosed in rome and then became top of the agenda on february 20th when we had the first outbreak in north italy the day after on february 21st i clearly remember that we instructed all our employees to go home take their laptop with them because safety of our employees has always been number one and that one was the beginning of unexpected uncertain scary times and six months down the line now we can maybe take some learnings with us and move forward covet situation now is much better in italy i recently spent one week holiday with my family in sicily and it was it was actually everything was very well organized you cannot enter in any kind of shop even an ice cream shop or a new stand without wearing a mask uh most interesting i noticed that because of khalid actually some businesses like public beaches for instance they took a giant leap in terms of services it's now possible to book your own spot you actually pick up your own specific spot on the on a public beach and you get a code qr code online and you access through your mobile public speech something which was literally impossible to foresee just a year ago this experience has challenged the very basic foundation and assumption of modern society people and the working environment in all these three areas i can definitely say that agility is the new black as simple as that as human beings we have been flooded overnight by all sorts of emotions but as business leaders we need to remember that we own our emotions they don't own us it's up to us to control them emotions are key i don't believe as that as business leader is simply a dry number driven person not at all emotions are crucial in our role are definitely crucials in our role but emotions are useful because they tell us what we care about they're in a world of flooded of data they actually can be considered our data entry point because they tell exactly what we care about and overnight everything has changed and this is why it is crucial for business leader to be able to articulate and manage its emotion like every other person in the business we have been facing different feelings in different moments sometimes even during the same the same day so that one is crucial and as business leader we tend to control everything we need to be we need to be aware of everything that is going on and you need to be accountable for everything that is happening but as a human beings we need to remember that we can only control the controllables hi this is vivian from widening candy shanghai my first corvette 19 moment happened in late jan when we were about to have a chinese new year holiday which is like christmas in the west so we all flew back to our hometown to see our family then the lockdown happened and the public holiday was extended and then extended and further extended and we started to realize that we were going to work from home for quite a long while most projects were on hope at the time but we felt like we got to do something proactively otherwise people got too stressful or like depressed stuck at home watching on our news 16 hours a day so we had our team proactively doing strategic and creative ideas for client we tasked our people to work on in-house project that we were too busy to do last year and then one team initiated a project called you can't master smile because at that time everyone was required by law to wear a mask and our neighborhood at that time was like also very empty and smaller because of the lockdown so we want to do something simple and cheerful to bring the smiles back we sneak back to our office and turn our gym into an ad hoc photo booth where we photo photograph our people and then we photoshop and swap that smile on top of each other's productive mask to create this happy visual we also cover our building windows with all these pictures and then turn our whole building into a giant auto billboard as we are just across the coronavirus hospital we hope that we can cheat up the patient there hindsight that was the best thing we have done during that very stressful time first of all our people were happy that they could do something for others during that time it also distracted us from worries and horrifying news it also turned our neighborhood you know i turned out our neighborhood really loved it some small shops and restaurants joined us then like some local dumpling chain store joined us and then some brands like gab and bose and alibaba also join us the hashtag eventually like the hashtag of you can't mask a smile eventually um reached over 1 million on weibo which is the biggest chinese social media platform here it has it has like became a movement that we didn't plan for it at all so uh what's going on now we are back to the office for three months and life in shanghai and most of china is almost back to normal now shops and restaurants are all open business resumed local production came back and everyone is trying to chase back that six-month speed bump we just got over so luckily we are getting busy again um what we have learned from this experience is that our creativity and productive productivity didn't drop during the lockdown to our surprise it actually we actually got a lot done because we got a lot more focus working at home it make us like really look at our working space and wonder is our open office to open uh shall we build a more focused area when people want to like you know concentrate it can like block out destruction shall we let more people work from home or at least like you know make it flexible for people to choose in the future also some of our creative directors are right now still stuck overseas uh as china hasn't opened its gate yet however the facts that they managed to work remotely with their team here and even directors and production houses across the world completely open open our mind to how flexible a creative and productivity process could be all these learnings inspire us to evolve in a new way of working which supports our people to work and present and produce in hybrid ways whether we are from home from office from the balcony of our parents house or from overseas it is almost certain that the second wave will heat and by the time we will be much more ready for it that's what we believe in thank you it was early january to mid-january when covert started coming into my consciousness it was an unusual time in australia which is where i'm based because we'd just gone through a christmas of devastating bushfires all the way up the east coast and they'd continued into january so there was a lot going on in our environment at that time but i particularly remember probably by mid-january that the news coming out of china and thinking about how that was going to affect us and then we started to see cases in australia and new zealand as well during february um the way in which our business reacted to that was to look at the different parts of the business that we felt were perhaps going to be challenged if we did have to go down into a lockdown situation and looked at the obvious ones across the creative agencies and digital agencies which were production and studio we put together a task force and one person led that from one of the agencies and brought all the production managers and directors together they looked at process technology requirements and what we would need to do to solve for them we also took that same method uh with our data leads and our investment leads across media so that happened throughout february and then we we got into march and those first two weeks of march were really really intense uh that's when it all started to ramp up we were really lucky at publicis because in the end of 2019 we'd actually launched our flexibility approach called publicist liberty and this was a flexibility approach based on six behaviours so the behaviors were trust one another set your own boundaries communicate effectively focus on outputs uh use texture advantage and we saw a lot of that um through covert that was on steroids and also the last one which was we're all different which i think is really really important to remember so we had that foundation and that was a massive organizational change with training from senior leaders