The future of work has been just around the corner for some time…

My favourite book, Replay (Ken Grimwood, 1986), tells of a 43-year-old man who repeatedly dies and awakens in his 18-year-old body. He relives his life, each time choosing a different path using hindsight. Effectively a precursor to Groundhog Day, the tale that repeatedly references the way many have lived during lockdown. Another walk, anyone?!

With many companies, and perhaps governments, wishing for the benefit of hindsight, this was not needed by Ashfield MedComms. There are no regrets and we didn’t pause with the rest of the world; we put our work family, our people, first.
We continued to be people-obsessed,
and in 2020:

• 150 people were hired and 200 were promoted
• Our learning programme, The Academy, was delivered 100% remotely
• We invested £4.5m in training
• Over 100 people graduated from our award-winning allegro programme, accelerating the development of medical writers.

• Gave those with COVID-19 caring responsibilities the gift of time, without guilt or impact on pay
• Turned engagement into an addiction: building on strong psychological safety and trust, we communicated authentically, stayed together virtually, encouraged humanised check-ins and had fun together
• Focused on mental health by creating resources around resilience and managing from home, and trained one in 35 team members to be Mental Health First Aiders. One in three people accessed dedicated wellness support
• Paid bonuses and reviewed salaries for all, keeping all jobs safe
• Supported our community through donations (totalling more than £20,000) to many charities, including the Trussell Trust, and we provided ~150 laptops to schools.
• Our well-established Dynamic Flexible Working policy allowed our people to transition to permanent homeworking immediately, and to plan days around the myriad of new concerns, such as home-schooling, family care and maintaining wellness.

We have an opportunity to continue to disrupt convention and challenge the way we work, something that has been with us for a while. As mindsets shift, expectations change and diversity in thinking becomes ever more important; we need to remain agile. We need to continue to respond to the changes across our people and our business to further strengthen our trailblazing proposition.

Ultimately, we want to build on the positives learnt from enforced homeworking while still enjoying new freedoms when the time is right. We need to place ourselves outside the ‘languishing zone’, where people feel ‘meh’ about the world, and ensure that we can all find our flow; that ‘sweet spot’ when time floats away, where we work at our best and feel fully engaged and energised. This may result in many of us being in the office on some days and at home on others. Some days may be longer, others may be more flexible, with thoughtful planning and organisation.

Critically, we need to keep sight of the key components that form the PERMA model where flow also has a home (Seligman, 2012), where ‘flourishing’ is our desired outcome, which will Make it Matter for our people. Prominently, research shows significant positive associations between each of the PERMA components and physical health, vitality, job and life satisfaction and commitment (Kern, Waters, Alder, & White, 2014) – a worthy list.

• Positive emotions – experiencing positive feelings such as gratitude, inspiration, curiosity, enjoying the ‘here and now’
• Engagement (flow) – when truly engaged time stops, we lose ourselves, we concentrate intensely
• Relationships – positive social interactions, a feeling of belonging to a team
• Meaning – serving a cause
• Achievements – taking pride in success, feeling valued.

To find out more about Ashfield MedComms, visit https://ashfieldmedcomms.com/