Covid-19 was the instigator which transitioned our teams towards a need to work from home and caused us to re-evaluate the way in which we engage with our teams. After our recent announcement that MCG staff can work from anywhere, forever. We took the opportunity to reflect on the great ways in which covid-19 has impacted our business, our people and the wider eLearning community.

We focused on community support.
In the last 3 months our company, and our employees, have contributed over £6,500 to local causes. Within weeks of working remotely, a number of our team, set the first fundraising challenge. If we could raise £200 for a local foodbank, they would shave their heads live in our weekly (now virtual) CleverBar! Over the course of one week, they quadrupled their fundraising target raising £905 to help local people in crisis.

We announced a new charity partnership with The Hubb Foundation, a local charity dedicated to improving the lives of children and their families across the Stoke-on-Trent community where our HQ is based.  MCG was pleased to fund half the cost of 500 code breaker sets, to the tune of £5,000, to help enhance local children’s understanding of STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) in a fun way. We have since followed this up with a further £500 donation to the charities great work. 

We prioritised employee wellbeing.
The wellbeing of our people has always been one of our top priorities, and nothing has changed in light of covid-19. We continued to recognise the hard work of our staff through ‘little acts of kindness’. When the ‘Easter Bunny’ was unable to visit the office, we sent all staff a £10 voucher at Easter to go out and treat themselves, and their families, to some Easter goodies. 

We kept in touch and led a number of pulse surveys designed to check in on our teams, support them through remote working and be aware of their feelings surrounding returning to the office.

We led a weeklong campaign in National Mental Health Awareness Week which saw 100s of ‘Kudos’ messages shared across Microsoft Teams, takeovers over our ‘Daily Stand Ups’ and a group wide Tea & Talk event including a personalised Tea and Biscuit letterbox gift sent to everybody’s home… including team members who hadn’t ‘officially’ joined us yet!

We appointed our first Wellbeing Champion who recently completed a Mental Health Awareness course to help us focus on employee wellbeing now, and in the future.

We had fun.
We took CleverBar virtual! Our weekly Friday afternoon celebration continued over Zoom, encouraging the team to get together and recognise another week of work well done. We’ve led MCG Pictionary, Bingo, Emoji Quiz and online gaming events. We’ve shared pet pics, funny memes and bad jokes. We kept the MCG culture alive by remembering we’re all in it together.

We focused on the future.
Covid-19 gave us the opportunity to focus on the future, bringing forward our plans for product development, facilitating us to recruit a number of new positions across the business and give everyone something exciting to aim for. We quickly expanded on our approach to flexible working and launched into “working from anywhere, forever” adapting our day to day way of working to offer remote working as a standard across the business.

As we move forward as a business, we’ll remember covid-19 as a time which evidenced the strength of our people, the determination of our leadership teams and a time which shaped the future of MCG for many years to come.

For any additional questions please contact 0330 133 1638