WHEN LOCATION ISN’T EVERYTHING 

Many of the clients I have worked with over the years have held fast to their belief that, whilst working from home has a time and place, the greater good of the company will be better achieved by having employees spend much of their time in a physical location. After all, this is where they can best interact and exchange with colleagues to stimulate creativity and innovation.

The COVID-19 crisis overturned this thinking entirely, as organisations were forced to ‘get on and do’ within unexpected new parameters. What was interesting was how many times during lockdown I heard peers, customers and friends observe that interaction with their teams was so much better throughout 10-12 weeks than during the preceding months, perhaps years!

Driving this was the requirement for distributed teams to be more structured about the frequency, content and cadence of their virtual interaction. Done successfully, this is achieved efficiently and expediently, with everyone having the chance to have their say. On the upside, a business owner in the professional services market observed to me during lockdown that he felt more in control of what his staff were prioritising then, than he had made time to appreciate when sitting in the same building.

Given time, will might all revert to the practices we were familiar with in February 2020. But one lesson I trust we will take with us from March 2020 will be the priority we placed on interacting with each other ‘digitally’, without the inflexibility mandated to always do so physically.