There was a lot of discussion during COVID about businesses needing to pivot, needing to adapt to the online environment to reach their customers, and that working from home was the future.

But our customers and indeed, our business for the most part weren’t in a position to do any of those things.

You, our clients, operate large production facilities, providing materials and products that our society simply couldn’t do without, and whilst, some of your staff might have been able to work from home, there was a large proportion who couldn’t and like you, we had to rapidly adapt and build plans to keep our staff functional in order to fulfil our obligations.

It tested us, as it did you, but it also showcased for us the value of our current journey ‘From Good To Great’, a journey that we began just prior to COVID hitting.

That process saw us begin to identify key weaknesses in our business and we began building plans and solutions to remove these over the medium term.

The timing of COVID therefore presented our business with a key opportunity to implement and test many of our plans, and in turn sensor check our decisions.

Some of these were:

1. Improved training across our workforce to ensure a far more skilled and more importantly flexible workforce.
2. Communications systems that made the “distancing’ required during lock down vastly more manageable, with clear lines of communications across the team regardless of location. And
3. A clear vision that provided purpose to our staff during what was a difficult and unpredictable time.

The key takeaways were :

That without having been a fair way along that journey with processes (even in draft format) already in motion, we would have been a long way behind the eight ball when the reality of COVID hit, and would have faced significant challenges trying to re-engineer our business in such a volatile environment.

It also showcased, where our new processes had been left wanting, and allowed us to refine those using real time experiences not merely our best guess, as it had been prior to the pandemic.

It also allowed us to hone our workforce, showcasing the true value of our employees and where necessary making some tough decisions about themake-up of our team.

Above all else it has proved our commitment to honing MEX Engineering To be the pre-eminent Engineering service provider in Australia!

But beyond our own experiences we also go to see some of the initiatives our clients took to survive what turned out to be nearly 2 years if disruption.

Be more flexible.

The businesses we server are big and rigid, they had to quickly rethink the use of their workforces, with smaller teams on differing rotations to minimise the risk of prolonged downtime due to exposure.