Simon presented a robust set of best practices that leaders can utilize to ensure that they are showing up in a meaningful way to make a measurable positive impact with their employees and their products.

Here are a few key takeaways from this webinar:

Difficult circumstances provide an opportunity for conscious businesses to make a difference with our products and with our people. 

All companies, especially conscious companies, are under intense scrutiny right now. When everyone looks back in 12 months’ time – and looks at how your brand showed up during this crisis– hopefully they will see that you led with your values. Simon emphasized throughout the webinar that “This moment of crisis is both an opportunity and a responsibility for brands that are conscious leaders to rally their employees and fortify their culture so they survive outright, they thrive, and they really contribute meaningfully during Covid-19.”

You can maintain and expand your conscious culture throughout this crisis by focusing on employee essentials.

Simon explored three pathways that this crisis has brought to light and highlighted opportunities for business leaders to make a real difference for their stakeholders within each.

• Share the Life – Thanks to technology, we have been given an unprecedented look into the personal life and space of many of our colleagues. We’ve seen living rooms, messy kitchen tables, children’s artwork splashed across our colleagues’ walls. Ironically, technology is allowing us to explore and share our humanity in the workplace and we are in a unique position to leverage this experience as an opportunity to get to know each other better. Consider making a few “fringe benefits” available to your employees: there are meal-delivery kits, virtual exercise apps, standing desks, online classes, telemedicine, home workout equipment, books, plants, and games that you can offer your employees to enrich their lives so it doesn’t feel like we’re living in isolation; these are tools that create opportunities to share the experience of this remote life.
  
  
• Share the Load – In what ways can you repurpose what you’re doing, or make a contribution in kind, to support your stakeholders through the Covid-19 crisis? Look at your supply chain and think “how can we all work together to make a meaningful difference?” Here are a few suggestions…
  • If you have something you can do that will make a difference, open up your IP.
  • Share the credit. This is not about owning the change, you can’t be the celebrity of your stakeholder community, “you must be the Chief Celebrant”.
  • Use this moment as an opportunity to fundamentally retool the role of business in the world. Serve your Higher Purpose to inspire new behavior through your example.
  • Recognize your employees for the specific efforts they’ve led, call them out by name, tell us what they’re doing to make a difference.
  • Share the story!!! Don’t forget to complete the last mile of the story supply chain. Encourage your employees and stakeholders to share the stories of the difference they are making.
    
    
• Share the Love – You have the power to unlock the whole human being inside each employee; give employees a role in planning how they can make a meaningful difference. See this as an investment in a long-term impact platform. This isn’t something finite that will end when Covid-19 is over. Rather, this is an ongoing strategy that will unlock a higher level of humanity in your organization. Build a culture where employees are encouraged to identify ways that they can “show up” for the people who are supporting our ability to work safely from home: cleaning staff at hospitals, truckers who keep the supply chain working, emergency service professionals, factory workers who are retooling their skills to provide ventilators, and so on. 

Make the most of remote life and prepare for the new normal.

What value can we take away from this experience? There are learnings to be had in terms of employee engagement, building a resilient culture, and in reshaping the role of business in the world post-Covid-19. Explore the unexpected benefits and pitfalls that your team experienced during this time and how it might inform the “new normal” in the aftermath of Covid-19. And consider how the actions you take now can be institutionalized as an ongoing expression of your Higher Purpose.