The recent pandemic has obviously been a traumatic event that has touched us all in one way or another. I do not wish to belittle the impact it has had on people’s lives, but for those of us that are lucky enough to have been able to continue to work, it has accelerated considerably the whole concept of remote working.
I want to say that I am a massive fan of working from home (WFH).
At VIPR, we are embracing it, and it is working very well for us. We were already set up to work in this way, but were not expecting to do so for this length of time!
Right now, we are working as an organisation to establish exactly how we want to line up in the new future we are expecting.
I can see us reminiscing in the future about the way we used to work before 2020.
There are many undoubted benefits to WFH that have been cited in other posts, but one challenge I wanted to get people’s views on relates to communications.
Clearly, communications take increased importance with a distributed workforce.
Interestingly, we are now communicating a lot more than before, and the whole organisation appreciates this. It does make me wonder why we didn’t do this to this level previously.
The answer, I think, is in the increased effort this takes from leadership.
While we could argue that this should have been the norm prior to Covid-19, it was not, but now is, firmly part of VIPR’s ways of working.
So, how do we cope with this extra effort required? It is clearly beneficial, but we need to bake it into already busy schedules.
Here comes the tricky bit. Does the responsibility for communications across the organisation lay purely with the leadership, or can we find a way to share this with the wider organisation?
Should employees have the responsibility to drive some communications themselves? If so, how does leadership support this?
I think in time, this will become more and more accepted as a cultural norm, but I feel that there is still a journey to get there.
I welcome your views. Let me know on LinkedIn, you can connect with me here.
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Stewart Williams, COO.
