Lockdown Team Blog - Series 2: Carol Hopwood

3 minutes to read.

Last year, our teams produced a series of blogs written by colleagues across multiple divisions of the company. They provided a small insight into our evolving working practices and values as we all adjusted to our new post-COVID19 world. Now we're back with our second series!

Here is the fifth in our 2nd series of posts from our Head of Serious and Catastrophic Injury, Carol Hopwood.

Working from home or living at work?

"I have never been a fan of working from home.  The physical division of work and home helped me maintain a work life balance and the daily commute gave me an opportunity to read, listen to music or just have some quiet contemplation at the end of a busy day.  I am lucky that I have a designated working space, I have no home schooling to battle and have a dog that will happily sit on my feet under my desk to keep them warm. Yet I cannot wait to get back to work.

We are social creatures and I miss human interaction. Whilst Teams and Zooms enables us to see and speak to others in real time, we can’t offer the same level of comfort to a distressed client or family member over a video screen, we can’t get the same sense of how families are coping, we don t get the same rapport. I’ve lost count of how many hands I have held or hugs I have given as our clients have faced the most difficult times of their lives and I miss that we can’t do that for them right now.

Working through the pandemic, even the most stoical of people have felt the pressure and its part of our role as Senior Leaders to help ensure that our most important asset, our people, are supported as we navigate through.  The firm has been so proactive in supporting the workforce as we all try to manage the seismic changes to our day-to-day lives that the pandemic has brought. Transitioning the work force to being able to work from home, flexible working hours, the introduction of wellbeing ambassadors, on line and interactive professional support, on line social events, competitions, fund raising events, hampers full of goodies to every staff members, on line awards ceremonies, and the inevitable quizzes to name but a few.  The message has been that it is Ok not to be OK, to talk about how we are feeling and to adapt and make changes to get us through.  None of us are immune to bad days but switching on the radio, calling a friend, taking a lunch time walk have all helped.  Our staff have been amazing, just getting on and delivering their usual exceptional service levels for our clients whose gratitude is evident from the daily five star reviews that we get as feedback.

We will emerge from this, more technology savvy, with greater resilience, more efficiencies of working and above all for me, more grateful for all that we have. So just in time, as we emerge from lockdown winter, the daffodils are sprouting, the birds are singing and it is light after 5pm. Small things can lift the spirits."