Podcast 40: What does loyalty mean in times of crisis?

What does loyalty mean in times of crisis

Welcome to a Question of Gamification. I am An Coppens, the show host for this show and the CEO and chief game changer at Gamification Nation. Today, I want to answer the question,  what does loyalty mean in times of crisis?

I will give a bit of a health warning to start with, that this will be a very personal and probably a very honest podcast episode in the sense that what we see all around us is probably the same for most of us. How we see and how we experience what is going on with Covid-19, business, family, friends, is what's different based on all of our own previous experiences.  

The topic of loyalty is interesting because in gamification, we often design for loyalty, for consistency, for continuous support for either a company, a product or even a service offering. We often get asked to make learning sticky, which is effectively a request to train people to be loyal to training itself, but also loyal to specific pieces of content.

Now, what I'm noticing, and I wonder if it's the same for you, is that loyalty during this time also has many more meanings. Or maybe it's just the same, only experienced much more in your face now, than it used to be before. I think as a small business loyalty from your customers, loyalty from your suppliers and loyalty from the leaders towards the people that work for you. 
Loyalty in times of crisis?
Well, I have to say what was striking in the early weeks of this COVID19 lockdown, is that our pipeline went from a healthy pipeline of many potential projects to nearly completely gone in the space of two weeks.

The biggest companies were the first to drop the enquiry and to close the ranks.

The smaller ones led us a little bit on the long finger and you know, eventually also had to park or pause. From the existing clients, it was also interesting to see who's being loyal and who we could turn to because as soon as we started losing pipeline, one of the steps I took was to reach out to our client base and say, look, is there anything else we can do for you?

Is there a project that you've been thinking about that you now have time to execute? The response to that was also interesting. Those that we worked well with, and you know, although they didn't have immediate projects, we're able to reach out and say, Hey, why don't we do this? Why don't we look at that?

And a few others rang me personally to say, "Hey, we'll keep an eye out for something. You know, we don't have anything right now that we can move on with but, you're first on the list when we do." You know, those are heartening things when everyone is feeling the pinch of lockdowns and potential closures.

We are no way near as bad as a retail store or a bar or restaurant who have to completely lockdown and many won't make it out of this crisis.

Saying that, we didn't actually expect to be hit as much as we are, because in reality, our business has been functioning remotely since its inception. That's how we structured it. That's how I wanted it to be, to have, let's say, a digital nomad lifestyle. And you know, most of my team is the same. You know, we meet when we can in person, but we don't have to meet on a regular basis to be effective and to deliver the services we do. So it was interesting to see that even though we are structured that way, that we are still significantly hit.
Reality check
We had eight live projects, out of the eight only two are still alive. We had, as I said, a healthy pipeline. That one completely evaporated within the space of two weeks, and we have not, so far been able to generate new business. The team, on my side, I've been honest with from the start.

My guys, we have a small team of seven people. Most of them are on long term freelance arrangements with us. So we're very much tapping into the gig economy. What I could have done is say to everyone, looks like, we're closing, closing projects and therefore thank you very ...