Archive for category: Blog

8 Companies Who Employed Smart Thinking to Pivot During COVID-19

Towards the start of the pandemic, we championed the stories of seven companies, from seven industries, who had made smart changes to their business models to thrive during COVID-19. From in-person baking classes moved online, to whole retail chains gone dark to support home deliveries and warehousing – if you missed the article, you can check it out here!

None of us could have imagined that the impact of the pandemic would be so far reaching or that its restrictions would have such longevity. In some places, life is slowly returning to normal. In others, normal still seems far off. It’s been some time, and we wanted to highlight 8 more companies who have made intelligent business changes to stay relevant and profitable when everything that they knew turned upside down.

Mattel Highlight Real Superheroes!

Toys have had an awesome year, with so many families needing some new supplies to keep kids busy while school closed its doors. But the competition is huge! We love how Mattel found a way to rise to the top of the pack by creating a brand-new product that no-one else would be selling. They launched a line of Key Worker themed action figures. The “Thank you heroes” collection includes nurses, doctors, delivery drivers and EMTs. Mattel saw its sales soar 47% in Q1 2021, exceeding all expectations from Wall Street.

 

Studio 539 Mixes Up the Supply Chain

Large scale events like weddings seemed to be a failsafe business, after all – there will always be couples looking to get married, right? Turns out, we were wrong, and this florist, @studio539flowers, was really struggling as an increasing number of events were being put on hold. On top of that, COVID-19 meant supply chain issues. The company quickly made two intelligent changes. First, they beat supply chain issues by exploring local farms and even growing their own flowers and foliage where necessary, becoming their own supplier. Secondly, they pivoted their business from huge events, and started specializing in smaller, intimate gatherings instead. And business is blooming!

 

Escapology Moves Online

Escape rooms were the up and coming leisure King of entertainment, whether it was for a night out, a bachelor/bachelorette party, corporate team building or more. But COVID-19 closed doors for many escape room companies, and Escapology Columbia saw business drop 82% in a single week. With a bit of ingenuity and tech know-how, Escapology launched Escapology @Home, and in 2020 saw half of its revenue come from the web application. In fact, after transforming their business through this pivot, they expect 2021 to be their most lucrative year yet.

 

Innovative Fitness Spots an Opportunity

Personal trainers are a tough sell when gymnasiums are closed, and Innovative Fitness quickly closed all 12 of its branches when the pandemic hit. However, they never thought of closing their doors entirely. “We were able to essentially reinvent our business in five days,” CEO Christopherson said. “We flipped our training services that were brick-and-mortar, in-person, to online.” 95% of its trainers stuck by the company’s side, as they moved to a 30-day online fitness plan, with at-home workouts, tips and tricks from a growing community. In fact, within 48 hours, the online community attracted 1,500 members, and it now has more than 2,200 and growing. 

 

Milwaukee Food and City Tours Gets Innovative

We love the way that this Winsconsin-based tour company thought outside the box to stay profitable during the pandemic. Forced to decrease the number of physical tours they offered, and with fewer patrons on the street and signing up for tours due to face coverings and social distancing, they adapted their offering to include gift boxes, known as “Shelter in Style” kits. These included all the tastes and experiences of Milwaukee, including baked goods, interactive stories, trivia and more. An experience in a box – awesome!

 

ChargedUp Step up!

You might recognize ChargeUp’s power on-demand charging stations, as the largest supplier of device charging equipment in Europe. Use your phone to scan a ChargeUp station, and release a power bank. That’s it! However, this year, ChargeUp stations have stayed profitable by becoming CleanUp stations, offering hand sanitizer to stop the spread of COVID-19. “With the majority of our usual network of pubs, clubs, cafes, and shopping centers closing down due to the COVID-19 crisis, we wanted to find a way to use our skills, our resources, and our network to help during what is a tough period for everyone. We have a strong creative team, so we put our heads together – virtually, not physically! – and CleanedUp was born.”

