2020 has certainly been a challenging year with COVID-19 forcing most organisations to adapt and change the way they work and manage their teams. We take a look at the year and how we at EBS have approached this year, whilst continuing to live into our EPIC values and build our community remotely in this challenging time.
At the start of 2020, like most businesses – we had big plans in place for our team! Being a very social lot, we were able to enjoy our Family Day at the Melbourne Zoo in February, and Paul Woods our CEO traveled to Sydney to catch up with the Pay Off Podcast over a beer and discuss how EBS has created a dream company culture.
Within weeks, we were facing the COVID-19 pandemic and by mid-March we packed up our desktops and setup out of our homes. Fortunately, our systems were all in the cloud and the transition to working from home was seamless.
Our weekly team meetings were all conducted via Microsoft Teams and the business pivoted to a remote and online environment for everything from Not-For-Profit User Groups to project implementations. For clients that had moved to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central in 2019 and early 2020, they were seeing the benefits of having moved to a full cloud-based financial management system.
What
Our
Clients
Say
“It’s been seamless. It doesn’t matter where you are, you can use it anywhere. Business Central will allow us to apply more flexibility into the future – one day at the office, then the next day at home and there’s no change.” ~ Australian Childhood Foundation
By mid-year, we had all settled into our new norm for the foreseeable future and COVID proved to be no barrier for clients looking to move their systems to the cloud as we migrated them across to Business Central.
We were conscious of keeping up our social gatherings and morale. Even though we couldn’t see each other face-to-face and we were sure to check in with each other organising:
- Daily check-ins and weekly Teams sessions.
- Pandemic Picnics, where we would order Uber Eats and all have lunch together online.
- Care packages sent to staff on RUOK Day.
- Motivating the team during Melbourne’s hard lockdown with a step challenge to Walk to the G by AFL Grand Final Day.
- An EBS EPIC Quiz Show using Kahoot!
By far the highlight though was the ability to come together for our End of Financial Year celebration which was postponed so far out it became the Christmas Party too. To see each other again in person after 8 months was EPIC.
As we look forward to 2021, we are thankful for the clients that have come along with us on this wild ride and we see a brighter future as we head into EBS’s 20th anniversary year. Onwards and upwards.
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Terri McKinnon is the Marketing Manager at EBS. With a focus on delivering communications that support the EBS community and reflecting the company’s core values. Her breadth of experience sees her building out the communications strategy, and being hands-on in the delivery of the website, collateral, success stories, social media, and managing our events and customer user groups.