The nights are drawing in, the leaves are turning to a thousand shades of red, brown and gold and our recent (two-day !) Indian summer has succumbed to the grey damp of Autumn. As we move into the final throws of 2021, have we also moved into what has, hitherto, been foretold as “the New Normal”?
It is undoubtedly the case that, after the past twenty months of unrelenting and unprecedented turmoil, life does now have the feel of being a great deal more settled. The return of the children to school at the beginning of September seemed, in particular, to have been something of a psychological turning point. The drawing of a line in the sand. Over the course of that one week, my commute into work suddenly became noticeably busier, the shared car park outside of our Teesside office once again began to fill up and the previously deserted workstations at our Teesside and Newcastle offices became re-animated with the noise of a plethora of clacking keyboards. The staff, clients and visitors who have made their way back into our offices have brought in with them the busyness, buzz and camaraderie that has been missing from our workplace for so long.
Things will, of course, never return to how they were pre-covid. We are now facing up to the economic legacy of the pandemic (and, arguably, Brexit). There will be no quick fix to those problems. Also, working practices will have changed forever. Whilst we, at Jacksons, still regard ourselves as being, fundamentally, an office-based business, covid has taught us that there are different, more imaginative ways of doing things. Having been forced to adopt home working by circumstances outside of our control, we have learned that, whilst there are undoubtedly many drawbacks to home working, there are also benefits to be had. We have, therefore, this week, rolled out to our staff a new, flexible hybrid working policy. Our intention is that this will be our new way of working, a way of working that, we hope, will continue long beyond the final fading of the last embers of covid. It is our first step towards meeting the challenges of the changed world into which we are now re-emerging. It almost certainly won’t be our last.
Winter’s Coming;…….. and so is our New Normal.
