David Parkin on the future of work – WFH or WTF?

A YEAR ago yesterday we ran a live event called ‘The Future of Work’.

Quite a lot has happened since then.

So it was fascinating to be able to organise a virtual event exactly a year on with the same title.

Well actually ‘The Future of Work…Revisited’, although I think these days the title would be ‘The Future of Work 2.0’.

Or given how much most people’s working lives have changed over the last 12 months, it probably should have been called ‘The Future of Work 42.0’.

A positive non-pandemic related change is that last year our client for the event was Woodrow Mercer Finance.

The firm, having undergone a management buyout in November, is now known by the smart new name Headstar.

What has stayed the same is that it is a financial recruitment firm run by finance directors and with an engaging and energetic team.

They were keen to revisit the subject of the future of work and so we organised the event online using a new virtual event platform called Event Anywhere.

It was created and developed by one of our panellists, Sean Gilligan, the founder of learning technology company Webanywhere which has more than 150 staff in the UK, US and Poland.

As I told our audience as I introduced Sean at yesterday’s event, he spent lockdown creating and developing Event Anywhere, which puts my achievement of finishing a 1,000 piece jigsaw in perspective.

Joining Sean on the panel were Carla Stockton-Jones, the UK managing director of Stagecoach, the country’s largest bus and coach operator with 24,000 people and 8,000 buses, coaches and trams.

Carla was previously director of home service at Sky and joined Stagecoach in February last year.

Also on the panel were two people with a wealth of tech and social media experience.

Helen Oldham is a founding board director of NorthInvest, a not-for-profit, early stage investment connector for Northern-based tech start-ups.

Helen is also a non-executive director, mentor and investor and chair of trustees at Smart Works Leeds, a charity which provides coaching and clothing to unemployed women.

Tim Hyde is one of the UK’s leading social media gurus. He was the 11th member of staff at LadBible aged 18 and then moved on to Social Chain where he created social media campaigns for the likes of Apple, Amazon and McDonald’s and pioneered the top nine most engaged live streams by a brand ever.

He now runs his own social media marketing agency called TWH Media with clients including Adidas and Apple Music and in the last 12 months alone has spent over £16m on Facebook and Instagram advertising and generated one billion views of organic content.

Which isn’t bad for somebody who is 25-years-old.

I told Tim that last year I’m sure he was the only person in the room wearing trainers, but this year I think a few more of the audience would be wearing them – and probably athleisure wear too.

Another returning panellist from the last event was Phil Parkinson who is the finance director at Rolf C Hagen, a Canadian-owned pet products supplier with its UK base in Castleford which supplies everything from fish tanks to nerf guns.

I said to Phil that when I met him last year he insisted on bumping elbows instead of shaking hands and I thought he was crazy.

How times change.

At last year’s event the panel made some bold predictions but no one could have guessed how much things really would change in the ensuing 12 months.

So are we in a new normal and will things continue to change in the future?

The panel were agreed that while working from home (or WFH if you like abbreviations) will remain a permanent part of working life for many people, there is a real desire by many to return to their workplaces.

And that is for many reasons, whether it be parents who have had to cope with the pressures of juggling a job and homeschooling their children or workers missing the ‘watercooler chats’ with colleagues.

Phil said that bringing people together in a workplace is often the catalyst for “genius moments”.

I’ve been waiting my whole life for one of those.

Many of the questions focused on the pros and cons of working from home.

Do we have WFH fatigue and does concern about allowing employees’ mental health to decline without social interaction factor in their thinking?

Carla made a really interesting point that it is not just working from home that can create issues for workers.

She said that bus drivers used to interacting with many passengers on their daily journeys have had to cope with working days where not one passenger boarded their bus.

What came across from all the panellists was a deep concern for their colleagues and an open-minded approach to how they work in the future.

It prompted one member of the audience to comment: “Great empathetic panel – you can see how much they care about their staff.”

The hour allotted for the question and answer session flew by and then all the panellists and attendees as well as the Headstar team had the opportunity to meet up in a virtual exhibition hall where tables of four had been set out.

Attendees simply clicked on one of the seats around the table to have a chat with the others around the table on screen.

I flitted around the room joining tables for a chat in a pretty similar way to how I would operate at a live event.

It worked really well and is a clever and effective addition to Sean’s Event Anywhere platform.

Perhaps the discussion was helped because Headstar had sent every attendee and panellist a ‘care package’ before the event containing a bottle of Black Sheep beer, a tin of gin and tonic, an alcohol-free beer from Ilkley Brewery, a tin of Yorkshire crisps and, perhaps most impressive, a branded Headstar notebook and pen.

Well, I’m not much of a drinker.

James Roach, Neil Muffitt and their colleagues from Headstar know how to host a great event and we love organising them, given it was the fifth one COPA have worked on for them.

It will be nice to get back to face to face events but in the meantime platforms like Sean Gilligan’s Event Anywhere will help keep us all communicating.

And when we return to something like normality I can certainly imagine that live events can be experienced by a much wider audience thanks to the benefits of technology.

:::

SPRING definitely feels like it is in the air.

OK, last weekend’s sunshine was followed by fog and near freezing temperatures on Monday morning but I’m definitely seeing signs of a welcome change in the seasons.

It isn’t so much the lighter nights and brighter mornings, or the snowdrops and daffodils pushing their way out of the soil.

It isn’t even the morning birdsong – song thrushes, robins and blackbirds warbling a pleasing tune.

No, what I think has really underlined the fact that spring is starting to bloom is the latest shirting samples from Michelsberg Tailoring.

Baby pink or lilac blue? I just can’t make up my mind.

Now if I had somewhere to go wearing a smart new made to measure shirt, that would be even better.

Have a great weekend.

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