Page 18 - Toy&Hobby Magazine Aug-Oct 2020

COVID-19
IMPACT
18 TOY & HOBBY RETAILER AUGUST / SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2020
Adapt and thrive
Businesses involved in the licensing space in Australia reveal how they’ve adapted to COVID-19 and how they stay motivated.
LEGO AUSTRALIA & NZ:
VP & GM – CLAUS KRISTENSEN We have, like everybody else, been working from home and have taken our whole organisation online.
It's been very interesting and also very challenging for a lot of us but it's also provided a lot of opportunities to do things differently and to learn and develop and adapt to new ways of working.
The team has been amazing, very agile, very resilient in staying motivated and getting all of our tasks done.
Toy & Hobby Retailer has asked me to give you a few tips on how we're staying motivated and how we work.
My number one tip for working from home is to not get sucked into the screen. It is so easy to go from meeting to meeting and suddenly a day is gone and you've just been looking into a screen with no breaks or anything.
What previously was done on the way to the coffee machine now takes a meeting and also takes a longer time.
I would encourage everyone to remember to take those small breaks, don't make the meetings too long, ensure you go for a walk, ensure you've got time for a toilet break, stand up and reflex, go for a walk around your own house.
The way I stay motivated is by using the time where I was commuting in the morning to train so I get a good start to the day.
Then the fact that I'm home where my kids are, I get to spend some time in my small breaks and lunch with them which is really amazing because I wasn't able to do that before.
How I motivate my team is by communicating a lot.
So we've increased our communication with weekly huddles and check-ins and all sorts of different forms of communication throughout the week.
We also focus a lot on culture, culture is extremely important to us.
[We have taken our culture online] with work from home challenges, virtual Fridays, online training and online yoga.
That's worked really well and the team
is coming up with new ideas on how we can stay connected.
Communication is also very important in terms of our customers.
We already had a good level of communication and because our customers are spread out all over the world, we are used to communicating via different forms.
We've continued that and we're understanding their situation and their challenges and how we can support them in the best way.
BENSONS TRADING: BRAND AND PRODUCT MANAGER – SAMANTHA ATKINSON
Over the past few months like any other individual or business it is been a complete roller coaster and like many other businesses we’ve faced challenges since COVID-19.
I would say that we were probably one of
the businesses that were hit first being in the entertainment and events space, which meant that we had to make some significant changes both internally and externally as a business to adapt to the new norm throughout COVID-19.
From the beginning of March, when it became apparent to us that there was unlikely going to be any events over the next six months, that meant that we had to act fast and make some changes.
This presented some new opportunities to us as a business but also meant we had some serious challenges to be able to facilitate these opportunities.
One of the strongest growths we saw as a business was obvious: online.
It has been a really busy few months for us trying to streamline our business and adapt our internal operations to this ever-changing environment.
Some key tips I would suggest to companies facing similar types of challenges as us, would be mostly to think outside the square.
This may mean that you ensure you've got some type of online presence.