For many employers, their ‘team spirit’ and ‘family feel’ are crucial parts of their identity. Many are concerned that this will be challenging to maintain if many staff are working predominantly remotely. We were lucky to hear from expert speakers C-J Green and Dyfrig Jenkins, plus insight from the accountancy awarding bodies.
At the start of the session, Gareth ran a poll about how much different levels of staff will work from home in the coming months (October 2020 to March 2021). Here are the results of the percentage of the audience that gave each answer:
It is clear from the results that:
This certainly made the purpose of the session extremely timely!
After running the poll, the audience were asked for the reasons they would let staff work in the office, and we received a range of responses through the chatbox:
“We’re allowing people to work in the office if they are unable to work from home, be it the environment or IT connection. In addition, there are certain teams where they are ineffective from home so there is a requirement for them to be in the office.”
“Key office-based functions – telephone helpdesk, secure payments, IT support. Also, to support an individual’s mental health.”
“Systems dependent roles.”
“Exceptional circumstances to be agreed with the manager, printing, wellbeing, IT, customer-facing roles where essential services have to be provided.”
“Where they have a lack of space or IT to work from home. Where there are performance issues. Also just allowing people to see others for their own mental wellbeing.”
“Staff essential to maintaining the running of the office, e.g. admin team. New apprentices with their buddies, those unable to work at home. We have a third at home, a third full time in office, a third odd days. All under review depending and those wishing a break can request time in office.”
This led nicely into hearing from our ‘dream team’, double-act of expert speakers Dyfrig Jenkins of YOU.DEVELOPMENT LTD and C-J Green of BraveGoose who both gave plenty of practical pointers for the listeners to implement.
In his fascinating talk Dyfrig referenced the ‘Engaging for Success’ report (link below) which highlights 4 enablers of employee engagement:
C-J was as inspirational as ever, some of her points really resonated with the audience:
Our Session on Maintaining a Team Ethos was recorded. Please use the link below to access it:
You can watch the full discussion here
“One thing to explore is the notion of Airbnb experiences for your teams, one of our clients has adopted these with huge success.”
“I’m going to start making my “welfare calls” walking talks where possible and also ask each member of our management team to make contact with someone not in their team for a check-in.”
“I have just blocked out two hours of my calendar every Friday. And I have started organising a team-effort mega triathlon for Children in Need.”
“I’m going to check out those online tools (Nectar, Kazoo, Bonusly, Go Game) and save some time in my diary for planning.”
“We have already taken on 1-2-1s with staff, but making time in the diary for myself to reflect is something I will definitely do.”