 

Subway Moves to Fresh Groceries

Restaurants have been one of the industries that have suffered most from the pandemic, especially as a result of the waves of opening doors and closing them again, making it difficult for many companies in the Food and Hospitality business to plan ahead in terms of stock and staffing. Many restaurants have made intelligent changes that will offer them more sustainable revenue. Subway Grocery allowed Subway to move into selling staples such as bread, meat, eggs, cheese and more, selling these at 250 of their stores, with online orders and curbside pickups.

 

Club Vino – Experiences Moved Virtual

Wine tasting is one of those experiences that is just not pandemic-friendly, from the restrictions on traveling, to the nature of sharing bottles and nibbles, all very un-mask friendly! Marco Castelanelli didn’t want to wait around for the new normal, so Club Vino went online, including a home-tasting package that includes your themed wine, printable tasting notes, and a video that guides the customers through the process. With vouchers available on the website, this business pivot is not just a great alternative for consumers, it’s also a lot more scalable for Castalanelli.

 

Want to Follow These Companies’ Agile Examples?

If you’re still looking for ways to address the new normal, according to the Harvard Business Review, your pivot needs to follow three steps.

1. Align with one trend caused by the pandemic, such as remote work or social distancing.
2. Extend your existing capabilities alongside your original intent for value.
3. Offer a sustainable path to profitability, enhancing your brand value for consumers.

Have any other examples of awesome pivots from this year? Share them in the comments!

Enhance your Team Management Skills with a CSM Certification

As a certified ScrumMaster, you will gain access to valuable team building and management methodologies. 

Here are some the ways that a CSM certification can help you improve your team management and collaboration skills:

As a CSM, you will have the opportunity to motivate and lead your teammates, and to guide them in working together and solving challenges more efficiently.

As a CSM, you will learn to be a good team player by listening to your teammates, accepting their suggestions, addressing challenges they may face, and helping them collaborate to solve these challenges.

Learn to keep the channels of communication and collaboration open to ensure that your team works together towards the success of each project. 

Adopt an Agile mindset and help your team members do the same. This will lead to fewer disagreements, better collaboration and more successful projects.

In a nutshell, a CSM certification can really help boost your career and improve your team management skills by giving you what you need to motivate and lead your teammates, encourage and facilitate collaboration, become a better team player, keep communication channels open and adopt an Agile mindset.   

Ready to get all that and more? Sign up for the online CSM training now!

 

 

Five Immediate Ways You Can Use LinkedIn to Find a New Job!

More than 95% of recruiters use LinkedIn to find talent, and there are currently more than 20 million open jobs available on the platform. However, if you struggle with making meaningful connections or closing opportunities using LinkedIn, you’re not alone. According to experts behind the scenes, while nearly 80% of users know the importance of networking effectively, almost half say they just don’t have the time.

Here are five things that you can do on LinkedIn right now that could make an actionable difference to your job prospects.

Update Your Headline and Description

Everyone on LinkedIn gets the same opportunity to stand out to the crowd, using their headline and summary on their profile. This is the first thing that recruiters and executives will see when they click on your profile – so make it count! You have 120 characters to play with in your headline, and there are no rules. That means you don’t need to use your actual current job title if you feel that something else is more important. Feel free to add adjectives or certifications if that will support your description.

Top tip: Even if you’re currently out of work, don’t use “formerly” or “previously” in your title.

Next, start polishing up your about section. Here’s where it pays to be concise, and to use the right language. Describe what you’re proud of, and what you thrive at, including keywords for the role. Work backwards: what will recruiters be searching for? Utilize terms such as “revenue growth”, “cost-optimization”, “high performance teams” but without keyword stuffing. One smart way to get the right keywords in place is to make a short list of “Desired roles” where you can list them all so that they come up in a recruiter search.

