IT'S hard to believe it's 10 weeks since we vanished from our offices. It changed overnight. Even if we were occasionally working from home before Covid-19, the way we’d always connected with people wasn’t possible anymore.
But what we fundamentally are remains the same - human beings wired for connections. As Aristotle said: “Man is by nature a social animal”. And as we plan for the long-term, we need to learn how to connect equally as well virtually.
For a firm as vast as PwC, investing in our social side and creating a community we can all be part of has always been a priority. With over 2,200 of us from all walks of life, our success depends on supporting each other to be our best.
We’ve social groups holding events for single parents, carers, LGBTQ+, BAME, people with disabilities, religions and more. We even have First Friday socials for the entire office just because it’s fun and we know that’s important. But from March 16, the way we did things before had to change.
For the vast majority of the office-based workforce, the place you’re reading this article now is likely the place you’ll be spending your working hours for the next few months. Our box rooms, bedrooms, attics or garages have been repurposed, spruced up and our desks range from massage tables to still-shiny standing desks.
Our colleagues also look quite different. They might be furry, they might need you to dress them in the mornings or maybe they’re basking outside in the sun while you switch from one video call to another. It’s been fun, it’s been manic, it’s been stressful, it’s been enlightening - we’re experiencing all of this while facing challenges we could never have anticipated.
And what we need isn’t really the right tech or set-up. The theme of kindness during Mental Health Awareness Week was perfect for our time. What we really need is the human connection - yes virtually - but no less meaningful. It's to know that we will support and help each other when facing all of our various challenges. Thankfully, that culture is already ingrained in who we are.
As the lead for student recruitment for Northern Ireland and a director in the Operate division of the firm, I’m proud of what we’ve achieved together. With regular live streams for large and small groups, partners and staff talk candidly about their own experiences and wellbeing, their ups and downs. We’ve been fortunate to have external experts discuss how to look after ourselves and each other; and what’s been clearly messaged is that taking time out to check in with others is not a luxury, it’s essential.
We’ve met the challenge of working separately and become better because of it. Over the past ten weeks, we’ve swapped commutes for Zooms, catch-up coffees with virtual brews, early meetings with Darkness into Light walks and lunch meetings with bake alongs. Our annual day of volunteering two weeks ago was in danger of being cancelled - so we changed it to an all-day telethon on Webex for all our staff, raising £6,500 for our suicide-prevention charity Into Tomorrow.
We know now that we’ll keep doing the new things that work and there will be other things which we’ll never return to. Therefore for us, the challenge about working from home was never about what tech we needed to make virtual working a success - that we knew we’d get right because agility everyday flexibility is part of our DNA. The big challenge was how we could ensure that in a new normal, when we didn’t have a physical office to bring us together, the culture we have would do the job instead. It’s not just kept what we had - it’s helped us improve
Deborah Stevenson is head of student recruitment at PwC Northern Ireland
