By Danielle Kutchel
The Covid pandemic has given rise to a number of buzz words – chief among them, resilience.
This is especially relevant to businesses as they’ve forged a path through some of the most unexpected trading scenarios in living memory.
For Greg Plant, founder and director of Powerplant Project Services in Hallam, resilience has become the name of the game.
It’s a quality that’s been incorporated into the company’s daily practices since the pandemic hit.
And it’s the name of the category they’ve been named as a finalist in for the 2021 Casey Business Awards.
Mr Plant said he and the team were “quietly confident” of their ability to get the judges’ attention this year.
The company is a previous winner in the busines awards, having picked up two gongs in 2017.
But in the wake of Covid, they upped their game.
Mr Plant said Powerplant regularly measures its performance against industry standards and was therefore able to see that it was performing well against these.
When Covid hit, the company looked to its values – people, performance and pride – to see it through.
“We adopted a survive to thrive process,” Mr Plant said.
“Where there was pain, we shared it and that helped us all keep going.”
Pulling together as a team, staff regularly checked in with each other even over Microsoft Teams.
The social side of things was stepped up with daily quizzes and end-of-week drinks as well as a Friday ‘good news’ session.
A resilience expert was brought in to help pass on a number of strategies that staff could use in their personal and professional lives.
At the beginning of the series of workshops, the expert took a diagnostic of the team to see how they measured on the resilience scale.
By the end of the series, their resilience had markedly improved.
Mr Plant also encouraged his employees to reach out to others if they were having a “down day”.
He led by example, checking in with staff over the phone in a practice that has continued into 2021. Management at Powerplant is mindful of the ‘Covid hangover’ that many are still experiencing, so the focus on resilience, community and connection within the workplace is now an ongoing one.
And it seems it has all paid off: since the lifting of restrictions last year, the business has thrived.
Mr Plant said the awards had helped change the business for the better, as it has provided an opportunity for he and other members of the team to think about their skills gaps and how to improve both personally and as a collective.
“They got me on the front foot of what I should do to make this business the best it could be,” he explained.
“The awards helped change us for the better.
He said the team quickly realised they could leverage their capabilities to build a better industry, thanks to the insights provided by the awards process.
Mr Plant now encourages other local businesses to enter the Casey Business Awards to see how they too can improve.
“We’ve got a lot to thank the awards program for, for helping us to improve the way we roll and the things that we do.”
He congratulated management at Powerplant on forming a strategy and achieving its goals, and the team for finding “ways to perform under pretty challenging circumstances”.
“We’ve got a lot to be proud of… we did survive the pandemic and we are thriving now even to the point where we’re recruiting now with opportunities in this area for more jobs,” he said.
The winners of the Casey Business Awards will be announced at a gala event in late June.
