Happy ‘not so new’ year! I hope that everyone managed to get some well-deserved rest and head space over the holidays in preparation for what’s going to be a busy, exciting (Brexity) and challenging year.
In mid-December, we ran our usual quarterly ‘pulse’ survey with colleagues here in Carnival House. With the help of new data analytics tools we’re now applying to employee NPS (based on similar principals of what we use for Guests), your Executive Leadership Team member will be discussing the results for your area. But it’s safe to say that one theme remains consistently strong across our business. That’s the pride we have for our brands and for what we do. And as well we should—no doubt that pride brings great personal satisfaction and commercial results.
But even pride has its downsides. Because sometimes with pride, we get a false sense of security. We can become complacent and we can be fooled into thinking that what we do and how we do it can’t get any better than it already is.
When we announced some changes to our organisational structure at the end last year, I said that sometimes we have to make difficult decisions in order to set ourselves up for future success. Because despite the successes we’ve had over the last few years, we won’t always have a stable macroeconomic backdrop and favourable tailwinds like we’ve experienced, not to mention our 50%+ growth in the pipeline.
As a matter of fact, as we hit the halfway marker on our first quarter, it’s clear that we’re already facing tougher market conditions (yes, in part driven by Brexit uncertainty). Not surprisingly, we’ve seen a dip in consumer confidence and a less-buoyant holiday market. And while we may be leaders in our market, we don’t employ an army of Kevin Costners and this isn’t the Field of Dreams—so just because we’ve built ships, it doesn’t mean Guests are coming! In order to create unforgettable holiday happiness, we first need booked Guests. So also, not surprisingly, teams across the business have been working extremely hard to drive demand by bolstering consumer confidence and create compelling propositions.
And we’ve got teams across a ton of different work streams preparing to deal with any disruption Brexit could give us. Because pride alone in how we’ve done things to date won’t cut it. We constantly need to assess our situation and ask how we can do things better; how we can adopt to change on the horizon.
But we shouldn’t need something on of the scale of Brexit to take action. We all need to be allergic to thoughts of “because we’ve always done it this way”, or “I’ll do that when”, for things that matter for our Guests or our colleagues, big or small.
If there’s a new year’s resolution for all of us, it’s probably to look up, look around, be curious as to what’s going on, and ask ourselves: “is what I’m doing making a difference to today?”, “what could I do now to make this simpler, more efficient, better?” And “are we prioritising our workloads and resources effectively?”
We’re not all involved in big transformation projects. But we all have the opportunity to continuously take what we did yesterday and make it better today…it’ll pay dividends tomorrow.