#LockdownLessons: Employees are a company’s most important shareholders
During the nationwide lockdown, many companies were forced to implement a business continuity plan (BCP), a protocol which aims to recover a business from any external or internal disaster. At the first announcement of the strict adherence to physical distancing, Lightstone embarked on the implementation of its BCP. The BCP was headed up by a crisis committee which included stakeholders across the value chain aimed at rolling out and monitoring any crisis either internal or external.
Hayley Ivins Downs, head of sales at Lightstone |
As with any crisis, your employees are a company’s most important shareholders and this has always been our position since the announcement of lockdown. We consulted with our employees and assisted them in setting up remote working spaces. With the isolation from the office, our internal communication also became invaluable and a large focus was placed on communicating employee wellness topics such as financial advice tips, mental health wellness, handling online communication and how to manage your day when working from home.
Maintaining response times
One of the biggest worries during the lockdown was to ensure response time is not affected and Lightstone is very proud of the fact that standard response times were not affected and employees were able to conduct online meetings with clients providing the necessary support on systems resulting in no system interruptions or downtime during this transition.
The impact of Covid-19 is enormous – to date, the real estate industry has been unable to continue operating as per normal; and the closure of the Deeds Office meant no property transactions could occur during the month of April. The recent announcements by cabinet also saw the implementation of a staggered opening of the economy and estate agents will only be operational at Level 2. The impact on us has been through the negative impact on our clients in all sectors, financial, real estate, insurance and retail.
Services launched
Understanding the incredible pressure clients and consumers across South Africa are under; the company has launched a variety of services:
- The property and vehicle valuation reports are now available to consumers and aim to help property and vehicle owners understand the value of their assets.
- In partnership with Tracker, we have compiled a lockdown index that tracks the activity of people (anonymised and aggregated), and it was then further extended to show how busy shopping malls are, with an ability to view the times malls are the busiest. This will certainly help when people need to do shopping and plan accordingly. This will be released free of charge shortly to the public at large and is available on its social networking portals.
- Realising that there will be an added focus on risk, we have started testing new risk models that would be of assistance in the financial and insurance sectors. We should be releasing these in the next several weeks.
- Lightstone were able to assist its clients by providing a 35% discount on subscriptions for April and May.
Revenue generation challenges
The challenges have been to find ways to keep Lightstone revenue generating. We have over 300 staff members on our payroll, and due to cash reserves have been able to sustain them during the lockdown period. With our clients not in a position to work and the Deeds Office only operational from May, it has meant loss of activity on their systems, and due to this, the company was forced to take the decision to reduce salaries across the company.
We are incredibly proud of our employees, who amidst the uncertain times have continued pushing through, coming up with ideas, activating projects that we had planned, and have all remained positive. The best part is so far, no Lightstone employee has fallen ill with Covid-19 and we are pleased that our staff for being responsible and staying safe.
Positive outlook
Although we face unprecedented times, we are positive that the property industry will recover and will be an asset to invest in once again. The industry was under strain before lockdown and will continue to go through some trying times. Now, with one third of the Deeds Office returning to work in May, we are positive in seeing increased activity soon.
We also see how estate agent clients have embraced the use of online tools to engage with us and their clients. The Lightstone team are hosting daily training webinars with their clients which included a mammoth 1,000 participants at a time. During this time, we started free webinars to train and upskill clients on our Property Toolkit and this has been a success story in its own.
By working together, we will be able to create a new normal and hopefully make the purchasing or selling of a property a lot more efficient. We are very encouraged to see how estate agents are looking to improve their skills and look at creative ways to keep their business afloat. We will continue to support them in these efforts.
Source: bizcommunity.com