How are your people coping with working from home and the prospect of continuing to do so for another six months following this week’s Government announcement?

While satisfaction levels among older employees have been generally positive, reactions from younger workers are less enthusiastic. One of the biggest challenges is the loss of office camaraderie. For younger employees in particular, work life is much more than what you are paid to do. Stripping away social aspects like catching up with colleagues on Monday morning, office banter or drinks after work has a natural bearing on the culture of an organisation and, in our case, interacting with our members promotes happiness and wellbeing within our team.  

What is your company view: continue to work remotely or go back to the office? Many businesses appear polarised. Pinterest has recently paid $90m to end a new lease obligation in favour of a more distributed workforce while CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings pans homeworking, saying that he does not see ‘any positives’ at all. The reality is that a third way is emerging. In this hybrid model, businesses are looking to combine the best of both worlds with employees spending part of their time in the office and the rest working virtually, depending on the tasks that they need to fulfil.

Lockdown has seen a huge increase in a more sedentary lifestyle for a large proportion of the UK. This is having a negative effect on posture and spinal mobility, especially for those sitting for long periods of time in chairs that are not ergonomically designed, as they perhaps may be in their office.

This post was created in partnership with FLY LDN and Fi Clark @fifiyogagirl, head of Yoga for FLY LDN

What does an agile workplace mean to you? While the concept has been around for years, the experience of global lockdown has turbo-charged business and employee interest in more flexible ways of working and altered the meaning of work for us all. In the words of Michael Dell, Founder of Dell Technologies, ‘Covid-19 has made one thing clear. Work is something you do, an outcome, not a place or a time’.

With a sunny weekend over and another busy week of working from home just starting, we wanted to share some unique perspectives and carefully selected stories that we’ve been sending to Members.

We are as determined as ever to support businesses, and the teams that make them what they are, through this pandemic, so we hope these few stories will inspire, guide and uplift.

This month, we are continuing to highlight excellent service around London, and where better to start than with one of our hotel partners who shares our service ethos? The Hari is a five-star boutique hotel in Belgravia, where our Members can book a working lunch at preferential rates and where some of our staff recently went to compare notes on service during a training day. At The Argyll Club, we’re committed to delivering and celebrating excellent service – here, we catch up with Andrew Coney, The Hari’s General Manager, on his views on life at the hotel, what makes great service, and his outlook for 2020.