Look for the ‘notify my network’ button on your profile page, and keep it firmly toggled off until you’re done editing your information. Otherwise your contacts will get told about every capital letter you tweak while you’re making your profile shine. Don’t forget to switch it back on when you’re ready to share!

Let Recruiters Know That You’re ‘Open to Work’

LinkedIn have recently rolled out a new feature that allows you to show recruiters that you’re ready for a new challenge. Simply head to your profile and under your picture you’ll see an option to “show recruiters you’re open to work”. From here you can decide on the location and job types that you’re interested in.

There are two choices in terms of promoting this new profile frame. You can keep it selective, so that only recruiters (not including those at your own organization) will see the frame, or you can make it public, which will add an “open to work” frame to your public profile photo. I would recommend keeping it to recruiters-only, or you might end up doubling your spam for no real benefit.

Use the Right Hashtags

If you do want to make more of a public statement that you’re looking for a new role, try the #opentowork hashtag on your posts. Keep checking the #offeringhelp hashtag too, where people are reaching out to provide support to anyone that’s found themselves out of a job this year, with help that varies from career coaching, to resume building and referrals. Kiran Prasad from LinkedIn encourages users to utilize the hashtags to network outside of your own connections. “Coming together as a community is one of the most important things we can do to get us closer to reaching our goals. We’re continuing to roll out new tools that allow our members to give and get help on LinkedIn, because we’re all better when we’re in it together.”

Find the Information You Need to Get Personal

When preparing for an interview or even a job application, LinkedIn can be an invaluable tool. The Harvard Business Review recommends adding the personal touch to covering letters by making sure you’ve found the right contact who will be reviewing resumes before you send your application. You can also find out more about them, such as mutual connections that you might be able to name drop or reach out to before the interview. You can also look for common career journeys that allow you to craft your covering letter with a bit more personality, helping you to stand out from the crowd. Never underestimate how powerful it can be to show that you admire the person reading your application.

This tactic can even help you to send cold emails. Think about a format such as this: “Hey [first name], I love how you made the move from [insert company name], a large corporate environment to [insert company name], a small start up where you could hold more responsibility and take control over the roadmap. That’s exactly the kind of move I’m hoping to make. Could I take you for a coffee and get some advice?”

Work on Your Connections

Bottom line is that LinkedIn is a social network. That means that you’ve got to be social to make things happen! Show your personality through the content that you share and post, and utilize the messenger app to reach out to connections without the copy and paste tool. Another important element of LinkedIn that can display that you’re a team player is sending recommendations as well as asking for them. Increasingly, recruiters are paying attention to the recommendations section of LinkedIn, and your profile will show both your own references, and the ones that you’ve sent out.

Because of LinkedIn’s great SEO, your profile is not only your online resume, it’s also often an employer’s first introduction to you when they Google your name.

Make it count!

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About the author:

Giora Morein is an Agile Transformation consultant and Certified Scrum Trainer. He brings over 15 years of Agile coaching and executive consulting experience to the table – building, coaching and training high-performing Fortune 1000 teams. His diverse success stories include Merrill Lynch and Cessna Aircraft, as well as Nike, Blizzard Entertainment and GE Healthcare.

Is your Daily Scrum getting repetitive or monotonous? Have you had any feedback that the format is stale, or have you noticed team members not paying as much attention as you would like them to? Here are some of our favorite ideas for spicing things up a bit, ideas that you can implement, either as one-offs, or on a regular basis to keep participants involved.

A Minute of Fun Can Ensure Your Participants Start Get Engaged

The minute of fun works in a simple way, setting the tone in the right direction. This could be any light-hearted ritual to start off the Scrum, such as a joke, a rhyme, a trivia question or any other quick idea. This immediately has the team having fun, paying attention and in a good mood, just where you want them to be at the start of play.

An idea to augment this could be getting the whole team involved, rotating the person leading the daily ‘minute of fun’, responsible for choosing the activity, telling the joke, or making sure it happens every day.  

