Navya Rehani Gupta has been CPO at travel experience company Peek for seven years – and so saw the company’s revenues disappear almost overnight in March 2020 as the world locked down to deal with the Covid 19 pandemic. The actions she and her team took to ensure the company survived the pandemic provide an apt demonstration of how important consistent, honest and clear communication is in shaping company culture.

The pandemic was devastating for businesses in the travel sector, but Peek managed to survive and is once again thriving, in no small part due to the actions taken by Navya and the executive team. They had a thoughtful and structured response to the changes thrust upon the company and reacted quickly to try to protect the business and minimise the disruption caused by the pandemic.

Navya explains: “All our tours and activity operators were not allowed to operate and the morale in the team was low. It was shocking for all of us as executives. Executives in the company had been through a number of downturns, but that sudden revenue drop to zero was a first for all of us. We really had to think about how to sustain ourselves.”

Introducing remote working

They understood immediately that they needed to make some layoffs, she says, and also to successfully manage the change in culture and cadence that comes with remote working. “As soon as we moved to remote working, we started company-wide brainstorms to ask: ‘how can we get out of this situation?’, ‘how do we thrive in this situation?’, ‘how can we help our customers?’,” says Navya. “That was the biggest source of inspiration as we defined the new product direction. I got on calls with our customers, our executive team got on calls with our customers, and that’s where we were able to find new ways to move fast and help our customers retain revenue.”

They were nervous that going remote would change the company so they made the decision that “there wouldn’t be one manager meeting or one executive conversation where we wouldn’t talk about culture first”.

Peek was one of the first companies to experiment with virtual team bonding, Navya says. Each team tried something different – from leading meetings with a joke or setting up one-on-one water cooler sessions. “We knew that we wanted to try something different that suited our culture, so when groups got together, people would be authentic and feel comfortable having conversations in a small group setting.”

Then, with other managers, Navya created a remote manifesto. This manifesto standardised communication by defining the right tool for every situation. It gave everyone a clear checklist of when to use an email, when to call a meeting, when to use Slack, what a good Slack message looks like and what a good email looks like. It also offered some best practices for using each tool.

Cake of communication

Navya and Peek’s Director of Design also created a strategy for efficient communication and called it the “cake of communication”. Cake stands for:

Context is key

Whenever you’re talking to people,  give them the right context before you send a blast of Slack messages.

Assume good intent

Before you read a message and think that people have bad intentions, take a step back and assume good intentions

Keep space for quiet

Know that you’re all working through different time zones, so keep space for quiet. If something can wait, schedule a message as opposed to ruining somebody’s evening. Or if people are trying to focus, give them that space.

Embrace responsibility

Navya says: “In an office setup, you could come in, pat somebody’s shoulder because you needed an answer, or catch them in the corridor. But in a virtual world, everybody should embrace responsibility and not want to be chased. If you’ve given a commitment to somebody, honour that commitment, and make sure that everybody else around you doesn’t have to chase you. “

She says that Peek’s culture adapted and changed for the better because they’d thought about how the culture should be shaped in a remote environment.

Tackle concerns head-on

Peek’s management team also addressed staff concerns about job security head-on – the round of layoffs at the start of the pandemic was of necessity followed by a move to part-time working and a reduction in salary. Says Navya: “We addressed concerns as they came. There was a time when we were doing either weekly or bi-weekly anonymous Town Halls. We asked for feedback constantly and proactively communicated how the company was doing. Even when the revenue was zero, we would say ‘it’s zero’, ‘it’s gone a little bit up’ or ‘it’s going down’, ‘here are the five things that we’re trying to do to bring the revenue back up’. By being so transparent and by being so proactive, it got people excited to jump on the train and make a difference to the final outcome.”

Use clear decision making frameworks

Navya advocates clear frameworks as processes to rely on when decisions are made – they reduce ambiguity, build trust and assist with effective communication.

Peek uses a framework called Rapids, based on the Bain & Co Rapid Framework, as follows.

R is the recommender

A is the person who approves

P is for the people who perform

I is who gets input

D is the final decision-maker

S (added to the Bain framework by Peek)… who do we actually share the decision with?

Navya thinks that many companies fail to broadcast the decisions they make, even though they do a good job of pulling in the right people. She says: “Having a clear decision-making framework in advance helps you navigate change more effectively because you can move fast with confidence while bringing the whole team along.”

As a final point, she says it’s important to rally around outcomes. “It’s really relevant as you’re navigating through change,” she says. “When you’re dealing with change, you need to rally the whole team around the outcome – whether it’s a certain revenue target, a certain KPI, or whether you are moving towards your Northstar, or some milestone – if you rally people around that Northstar, you cut through the noise, and you get everybody to jump on the train with you for the ride.”