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What’s not to love about working from home? As Coronavirus restrictions continue, more and more of us are working from home and experiencing the benefits of doing so. A morning commute reduced to walking downstairs to your home office space saves on travel expenses and stress while making it easy to maintain a positive work-life balance. Some are finding it easier to concentrate on our work without being interrupted my office chitchat and meetings that might not have been strictly necessary (couldn’t that have been an email?).
Unfortunately, as with much about the fallout from this pandemic, it isn’t as simple as that. The impact of working from home on our mental health and stress levels has, sadly, been well documented, but for many, there are practical considerations to consider, including childcare arrangements, issues around sharing living space in the daytime and other personal commitments. This has forced the hand of many companies into rethinking flexible working and establishing it as part of their company culture.
Here at Connexus, we have long supported the principle of flexible working: allowing colleagues to work the hours to suit them, whenever possible. Colleagues’ work-life balance and wellbeing are more important than ever at the moment, and Line Managers are encouraged to consider all flexible working requests. Of course, this must always be balanced with delivering the same high-quality housing services that our customers expect.
Most recent flexible working requests have been related to childcare. Children have now returned to classrooms in schools and nurseries, but the lockdown and subsequent restrictions meant that many of our colleagues faced with the unenviable task of trying to work from home with their children by their side. Laura Davies was left trying to balance her responsibilities as our Housing Services Manager with looking after her two young children. In normal times both Laura and her husband would be at work for much of the week, and so both of them being at home presented a problem. Fortunately, Laura’s Line Manager and team here at Connexus were very understanding and she was able to work earlier or late shifts, finishing or starting at lunchtime.
Lockdown forced parents across the UK to quickly adapt and become teachers, and Tom Bateson, Business Change Officer, and his wife soon found himself trying to balance his job with teaching and entertaining their two children. Tom’s Line Manager worked with him to work out some flexible work hours that would suit Connexus and Tom’s family responsibilities. This allowed Tom to have two free mornings and make up the time by working later in the day, giving Tom time to home school and his wife time to work on her business.
Nobody would ever have predicted the Coronavirus pandemic, but Connexus was already in a good position to facilitate remote and flexible working. While unable to recreate the personal nature of an in-person meeting, video calls have become vital to the day-to-day running of the business. Our Communications and Marketing team in particular are used to sitting in the same office and pitching ideas for content to each other. As a Line Manager, Gemma Williams, Senior Communications & Marketing Officer, recognised that this social contact was going to be hard to replace.
Gemma also faced the prospect of looking after her two children (and two dogs!) during the full-lockdown period, while she and her husband maintained their busy full-time jobs. While regular flexible working was not necessary, it did allow Gemma to start work early when her husband had an important work commitment later in the day or vice versa. Through the miracle of modern technology and flexible working, no time was lost and Gemma's team were always in contact with her.
Flexible working has long been supported by Connexus, but, as the experiences of our colleagues show, the practice has really come into its own during the COVID-19 crisis. Even as children return to school and life returns to some sort of normality, we will always respect that not being able to work a 9-to-5 should not exclude you from Life At Connexus.
