Reports that financial services workers in London’s Canary Wharf are now taking Friday as an undeclared day off has sparked a debate about attitudes to returning to work post-Covid lockdown.
Entrepreneur Lord Willie Haughey noted that many restaurants and bars in particular, UK-wide, are no longer opening on a Friday.
“I was hoping and I was confident people would slowly get back but it’s been much slower than I thought it would be,” Lord Haughey told listeners to his Go Radio show.
“In my own opinion, and speaking about my own business, I definitely think we have to get people to come back to work. I don’t think things are going to get back to normal, but we cannot let a pandemic end up changing our whole working pattern.
“I’m sure all these companies in the city didn’t tell their workers not to come in on a Friday; people just took it upon themselves.
“But I can tell with my own car park, contrasting a Monday and a Friday, there’s a third of the cars in it.
“I would say to everybody who is still working from home, especially young people, if you’ve any ambition at all to do better within your company, you will not get recognised sitting in the house.
“As Sir Richard Dyson said, it’s all about collaboration. It’s about getting noticed. It's about seeing how people are doing. So I think you will just be a number and a name, if you work from home.”
Sir Tom Hunter was keen to it point out the importance of real world upskilling in the workplace.
“If you're a young person, how do you get your mentorship? How do you learn? How do you learn by doing? You don’t learn by sitting in your jammies on a Zoom call,” said Sir Tom.
“There are hard truths here. A lot of people don’t want to hear them, but the leaders of these businesses need to sit with their team and say: ‘Okay, we've two people we’re taking care of. We have you, the employees, and we have our customers. What's best for both here?”
Lord Haughey agreed, adding: “When I first started work at 15 I learned about life: the social skills and how different people operate, how you get to trust people, not to trust people.
“My message, especially to young people starting out is, if you have the opportunity, get into the office, get into your workplace, wherever it might be, and mingle and work together!”
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