Modern Ways of Working ~ Flexibility & Communication

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Audio transcript

Dinnae Galloway, IComm Marketing Manager:

"To me, modern ways of working means the ability to work wherever I need to work.

"So I actually enjoy working in the office - we've got a great office culture here. I love the people here, I enjoy coming into the office. But I'm also a mum, I also am I volunteer, I do a lot of community work. And so sometimes when I've got a community event going on, it's difficult for me to make it to that community event when I'm commuting from work. So to be able to, on some days, work from home or work from a cafe or work from a library or a customer site wherever I need to work from - having that flexibility, that to me is modern ways of working.

"The other aspect too, I think is being able to communicate in a way that's really expedient. So, gone are the days where you have to send an email and wait 2 or 3 days to get a response. You know if I need to have an answer to a question, I just somebody to send somebody a Teams message and say, "hey can you take a look at this? What do you think?" And you get immediate feedback. Maybe not immediate if they're not on their computer right at that time. But you get a quicker response than waiting for an email.

"I think a lot of times with email people think that it - and not that they think: email can be a really onerous task, going through your email. You know, some emails can take you 5 minutes to respond to, some emails can take you 20 minutes to respond to. So sometimes people tend to procrastinate about email. But they're not going to procrastinate about an IM. Right? Like they get a question on IM, they're just like "oh, this is my answer, here you go," so being able to do that, really quickly, and have that fast communication for people to be able to focus on a task and, without breaking stride, send somebody question, and say "Hey? What do you think of this?" get an answer and they haven't really broken stride on what they're focusing on, that is also another great thing about modern ways of working is that communication enablement.

"I work remotely probably about 1 or 2 days a week. Sometimes it's more depending on what I need at home whether I've got a community event that I need to be involved with or whether I'm working on, at a customer site. So for example, I'm the marketing manager, so I had to work at a customer site earlier this week with our Halcyon Change Management team, and doing social media grabs, videos and pictures of them actually training some of our customers and how to use their Skype room systems which was really fun. But I got to actually do work at a customer site. So working remotely 1 to 2 days a week, but sometimes more. Sometimes 3, 4, 5, whatever it ends up being."