A new way of team working - Gwenllian Owen

Welcome back from your holiday Gwenllian!

This last week has been a whirlwind and a mix of emotions to say the least! Returning to work from annual leave on Monday 16th March saw me facing one of the largest Pandemics to hit the world and a time of huge change to our daily working pattern. It wasn’t quite what I expected after a “once in a lifetime holiday”! There was little time to discuss holidays, it was straight in to make the necessary adjustments to our programmes, arrangements for home-working and ensuring that the team had what they needed to enable them to work from home.

We have all faced many sorts of change over the years but this is very different and has happened rapidly.  We may not have access to all our equipment, files or the information that we might need to keep our projects running as efficiently as usual but we are having to diversify and alter our working methods to ensure a professional service is still being provided. Communication channels are changing, for example the ION leadership and 20Twenty team at Bangor University are now all working from home and will be keeping you updated on any changes.

Of course, we are no longer out and about meeting with our delegates, our network colleagues and business communities and our daily work pattern has changed in order to safeguard our staff, delegates and the wider community. We will be keeping in touch with our networks through on-line forums and social media, ensuring that our delegates are kept informed of any changes whilst also keeping them engaged with the programmes. These are challenging times which could continue for weeks or months, but is also a period for new opportunities – the potential to look at how we can adapt our current practices and delivery methods and of course change our working patterns. 

We were disappointed that we had to postpone our planned events and hope that we will be able to update you soon with new dates for your cohort days, preview events and of course our Celebration and Awards Dinner that was to take place in April. We are following Government and University guidelines and looking out for updates on a daily basis and will share as much as we possibly can with you without overloading your already busy workload.

As a team, we are in regular contact, by email, telephone and video link-up so that we can stay motivated and get on with our work. We started our regular video link-up on Monday morning which was interesting whilst trying to get the technology to work! This will enable us to plan for the week ahead and keep in touch – it's always good to see people when you’re working remotely! We’ll be meeting daily via video-link for a quick plan for the day but also for a “virtual coffee-break” as we all need some form of contact with other human beings, people who are sharing the same thoughts as us, and no doubt will be worried about aspects of their jobs, their family, their business and the future. It’s more important than ever now to use the technology that we have available to us to keep in contact be that email, telephone, video-links, social media etc to ensure the wellbeing of all our teams.

We’ll have lots of questions spinning around our heads at this difficult time – wondering what the long-term holds for us, what is our vision for the future, how do we achieve that vision and remain positive about it? We’ll wonder whether it will be “back-to-normal” or will it be a “new normal”? My personal thoughts are that it will be a very “new normal”, we’ll all become a lot more tech-Savvy (that’s my personal wish!!), will have picked up new skills from our time working from home and managing from a distance and developed new methods of communicating as a team that don’t revolve around actual physical presence at the same location.

One thing that’s important to me and the team will be having clear lines of communication between each other and with our delegates.  I will try to ensure that all members of the team are in touch and that we are keeping our delegates in the loop. There will be blogs to work on, mini sessions to share, updates to our website and our social media.

In times of crisis, we must look for the opportunities that arise, this is now an opportunity for us to develop new strategies for life post COVID-19, develop new materials, new delivery methods and new ways of working.

The “new future” will be one of focusing on engagement with our delegates and assisting them as much as we can with what has happened and how the future unfolds for them. I am sure that over the next few weeks/months we will be able to develop new ways of delivering our courses, take advantage of on-line and blended learning opportunities and follow other leadership tips and hints that could help us.

The Welsh Government and the UK Government are developing support packages for businesses and we will try to get as much information to you to ensure that you are kept informed on what help is available during these difficult times. Here’s a link to recent information from Business Wales:  https://gov.wales/coronavirus-covid-19-support-businesses

Please, stay safe, keep in touch and we’ll update you again soon.

Gwenllian