down to every person across the publicist group in anz we had toolkits made ready to go and we had about 40 percent of staff accessing publicist liberty in the first half of this year so we walked into covert with that as a really solid foundation so when it got to uh it was the week beginning 17th of march is when we mobilized everyone to start working from home and we did that within three days so i think we surprised ourselves uh how smooth that process went pretty much that weekend the new zealand government went into street lockdown so they went down into a lockdown where you could only leave the house if it was for essential school no kids in schools so it was a lot more restrictive than the australian lockdown where people could still move around we could go and get takeaway food or coffee and so there was quite a market difference so we were really watching new zealand very carefully and uh communicating daily with with our team there on what we would be doing um they're in a much better place than us so if we look now to how the health situation of covert is across our region it's a really a mixed bag so you've got new zealand who's pretty much eradicated covers so the few cases they do have are from returning travelers uh in quarantine and really they're able to be back at work so we've opened the offices we have 90 of staff back some of them are working blended but most of them are coming into the office at least some point during the week and then you look to australia which is different depending on where you live in australia so in our melbourne offices we haven't been able to go back to work because they've had another surge of covert cases they've gone back down into lockdown in sydney and brisbane we've opened up our offices to those who want to voluntarily come back into the office and i would say we have about 15 to 20 of staff as we speak there are clusters uh showing up around new south wales which is a state in which sydney's in so we're bracing ourselves for what that means next when we're looking at rethinking the way we're going to work and how we work going forward i think what's really important is is separating out the during covert period and the post during covert there is a heightened level of anxiety and fear which is completely understandable people's lives are at stake their family their friends post covered once we are there it's a different state it's a different emotional state and people's choices will be different so i think uh when we're looking at what our publicist liberty version two is and how that evolves that's something where we're putting that filter over it definitely there's probably four things that uh i think we would definitely want to make sure we incorporate pretty much a week into going into lockdown and shut down and working from home we created something called publicist bench and this was off the back of our tersa dune our global ceo really asking us to look inside publicists for talent during this period and keeping the jobs inside publicist and really protecting our people and our jobs so we created publicist bench which enabled us to use staff from different agencies across publicist group in anz to work on different projects and different jobs across the group this was hugely successful so successful that it was picked up by publicist group and spread globally across the different regions and you know save thousands of jobs across the group and locally in our market are close to 100 jobs by using um public suspense the the event that's really solidified public suspense has been um the rollout of marcel for those of you who don't know um our global ceo arter so doom launched marcel which is a connected platform for our people back in 2017 we have now launched it out into most markets and we have at this stage about 60 000 of our staff connected one of the many features of marcel is marcel giggs so similar to publicist bench it enables you to put opportunities up whether that's a short-term possib opportunity whether it's a long-term job and our staff across publicist group globally get to access that now this is i just think this is this is a real benefit that we've seen um that we have already had in motion but i think that covert has helped break down those um bias those habits and those behaviors that may have stopped this happening before so it's broken down there are no borders between geography and what that is doing is bringing diverse thinking to our client work it's giving opportunities to our people to work on jobs and thinking from different parts of the world and that's something that's absolutely here to stay we had art directors and copywriters from new zealand working on jobs in australia and vice versa currently we have someone from digitas new york working on a project in sydney australia so it's really exciting for our people and i think it's really exciting to um to really embrace uh using different people with different skills background um to bring ideas uh you know across across the organization and to our clients so that's definitely one that we'll absolutely keep i think the other one that we found really was a benefit to our staff and and really effective and i think brought together the connectiveness was communication and again this came from the top down um the global ceo every fortnight would get us all together across our different regions and we had the opportunity to ask questions and our turkish is informed of what was happening on a group level and giving us direction and thought leadership around what we could possibly be doing and that was really valuable to us we were doing that on a market level as well with all the ceos from across our group we're a very connected group anyway around the power of one but it really helped heighten that and we're doing those uh twice a week and then we're doing three weekly ones across the whole group and we decided very early on that we wanted this to be really informative and we wanted to share all the information we had to our people and it really empowered them and in a time of um craziness where people didn't feel like they had control over anything they actually knew what they could do to help and i think that's made a massive difference to us as organizations and to our agencies and we've all really bound together as one and united to get to through this pandemic so they're some of the things that i would definitely be looking at and we're definitely looking at um putting into our way of working going forward i think there's one thing that's really interesting when we're looking at flexibility and working from different places we've all worked out we're really productive when we work from home less distractions if you've got the right environment of course and we're able to produce great work for our clients we're able to connect as teams and collaborate what we're looking at now though is what's the opportunity cost of those organic spontaneous conversations that we had as humans connected in our agencies on our floors in our offices and what's been lost through that and that could be an opportunity conversation with a client after everyone else has left the room it could be asking for someone's feedback around a talent it could be two people coming together with different ideas and creating that magic and i think that magic in our industry is so important and it's that connection that actually draws people to our industry and i think we can't forget that and how do we how do we keep hold of that in this new world and this new way of working how do we make sure that we're able to harness and create the environment where people can still come together because i think there's massive opportunities in that and i think that's where a lot of the inspiration in what we do and a lot of the thinking um and the proactive innovative ideas and new ways of of doing things comes from it's that personal connection and i think that's something we have to be really um careful not to lose and so how do we build that into the way we work going forward

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Length: 24min 3sec (1443 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 10 2021