All changed, changed utterly. I’m an operations manager for a global financial institution. My current job involves, amongst other things, managing fifty staff in ten different countries across three continents. Going from our staff having two screens, web cameras, headsets and a professional office set up to working from home with childcare commitments alongside significantly less hardware capabilities has been extremely challenging. While our department, like many others, had built continuity of business action plans, no one would have truly foreseen an event that would have meant all our staff in all of our locations globally would now be suddenly working remotely. We are adapting. And whilst our businesses will be adversely affected and our operational efficiency challenged, I have been touched by how all of us now see each other so much more as human beings. All of us can relate to each other facing the same situation in various different countries, we make more efforts to ensure we speak to each other every day and not just about our latest challenge. We try to be as flexible and understanding as possible when folks with children need to work different hours with creches closed. We work for each other, so all of us, rather than the individual, can be successful in this new environment.

The world will change from this experience, as will the financial sector. Do we need the office space we currently have in the centre of Dublin once we and our customers have and learnt from the experiment of remote working on a mass scale? Will we travel the world for meetings our senior leaders have conducted in their spare bedrooms? Will the commuter belt change when folks can work from home in Tralee & Letterkenny as effectively as they can from Blackrock? Millennials were changing how office environments existed with the success of Facebook & Google, but COVID-19 will likely speed this up even further when the dust of forced change settles, hopefully, for the better for society as a whole. A terrible beauty is born.  

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Fiacre Clear

Senior Vice President for an international bank