No one expected working through a year of pandemic to be easy. Still, those early weeks of the first UK lockdown a little over a year ago felt like it might not be all bad.
“That first lockdown – it was warm and sunny, people suddenly found they weren’t commuting, they found they had time with their family,” recalls Lynda Shillaw, chief executive of regeneration specialist Harworth Group.
“But they didn’t think it was going to last for a year – that’s the fundamental point,” she adds.
And so now, Shillaw and other leaders across the real estate industry are ruminating on the lessons that a year of being in and out of lockdown have taught businesses – especially when it comes to looking after the wellbeing of their employees. Many members of staff, company executives say, found the anticipated benefits of working from home fading over the months, and difficulties arising to take their place.
“What happened over time is that, in a very uncontrolled way, we moved the workplace into people’s homes, into their domestic settings,” says Shillaw, who was in the hiring process for her role at Harworth during the course of the pandemic. “For a short period of time, that is manageable. But over a longer period, it’s harder. We’re working differently. What we haven’t adapted to is actually managing ourselves.”
Victoria Hill, founder of Promind, a coaching company focused on helping real estate clients address wellbeing and mental health issues, agrees. But that skill can be learnt, she adds.
“We’ve often relied on other people and face-to-face time to organise ourselves,” she says of the challenges that remote working has posed. “Self-management, and learning to understand when things are going well for you and when they’re not, has been a really good skill set that has come out for some people.”
As the UK economy reopens and company bosses consider inviting staff back into the workplace, executives and other managers throughout businesses will want to make sure that their teams are given every support in working through the next phase of the coronavirus pandemic.
Human capital
Hill spent much of her career in real estate finance, working at RBS and CBRE before establishing Promind. The past year, she says, has changed the conversation about wellbeing in boardrooms around the country.
“Undoubtedly, the whole area of human capital has been thrust into the spotlight since Covid arrived,” Hill says. “And it really needed to happen. It’s moved up the agenda, it’s on people’s radar, I see it coming into the boardroom. There’s a long way to go and we’ve been finding our way in the dark… but ultimately people are coming to the realisation that productivity and wellbeing are co-dependent, rather than wellbeing being a discretionary extra.”
For some companies, the past year has acted as a reinforcement of existing priorities. At consultancy Hollis, senior partner John Woodman says wellbeing and mental health have been a core focus throughout the business “for a long, long time”, with managers, including Woodman, promoting openness in part through honest discussion of their own challenges. But here, too, the pandemic has given a greater sense of urgency to the discussion.
“It has been a very difficult period for people, in having to change how they work and deal with new pressures around working from home,” Woodman says. “We were already well on board with these issues as an organisation, but we still had to react quite quickly to the new world and looking after people in a very different environment.”
Hollis had set up a team to monitor the pandemic as it unfolded, and that team suggested that the business trial a day on which everyone worked from home on 17 March last year. Of course, no one returned to the office, with the lockdown beginning just days later. For Woodman as a manager, the immediate emphasis was on communication – ensuring that staff were informed about what was happening with the business and how it was affecting their working practices.
Woodman expects some of the initiatives introduced to last well beyond the pandemic. “We’ve certainly learnt a lot about how to communicate more effectively as a business. I almost laugh at some of the things we’re doing now that we weren’t doing for 30 years,” he says, pointing to a weekly email that he now sends to colleagues offering his thoughts on a particular development in the business or markets that week.
Our industry is a very social, very gregarious industry. People are really missing that side of it
Lynda Shillaw, Harworth Group
Social animals
Keeping those channels of communication open has been crucial. “Communication really has set some businesses apart in navigating this era,” says Hill. “The teams and businesses that have been successful have thought about how they communicate and have done a great job of top-down communication early across the board. Those that have excelled [have looked at] how each individual wants to be communicated with. Building it into one-to-ones and finding out what’s going on with individuals has worked really well.”
Shillaw singles out the HR team at Harworth for particular praise, working to make sure that managers have always been aware of which changes in Covid-19 restrictions will have the greatest effect on which colleagues. But managers at all levels bear responsibility, and she has been trying to inject some fun into proceedings too, holding informal “CEO breakfasts” over Teams so that her new colleagues can get to know her personally despite working remotely.
“We’re social animals,” she says. “Our industry is a very social, very gregarious industry. People are really missing that side of it as well as the work environment.”
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