In March, I was horrified to hear about a friend of a friend who - when she asked her manager if she could work from home just before lockdown fully kicked in - was effectively sent to Coventry for two weeks, with her boss refusing to speak to her.  OK, so this is an extreme example, but others we’ve spoken to have reported feeling “judged” in some way for what they are and are not able to do whilst working from home.…

“Getting to know you, getting to know all about you”; even Julie Andrews and Deborah Kerr didn’t find this easy, as they struggled with culture shock and personality clashes in The King and I. What has perhaps become more apparent, over the last three months, is that many managers – and HR - know very little about the people in their teams.…

So on to our next “keeper”. Clap for Carers may have run its course and it may not have been universally accepted as a great thing, but for many it did provide a form of recognition that has been somewhat missing in our society. People have told us about putting hand-made ‘thank you’ stickers on their bins for the refuse collectors, of people offering postal workers refreshments and use of their toilets, of people making more effort to thank delivery drivers and writing hand-made cards and gifts for care assistants.…

Questions that we should be considering within our senior leadership teams now include “How can we come back and retain the resilience we have had to show in the last few months? How do we build a more resilient organisation generally? What have we learned from this crisis and how do we prepare better for the next one?”…

A clear call for much greater flexibility and more access to remote working for all has been issued on the back of this crisis.  Nearly everyone we spoke to said that they expected to be given more personal choice, control and freedom in determining how and when they work from home, and that organisations need to be less hierarchical and elitist when it comes to their remote working policies. …