A year of living (and working) differently

I had meant to write this exactly three weeks ago to coincide with both my two-year anniversary in my current role at Deltatre and also the anniversary of my last day working "as normal" in the London office, but then I had too much other stuff to do, so here we are – a bit less timely, but still…

It would be fair to say that the last year has been... unusual. We've all had to suddenly adapt to a "new normal", whatever that means!

First off, let me make a few things clear - I've had it easy.

People in jobs like mine have had our relatively privileged lives disrupted and have taken on new-found challenges and restrictions, but that's small beer in the grand scheme of things.

I've been very fortunate in that nobody in my immediate family or circle of friends has been killed by COVID, and my personality is such that I do not need or crave the company of a lot of people, so being forced to largely stay at home with my wife, our two dogs and our two cats has actually been mostly been fine by me.

I already worked one or two days a week from home, so switching to full time home-working was easy.

We already had very diverse and distributed teams on my projects, so being in a single office location was never entirely the "old normal", even if I was regularly travelling up to four hours per day to sit on Zoom calls at a different desk in “the Before Times”.

We already had the tools for remote working and collaboration in place — laptops rather than desktop PCs, VPN connectivity, Zoom, Teams, Jira — and I have been pretty much able to do my job from anywhere with an internet connection for the past decade, if the prevailing working culture allowed for it.

Most importantly, we already had strong working relationships, both internally and with the client teams.

Anyone working on brand-new projects across our industry will surely face more hurdles building rapport with colleagues and customers this year and beyond — when the first COVID wave hit I was working across two projects, and for both of them we had benefited from being able to build a relationship with the client teams face-to-face beforehand. So even though there were issues of timezones and language to take into consideration (one client was split between South America and London, and we had team members in other exotic locations from China to Ipswich) we had already built up a level of communication, familiarity, and most importantly, trust.

I have been constantly impressed by the way that our business has responded to the COVID crisis and adapted to changing situations. The leadership teams pre-empted the imposition of lockdowns by facilitating and advocating a work-from-home strategy until it was safe to return to our various offices, and supported the needs of not just the Deltatre family but of their families in turn by acknowledging the need for additional flexibility to support childcare, home schooling, and often more than one parent working from home at the same time.

Again, I have had it easy — I have a dedicated office space at home rather than a kitchen table and an uncomfortable chair, I don't have kids who variously need feeding, educating, entertaining, and comforting in this strange new world, and I have a garden that I can step out into and away from the screens and the confines of the four walls that have become our entire world for months at a time. I admire anyone who has had to get through the last 12 months without those advantages.

So what comes next?

In the UK at least vaccines are rolling out, pubs and restaurants have a timeline for re-opening, and there is the glimmer of hope that by the time our birthdays roll around in July both my wife and I will be able to spend time with our families and friends without fear of putting each others health and lives at risk.

As for work? The pandemic has demonstrated that for a good number of jobs it is possible to work almost entirely remotely, and I for one will be profoundly happy if I do not have to go back to commuting into London with any regularity.

I hope that some of the positive changes brought by COVID will stick around after the virus has been defeated / managed, including breaking down the outmoded idea that many "office jobs" actually need to be carried out in traditional office spaces — specifically expensive offices in expensive cities with expensive accommodation and/or travel costs associated with them which make those jobs only suitable or accessible to those who live near enough to those locations and wish / are able to spend a chunk of their day travelling.

I hope it also helps to increase diversity in the workplace, providing employers with the opportunity to recruit from a much wider pool of candidates, less fettered by geography and more inclusive of those for whom an office-based role is either impractical or undesirable.

I hope that the notion of a "9 to 5" job being the default for most people changes — it's an old-fashioned notion and it makes it extra difficult for anyone with children or other responsibilities to work around, particularly those wishing to return to work after caring for children 24/7 once they reach school age.

But what about everyone else?

This is where we need to consider the downsides of greater home-working.

It will have an undeniable knock-on effect on the hospitality industry as we know it, with fewer office workers schlepping into town and city centres during the week there will be fewer people to buy their coffees in Starbucks, Caffe Nero, and Costa, fewer people to buy their lunchtime sandwiches, sushi, and healthy lunch boxes from Pret, Wasabi and Leon, and (more importantly in my personal view) fewer people still buying from the smaller, independent retailers struggling to compete with the big players with their dominant position on every street corner.

It will have the potential to hollow out those town and city centres, as formerly lucrative office space becomes surplus to requirements and gets redeveloped into… what? More overpriced housing that nobody outside a sovereign wealth fund can afford?

It will hurt the pensions of all of those people whose funds invested in that formerly lucrative commercial real estate as they end up with empty inventory and their returns stagnate.

It will definitely be manifested most clearly where there was already an imbalance, a plethora of very similar businesses offering very similar products with an inevitably unsustainable number of premises to maintain, and an over-inflated economic bias towards specific locations (ahem, I’m looking at you, London…) but in some ways it is those big players who not only dominate but define our smaller high streets.

Humans are social animals (apart from grumpy curmudgeons like me, obviously), so maybe the abandoned shell of an old-school department store could be turned into a co-working space with independent boutiques and a pop-up kitchen that promotes different local businesses… but somebody still needs to make it happen.

We've seen Debenhams and Topshop fold, and I suspect they won't be the last, but who is going to follow them? What new businesses are going to spring up and become the next generation of commercial success and define what a 21st century high street looks like?

My hope is that we can weather the COVID storm and the inevitable casualties it will take with it (both individuals and businesses) and that we can slowly rebuild and remodel our economy and our ways of working in a more considered, kinder, and ultimately more humane way that is more in tune with the goals and aspirations of a 21st century society.

If I do have to go back into the office, I could also murder the occasional pub lunch with a cheeky craft beer (or two) and a dirty burger while watching the world go by, if that's OK with everyone else?...