Feature Question: What Was a Lesson You Learnt in Your Role?

Each issue, we ask real estate professionals from around the country to share their opinions on real estate marketing and business topics. In this edition of Acme Mag we ask those in sales support and managerial roles about the lessons they learnt during 2020.

The lesson I learnt was the undeniable social aspect of working in an office and the importance of keeping mental wellbeing front of mind. Coming in each day, saying good morning, having a chat in the kitchen, eating lunch together, all of these things were immediately taken away during 2020 when we started working from home. Understanding that our staff were in a variety of situations such as home-schooling children, little ones running around while you’re trying to work, or on the other end of the spectrum, staff that live alone who weren’t having any social interactions that the office environment would usually provide. We were very conscious of the mental wellbeing of our staff, so the minute we started working from home we scheduled weekly Zoom meetings so people could keep that connection with each other. There wasn’t a set agenda, it was just important to check in, let them know that we’re here and that we are all doing this together.

Everyone was experiencing different emotions and reactions to working from home. We found just being available and staying connected had such an impact on how our staff were feeling and how they handled the situation overall. It really helped to maintain the culture that we have across the company, even though we weren’t physically in the office together.

I learnt that it was fortunate we’re a visionary company. With the challenges of 2020, I’m very thankful that we are a visionary company because already having those technologies in place caused a lot less chaos for us. We were able to maintain stability within our company, for our clients, and for our staff.

Off the back of that, one of the other biggest things I learnt was the importance of connection. I think we have an amazing working culture and we have incredible humans that work for us. We very much realised that it was important to maintain those connections and keep the culture alive as we started to work from more remote environments.

We had to introduce a lot more technology in 2020 when everything became remote with agents working from home, which meant we had to get on to IT and make sure they had access to the server and do training on new programs so that we were prepared if we did go into a lockdown. This of course now gives us the flexibility to work remotely when required without any hassle. Even with contracts and inspections, it was all Facetime and DocuSign. So the biggest lesson from all of that would be to always be open to new technologies, new programs, new systems, and to not always continue to do things the way we have always done them because of fear of the unknown.

We’re the sort of office that says ‘why change something if it’s not broken’ and then obviously – excuse my french – shit hit the fan, and then we were in unknown territory, and we were forced to make those changes. And then you think ‘are we doing things the right way? Are people going to be on board if we introduce new systems and processes?’ But I think it’s actually made us a better office for it.