Working from home; finding community in remote places
I took the homeworking switch to the extreme and moved back in with my parents in North Yorkshire at the beginning of March. I thought I’d sit out the (what I thought would be two-week!) pandemic surrounded by the moors and home-cooked meals.
According to the Office of National Statistics 49% of workers reported working from home at some point in the seven days leading upto 14 June 2020. Compare this to just 5% of the workforce between January and December 2019 and it’s easy to see the effect that coronavirus has had on working in the UK.
With employees enjoying the flexibility that homeworking brings and employers discovering that productivity hasn’t slumped, it's clear that working in the UK has been changed forever (whether you have embraced it or not!) Most people now agree that it is unlikely we will ever return to full capacity in the office.
At about the same time as lockdown was imposed, Filigree were appointed to help a London local authority with their coronavirus crisis communications response. This was a new type of comms for me. After a few weeks of preparing a daily briefing to help identify local issues and inform the Council’s priorities for the day, I was asked to take on the additional responsibility of managing their social media accounts.
With an estimated 42 million users across the UK, social media is taking on increasing importance for local government as a way to deliver information and updates to residents. This is especially true in the time of coronavirus as local councils are called on to disseminate important government guidance and lockdown updates. As people spend more time in their local neighbourhoods, having a sense of community is also increasingly meaningful and there is something for all local authorities to think about in being at the forefront of this togetherness.
Tapping into a very localised sense of community whilst sat 270 miles away, was quite a challenge. My vastly different surroundings made it difficult for me to understand and envisage the issues that lockdown was creating down in London. I was lucky enough to be surrounded by my family in a small village which felt very safe and far away from the virus. I felt like the wrong person to be warning people of park closures and the importance of social distancing whilst I was living in the middle of nowhere with no risk of bumping into people outside my household.
I quite quickly decided to shift the tone on the Council’s social media accounts. I felt that with lockdown and a barrage of unprecedented new restrictions being communicated by central government, it was unnecessary for local government to add its locally trusted voice. Obviously we knew it was imperative to echo the government’s messages on public health and social distancing, but we found that the vast majority of residents were already well-versed with this information. Instead I pivoted the social media approach to create a positive voice which amplified the community spirit and togetherness I could feel shining through my screen all those miles away. It echoed what was familiar within my own village and the immediate support network around me.
To achieve this, we decided to share a positive story from the borough every day. This included schools switching their DT department to create PPE, children who had had their schools shut spending their new found freedom raising money for charities and even a local ice cream man handing out free ice cream to staff at the local hospital. At times I found this to be quite a humbling experience and I received many messages from people who were overjoyed to see their efforts and the efforts of those around them recognised.
I found that appealing to people's better nature and collective responsibility was a much better approach when tackling issues, than simply clamping down with warnings and rules. For example we celebrate the community heroes to create a sense of pride in the area. We also wrote blogs such as ‘10 ways to show you love our parks’ emphasising that these green spaces were for all of us to share and encouraging people to look after them rather than positioning the Council as a figure that was watching over them, ready to scold.
The shift in tone has been received very positively by the Council and having the freedom to make changes and create my own voice on social media has greatly increased my confidence in this new type of communications.
I returned to London in the middle of June and whilst we are still working from home, I am finding it easier to post messages now I'm immersed back. I also find myself thinking that the stories I post and the information I share is most effective when it is immediate and location-specific. Having a sense of close-knit community is as important in the bustling capital city as it is in my small, home village back up north.