A Worldwide Dose of Kindness




A Worldwide Dose of Kindness


Thank you. Simply thank you to everyone for your response to Coronavirus. Mobilising an organisation the size of ours, with all our commitments to other organisations, and the lead role we have in Somerset has been incredible to see – electric at times.
As I write, the majority of us have been working at home for seven days (not including the weekend). That’s seven-days of Skype, Teams, telephones, emails. Crikey, the emails… New policies, guidance, planning, interpretation of national instruction. Views and advice that change and are out-of-date after 24-hours.
It’s tough and I don’t mind admitting that I’m finding it difficult at times. I miss the people I work with; work is a social setting, we are social creatures. And it’s tough, because we work in public services to improve lives, strengthen communities and to ‘do the right thing’. And I see many friends in local authorities and the NHS really struggling; this is something else.
We launched our redeployment programme this week. Put simply, we will need to scale back some services and functions in order to provide resource to community-facing roles. The first call always has to be for volunteers and we are now working with managers and their teams to look at how we can do this. Just a couple of hours after the launch of the questionnaire, we had 500 responses; that’s incredible and doesn’t include all those working in social care roles who are simply needed where they are. This is the reality of mobilising ourselves for the next phase of Coronavirus, as we look to support communities, vulnerable individuals, schools and our NHS colleagues.
You will be paid for working through the redeployment programme; in effect you are temporarily adjusting your job description. This can be using your current hours, working additional hours or somehow combining what you do now with a redeployed role; we’re open to ideas. We will respect individual circumstances and advice from Government and Public Health England must be followed.
Many of us are thinking about what comes out of this, wondering about society, jobs, relationships. I like to think about kindness, the spontaneous community groups that have sprung up, the conversations. I have further dreams about the structure of society and national approaches to how we look after workers and their families, what’s really important to us and the behaviours that will be celebrated over the coming weeks. So maybe my working at home, based in my ‘inspiration-isolation-room’ is having a positive impact??
Stay safe everyone, you’re brilliant, and thank you.
Chris Squire, Director of HR and Organisational Development

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