Working Out the Workplace
I was without broadband a couple of weeks ago, so booked myself into County Hall for a couple of days. Having purchased additional mobile phone data to avoid the potential wellbeing issues that lack of Wi-Fi could have on teenage lives in my house (one of the first tiers of Maslow’s Teenage Hierarchy of Needs, just above battery-life), I prepared myself for walking into the office and how that might feel. Someone on the radio this morning described the deserted Covid-office as something out of a zombie-apocalypse, but I have to say that’s not quite true (County Hall is extremely clean, for a start…), but it certainly was a bit eerie. It was really good to see some familiar faces, do a bit of catching-up, and there was even a fire-alarm on the first morning! I was also fortunate enough to have a late-afternoon tour of the new A-Block – it’s stunning, beautiful in places, just needs some people.
The national debate on how people return to offices is ramping-up. The feedback from our summer staff survey was completely clear: the overwhelming majority of staff like working from home, however miss seeing their colleagues and friends in the workplace and would favour some form of hybrid-working. I chair a group currently looking at how we return to the workplace, so how that looks, feels, the behaviours and thinking needed, as well as how we keep people as safe as we can. The initial work from this group will be presented to the Senior Leadership Team on 15 September and we will be consulting on recommendations. This will include aspects such as how we bring teams together, the etiquette needed when running meetings, how we enable people to choose where they work, and of course how we compensate colleagues for additional costs that arise from working at home.
Linked to this, we’re putting on a number of focus group sessions over the coming weeks, where we’ll cover aspects of the Staff Survey in more detail, discuss the learning from the past few months and how we apply that learning to new ways of working. I’d love to see as many people at these sessions as possible – they’re only an hour long – and we’ll put on more if needed. Details of these will be published shortly. We’ve also got another Chief Exec Q&A session coming-up on Thursday 24 September, which we’ll devote to a conversation on the future of the workplace.
Life since March has seen landmark events for many of us, some good, some horrible and many deeply personal. My twins have their first day at college today. We’ve got photos of them stood outside the house on the first day of primary and secondary school; I won’t repeat their reply when I suggested we did the same, this morning… My thoughts are with all those who are sending children to school and elsewhere in the next few days; you’ve had an incredibly tough job over the past few months as you juggle work and family life. On that note, I’m going to point you to the most wonderful thing I’ve seen in ages, which was put together by Somerset Music and features 90 of our extremely talented young musicians from Somerset’s schools and colleges, in a virtual recording of Elbow’s ‘One Day Like This’. I challenge you to watch it without a smile or a dry-eye.
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