Want People to Get Involved? Get Creative With the Order of Speakers

Getting your team involved in orchestrating the Scrum makes it easier to get the entire team participating. Often, you’ll find it’s only the facilitator, the Scrum Master who is speaking throughout the meetings, and you’re not even sure if the rest of the team are paying full attention. I love the idea of popcorn scrums, where each person decides who is the next person to speak – sort of like passing the mic. This forces team members to pay a bit more attention, because at any point it could be their turn to speak and weigh in.

Try Throwing out the Rules

If you’re still struggling with getting team members to open up about their real feelings about the Sprint, here’s an idea that works well for the retrospective especially. Agree with your team to host what I like to call a ‘Vegas-style’ retrospective, in line with the well-known expression, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

In this Scrum meeting, or in the retrospective, everything stays inside the meeting. No one takes notes, no-one takes minutes, and nothing can be repeated outside of the team and these four walls. No additional invites, and no one shares the output of the meeting. This can really help to boost participants into feeling that they are in a safe, shared space, and has the added benefit of helping participants feel like more of a team.

Use Engagement Cards to Stay on Track

Props can be a smart way to make your scrum unique, and keep it on track, which is especially important because a common reason for a stale or boring Scrum is that it’s getting too deep into the weeds. One technique which I love is taken from soccer: give each participant a yellow and red card that they can use at any time during the meeting. You can even use multi-colored stickies directed at a webcam. If another team member gets off track, someone can hold up a yellow card to warn them that the Scrum is not as valuable as it should be. If two or more people hold up a yellow card, the red card is in play – giving the speaker 60 seconds to wrap it up. Your team knows that they can play the cards at any time which helps keep them focused and on-topic.

A Truly Mobile Meeting

One of the best things about the Daily Scrum is that it can go anywhere. And yet, oftentimes Scrum teams meet in the same place, even sitting around the same meeting table. Take advantage of how portable this meeting can be, there’s a reason it’s called the Daily Stand-up after all! Get your team members engaged and interested by going for a walk, heading outside, changing location, or even going to get a coffee or an ice cream. Added benefit – if your team knows you might start moving, they’re much more likely to arrive on time!

Give some of these ideas a try over the next few weeks, and let me know which work well for your specific teams. Have any other ideas for making the Daily Scrum unique, getting out of bad habits and encouraging your team members to get involved? Share them on the community group.

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About the author:

Giora Morein is an Agile Transformation consultant and Certified Scrum Trainer. He brings over 15 years of Agile coaching and executive consulting experience to the table – building, coaching and training high-performing Fortune 1000 teams. His diverse success stories include Merrill Lynch and Cessna Aircraft, as well as Nike, Blizzard Entertainment and GE Healthcare.

Schedule your Collaboration Time

Looking for some ideas to make your team more effective? Why not schedule collaboration time from the outset.

Many scrum teams, especially if they are new, struggle to find opportunities and reasons to collaborate and work with one another. They may even find it awkward to approach one another and ask them to make time for collaboration.

One idea that can really work is to schedule your team’s collaboration time, by physically putting it on the calendar at a specific time. This can be a one off to get the ball rolling, or it can even be a recurring time in the weekly calendar, for example Thursdays from 2-4pm.  This does more than just let your team know there is a time for collaboration available, it allows them to see that there is an expectation that they will collaborate as team members.

Individuals can use this set time to find opportunities and reasons for working with others. They could ask for help with problem solving, get another opinion on innovation and ideation, or simply use the time to bounce ideas off one another. Whatever it is, creating an opportunity and an expectation for collaboration plants the seed that it might be a smart idea for team members to work together in the future.

Liked that Agile QuickTip? Just wait until you hear the others! Head to my back catalogue to watch the whole series on YouTube, and let me know which one is your favourite, or the most effective for your Scrum team! You can also visit our website, thinklouder.com where you’ll be able to learn more about our training and coaching offerings.