Guest blog: The power of the community and how flexible working, can work. By Steve Byrne, CEO, Travel Counsellors

The pandemic forced many to work from home, which in turn resulted in many reflecting on their lifestyle, not least how and when they want to work; whether that was to achieve or maintain a work-life balance or ensuring quality time can be spent enjoying and doing the things that are important to them and those they hold dear. For those already working from home, like our travel counsellors, it reminded all about the value of friendships forged and how much people enjoy and benefit from getting together face to face be that for social interaction or business networking.

For us, choosing to work whenever and wherever from home has always been fundamental to our franchisees’ relationships with their customers and has enabled them to provide outstanding  levels of customer care and build life-long relationships and loyalty. Flexible working was also embraced by our support teams prior to the pandemic, not least due to the bespoke technology and platform available to the whole community 24/7.

That said, with almost 2000 franchisees around the world and offices based in six different countries, as the travel industry was one of the first to be hit by the pandemic, we were no way immune and we had to enhance, and also fine tune in places not only our technology but the way in which we worked together as one community to ensure we got through the toughest of times together.

Having a strong culture

I was clear that whilst the pandemic will require us to adjust our strategy, we must not let it influence our purpose and values. It presented an opportunity to use these values to manage the pandemic and come out of it with our reputation enhanced, by doing all that we could to look after our customers and our people. Visible leadership and keeping everyone engaged, informed, and motivated by frequent communications using TCTV our internal web cast media and inviting external speakers to share their experiences with both employees and franchisees alike was imperative. As did looking to the future with optimism, reinforcing positivity and hope throughout the community that we will get through this; alongside using the digital platform to enable a remote community to continue to collaborate, engage and support one another - always staying true to our brand purpose of keeping it personal and using the tools to do that in an even more effective and meaningful way.

As with many businesses, we implemented remote and structured catch ups within the leadership team every week and we introduced townhall talks for all colleagues - providing updates on where we were as a business, where we are going, the important role everyone plays and how we are going to make things even better for all. There were regular informal catchups for both our employees and franchisees, to try and ensure everyone felt connected, listened to, and focussed on the future.

We also hosted virtual coffee catch ups between teams, and numerous quizzes to keep things fun along the way. We even hosted a virtual conference spanning 12 hours, during which we even managed to raise ten thousand pounds for our chosen charity.  We also ramped up our investment in mental health services and support, providing an independent 24/7 mental health counselling service for all, to complement the existing personal counsellor we provide. We also created a financial welfare fund to help those most in need.

What though struck me the most throughout, was the kindness and care shown by people in the community to each other. That extended to individual travel counsellors making donations to the welfare fund and customers insisting that travel counsellors retained some of the monies paid for holidays now sadly cancelled.

The pandemic showed the power and benefits of being part of a community and evidenced Peter Drucker’s statement that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast.’ – albeit we did have a strategy too!

 Flexible working requires you to think differently

During the pandemic we had to think differently, and in a way that remained true to our values and brand proposition ‘with us… it’s personal.’ We had to work extremely hard considering how we onboarded the 200 new travel counsellors that joined us during the pandemic, addressing learning and development alongside enhancing individual relationships and support teams.

We introduced a new digital training platform offering new and existing franchisees a personalised and blended learning experience, combining the latest technology with a people first culture.

We also embraced and invested in more digital learning to enable travel professionals to join the business and still have a personal induction experience, despite not being there in person.

Travel Counsellors ran travel and destination clinics and web casts to showcase the world to customers, whetting their appetite for all the wonderful experiences people could look forward to when travel returned. Our business travel counsellors also stayed close to their SME customers so they knew they would be there for them when they wanted to travel and renew their much valued customer and supplier relationships.

Because we continually ask for feedback from our entire community, we have discovered that our franchisees and support teams are going forward, enthused about a blended way of working together, recognising that we don’t need to be physically in the same room. As a result, we are also planning on more virtual events going forward alongside our in-situ events. 

In our experience, having strong foundations is key going into any crisis, and remaining true to your values to engage and support your community will ensure you are in the best possible place during and coming out of the most challenging of times. We want our people to be doing a job that they love and be given the flexibility and support platform to flourish and ultimately do what is right for their customers - and work their business/career around their personal life and vice versa. For me it’s not so much about how many days a week you do from home or the office but rather what flexibility we can provide people with, to make judgements around balancing the two. In the words of Churchill, we should not let a crisis go to waste, and those that look at how smarter and flexible ways of working can enhance their culture and build on a sense of community, will be those that come out of any situation stronger. The Company is currently experiencing record sales with earnings now 40% higher than before the pandemic and we expect to break the £1b turnover in a few years’ time. That is solely because of the way we cared for our customers and our people before the pandemic, during it and now.

Steve Byrne, CEO of Travel Counsellors, provider of a bespoke technology platform for 2000 independent leisure and corporate travel business owners shares how getting the business and its people through the toughest of times over the last two years has shone a spotlight on the power of the community and how flexible working, can work!