How IH Manchester Moved Forward During Lockdown

This year has been a challenge for everyone in many different ways. Here Director Peter talks about how we managed lockdown here at IH Manchester and how we are moving forward into the ‘new normal’.

“I think that the first thing that we have to do in a crisis is accept that sometimes bad things happen there’s no point wasting time and questioning why is this happening to me.
Things like this happen and you just have to accept it. You have to accept the reality and that things have changed, and things did change and i think they changed Irreversibly.

When we all went into lockdown and this this virus appeared, number one is accept the reality. Don’t try and wait to go back to what you were familiar with, what worked well in the past. You have to look at what can we do now, in the situation now, where people can’t move around, people
can’t go into a classroom anymore they can’t travel.

So what do we do what can we do and what can we do well?
You have to be creative and imaginative and we felt immediately that we had to consult with people. We had to communicate with people and that meant communicating with our customers, with our staff and with our agent partners. We had conversations about what was the best way forward? What would work for you and what would work for your market and your circumstances? It
became clear pretty soon what we needed to do, we needed to take everybody with us. So yes we needed to have our vision, but we needed it to be a vision that everybody could buy into
because it was a positive thing and it worked.

So accept, communicate and listen. I mean we really listened and if you remember we had our weekly webinars with agent partners every week from the beginning of lockdown. It wasn’t really a webinar, it wasn’t a one-way communication, it was a meeting. So we presented our product we explained why we did it, we listened to the reaction of our agent partners and together we created a different product than we had before. And people continued to come to these meetings.

So co-creation is something that I’ve learned as a word in business where you create a product with your customers, with your partners. You don’t create a product and then try and sell it to your customers and your partners and I think that’s something that’s come through really strongly over the last few months.”

You can see a short video of our hybrid lessons here: https://ihmanchester.com/hybrid-english-lessons/