Life

For Mental Health Awareness Week (18th-24th May 2020), Naomi Thompson, Head of Organisational Development at Benenden Health, provides insight into how employers can create a culture of openness around mental health.

A considerable task business owners face during the outbreak is keeping teams motivated and productive in the face of uncertainty. According to the people management and CIPD poll, around 63% of employers say anxiety is the biggest challenge facing their organisation right now, followed by the inability for their teams to work remotely.

In the current climate, many of us have found ourselves in different working environments – with the majority of people working from home. With our home and work spaces becoming the same place, it’s more important than ever to ensure you take steps to create some separation and avoid burnout – a common issue faced by small business owners.

Working from home is the new norm for many professionals and it’s still not clear how long this new way of working will last. So for many small businesses this means adjusting and managing the logistics of running a business remotely for the foreseeable future.

Right now we are in uncharted territory. COVID-19 is here, we don’t know how long for, and it is affecting so many people in so many different ways. Everyone is feeling different things and everyone has different circumstances. You are not others, others are not you.

The first step in an energy company collaborating with a startup is to ask itself a simple question: why? In part one of this series, we answered that from a wide-angle perspective – because the industry needs to innovate to keep up with the pace of change, and collaboration with startups appears the quickest, surest way to do so. Because the old model of fiercely guarded, siloed research has reached its limit.

The last few weeks has seen an unprecedented shift across the country from working in offices to working from home. Entire teams are working remotely and in truth this is a far bigger challenge than having just the odd person working from home.

Amid the current pandemic, the economy is taking a brutal hit, and as fledgling businesses, startups have a particularly fierce challenge to keep afloat. To try and help companies that aren’t eligible for existing relief schemes during this time, such as the CBILS loan, the government has announced a £1.25bn fund to try and help these companies – including startups – survive.

For the majority, the word entrepreneur conjures an image of a male in his twenties or early thirties. It’s unlikely the picture of someone in retirement age would come to mind and even less likely a woman in her 60s. However, a new wave of silver start-ups is emerging and with good reason! One such disruptor is Sheila Holt. Having traded on a smaller scale for a few years, Sheila embraced her entrepreneurial spirit and began scaling her finance business, Sapphire Lending Ltd, at the age of 60.

The current pandemic has brought shock and uncertainty to businesses across the world. From global heavyweights to SMEs that are the backbone of the British economy, the question for many leaders is, how can we keep afloat during this crisis? Thankfully we live in a digital age where many businesses can be taken online. Along with government support, there are many tools that can be easily accessed to pivot during this period. 

More than ever, cash flow is a key issue for small businesses, and understanding it is crucial to making informed decisions at the right time. The government will be asking businesses to demonstrate that they have an understanding of the state of their cash flow as it stands, and in the future before allowing access to the grants and schemes being offered.

The biggest enemies of good decision-making in times of deep crisis, like COVID 19,  are neither uncertainty nor ambiguity; they are over-confidence, procrastination, and incomplete or biased data.

Skim read the annual report of a major energy company from 2010 and you won’t come across many instances of the terms: ‘innovation’ or even ‘startup’. Now, it is a different world. Even the slowest moving established energy companies (perhaps especially the slowest moving) recognise that innovation is key to survival in a changing market and that collaboration with startups is a good way to go about it.

When most people think of startups, they picture hip loft offices, beanbags and charismatic CEOs with boundless enthusiasm and a seat-of-the-pants attitude. While this may be the case for some new businesses, particularly within tech, the picture for many startups is starkly different.

Businesses in the UK, and across the world, are facing unprecedented challenges in order to survive and thrive in the wake of COVID-19. Scaling businesses are facing an additional and unique set of challenges, as many will be in the ‘critical growth’ phase which is often loss-making – embarking on a stage of expansion in order to achieve future revenue growth. This makes the current climate daunting to approach.

With COVID-19 continuing to be at the forefront of everyone’s minds it can be hard to prioritise the right things for your startup when it comes to managing money. This is undoubtedly a tough time for everybody, but for startups, freelancers, sole traders and small business owners, it’s hitting particularly hard.

It’s always been clear to me that I’m not a math person. Or at least that’s the story I’m used to telling myself. Soon after graduating from Political Science and International Relations, I started working for Panama’s foreign service in Geneva. This was an opportunity of a lifetime, representing my country on issues I cared for like gender, climate change, and mass migrations.