Business Training Through Lockdown
27th May 2020
When the country was forced into lockdown in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses had to scramble to ensure they could keep going, including our many loyal clients who turned to working from home and holding virtual meetings.
At Marshalls, we always put our clients needs first, but it’s in extremely challenging times like this when we feel it is most important to be there for them. Closing our doors to our clients simply wasn’t an option for us; we wanted to offer continued support in return for their loyalty over the years. In fact, the lockdown has given many people the opportunity to develop their businesses through e-learning in everything from compliance, diversity, safeguarding and wellbeing, so we needed to ensure we were able to respond to that need.
Moving into remote working was less of a logistical challenge for us than our clients – we are used to working remotely so we already had this in place. It meant we could seamlessly transition our work from office to home without disruption to our service. However, we quickly realised that we didn’t need to simply keep going, but we had resources that we could make available to make our clients’ new working lives easier.
Responding to clients needs
Our clients found that suddenly they needed our e-learning resources but now had no budget for them. As we aren’t defined by set budgets, we were able to respond quickly and made our entire spring resource offering freely available to clients.
Using video technology, we were also able to film our most experienced trainers and distribute the recordings across our client network, totally free of charge. Supporting our clients to the best of our ability was the priority from the outset for us. This created immense value for them, as they were able to continue with their development and feel supported by our team.
Marshall’s priority has always been to grow organically and to focus on the core business which has enabled us to have the funds to carry us through periods like this – not one staff member has needed to be furloughed so far – and we can invest further to support our clients while they are at their most vulnerable. We understand our obligation to our clients, as we recognise that we are privileged – through years of careful business planning – to be able to keep going when so many others are not even able to trade.
Mark Crabtree, a trainer and coach helped us to develop the toolkit said “One thing that I have found impressive during this pandemic is how many businesses have pivoted their business models in order to keep going. However, I think this has come with real challenges. Working from home and meeting through video calls, supporting a team remotely, keeping engaged and motivated doesn’t come naturally to everyone. I have worked in the field of learning and development for many years and I wanted to offer some suggestions and thoughts about how we can support people and organisations to get as effective and efficient as they can be during the COVID crisis.
Re-iterating the support available to clients through lockdown, David Marshall said “We had prepared and invested in a suite of new e-learning courses for 2020. My team get meaning and purpose from their work by ensuring as many clients get to use them as possible even if we are not charging for them. In the long term we believe our clients will see us as a key partner and not just a transactional supplier who disappear when times are tough.”
Earlier this month, we released the Manager’s Lockdown Toolkit – our resource for home-working leaders managing teams remotely. If you’ve not seen the Toolkit yet, contact us today and we’ll send you the details. There is a version of the Toolkit available FREE to all our clients and there’s also a commercial version, so you can still make use of the resource without being a client.
Get in touch
If you would like a free trial of this course or find out more about our training courses please call +44 (0)845 123 3909 or get in touch using our contact form.
