How You Can Adapt Coronavirus Workarounds into Your New Normal (Opinion)
May 31, 2020 
Together with our equipment manufacturing partner AgriNomix, we were able to successfully commission the FibreDust HydraFiber processing unit at its production facility in India. If we weren’t currently working from home, this would have meant trips for many of us to and from the facility, and we may or may not have found and implemented this viable workaround.
While 2020 will be remembered as the year of the coronavirus, many businesses may choose to remember it as the year of the workaround. When the pandemic sent millions of us into our homes for work, doing things the way we’ve always done them was no longer an option. Companies have had to adapt and learn at a rate they’ve never had to before.
As I look at both the HydraFiber business I manage and the world around me, I feel that one of the single greatest outcomes of this period has been the idea generation of so many fantastic workarounds. We’re seeing brilliant solutions like the manufacturing of face shields in pizza ovens, drive-through garden centers, and full courses being taught remotely. In fact, with what we’ve seen regarding e-learning, there may never be another snow day.
Once we get through this immediate crisis, there will soon be an opportunity to establish our new normal. Some of these workarounds may no longer need to be implemented, but I believe many of them will be integrated into the new routine.
Implementing Workarounds
The HydraFiber team is spread out across the country. Pre-COVID, we relied heavily on face-to-face meetings to collaborate with one another and our customers. Like many of you, we went from city-hopping to stay-at-home overnight. We needed a new way to effectively communicate and interact both internally and externally. This led us to our first workaround: online collaboration.
It’s imperative that we are able to provide technical crop cultivation advice to help existing and new customers seamlessly transition to HydraFiber. It’s also important that we share that information with one another internally. We scrutinized several video conference platforms trying to find the ones that work best for us. Microsoft Teams provided us an opportunity to more effectively share and collaborate on documents internally, while RingCentral allowed us to hold external calls and video presentations.
With these new digital tools, we’ve been able to spread our crop recommendations further into the marketplace — which turned the initial workaround into an even bigger opportunity. The success of our online collaboration pushed our team to launch our own YouTube channel and Facebook page. Each week, we’re featuring a cultivation tip that is shared through email and social media posts. We follow that up with a mini-lecture that takes a deeper dive on the topic every Friday.
As we saw these new ideas take shape, it led to bigger questions: how can we use our digital tools to continue some of our other practices?
Together with our equipment manufacturing partner AgriNomix, we were able to successfully commission the FibreDust HydraFiber processing unit at its production facility in India. The machine will process a new blended coir/HydraFiber product designed for growing cannabis and hemp. We worked remotely with 3-D models, middle-of-the-night phone calls, and detailed process logs to help support the team in India to bring that machine online. If we weren’t currently working from home, this would have meant trips for many of us to and from the facility, and we may or may not have found and implemented this viable workaround, which is now playing an important role in our business effectiveness.
A Challenge to You
As we start moving into our new normal, I’d like to challenge all of us to take our recent experiences and generate the best alternatives to the old-fashioned “this is the way we’ve always done it” thinking. This time at home has provided us an unexpected opportunity to use the learnings that we’ve gained from this great period of idea generation and put them to use, so that we can all emerge stronger personally and professionally.
Having just finished the busy spring shipping season, and as we all get ready to reemerge from stay-at-home restrictions, I would encourage each of us to carve out 30 minutes in our schedules for idea generation. Use this half hour to journal, doodle, and jot notes on the business. What have been your key observations? Here are some questions to get your thought process started:
- What do I know now about COVID-19 that I wish I would have known at the start?
- What do we need to do as an industry to continue to attract all these new consumers that have emerged this year due to COVID-19?
- What business practices have I learned in the past few weeks that have been very effective? And what business practices should I stop doing?
- How can I improve the customer experience? What am I learning about what matters most for our customers? What method of communication has worked best?
- What meetings/trips have been vital? What meetings/trips have I learned I can function without?
- What is the newest technology I have discovered that is allowing me to do my job better?
- What additional training do I need to be more effective post-COVID-19?
- What do my employees need most from my leadership?
- What’s the simplest idea I found that has made my job easier?
I recently posted this same exercise on my LinkedIn page and received some excellent and thought-provoking responses, like this comment from Todd Downing, Managing Partner at Best Human Capital & Advisory Group.
“Our team is organizing a green industry roundtable to discuss solutions for coming out of a pandemic. We have already created a checklist to assist human resource leaders, but I would now like to bring a positive and solution-oriented conversation by a cross section of leaders to the green industry. We fully understand the inundation of webinars, blogs, and newsletters but recognize the value of a diverse group of thought leaders and mix of prominent companies representing the various segments of the green industry will be attractive.”
I hope this can help start the conversation among your own teams. While both you and I long to return to normal, I am also grateful for this unique moment in time that has given us all a chance to reflect. For the first time in many of our lifetimes, gardening has been seen as essential. Let’s collectively share our thoughts on new ways to keep it that way.
Please join me in an industry-wide effort to share and develop these ideas that will help all our businesses emerge stronger and smarter. Feel free to connect with me through LinkedIn, Facebook, or email as we share our thoughts to move away from business as usual and emerge better and bolder than before.
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