THE FINAL WORD

Cheese and Whine

During lockdown I have tried hard to stay connected with friends and colleagues and I have a nice routine developing, Criteo’s Mike Walley tells us.

Mike Walley is Senior Director of Global Real Estate & Workplace Strategy at Criteo

credit: antonio rodriguez

On Fridays at 6pm I sneak downstairs and liberate a bottle of red wine and a large bag of cheesy nibbles from under the watchful eyes of my wife, children and dog, creep back up to my office and join a Zoom call with some friends. We spend a relaxing hour, drinking a glass and talking rubbish (much as we used to do in the pub) before signing off until the following week.

Lately though, I have noticed we struggle to get through a full hour. Occasional moments of silence appear. We try not to talk about work; our sporting interests are varied and so we don’t get into deep conversation about any one thing and our children are all different age groups, so no school gate gossip or gripes to get our teeth into. This never used to be an issue when we were all commuting into London and interacting with wider humanity. The adventures of the commute alone can sustain a good chat for ages. But now...? Well, there are only so many things you can say about the 400th Zoom call of the week and the fact that the head of HR has taken to turning up to meetings in pyjamas.

I find myself in much the same position as I sit down to pen this article (quite a grand term for a series of inane ramblings) and realise that we have probably discussed to death every possible theory on ‘The return to the office’ or ‘The future of work’ or ‘The new normal’. What we actually need now is to go back and put some stuff into practice and see what happens.

I am about to kick off a major transformation project that will see the entire company shift from a traditional working model to a fully flexible approach. We are assuming that 50% of the population will work from home at any one time and are redesigning the complete portfolio to suit this way of working. We will run a global change management process to help managers, who may not have had remote teams before, shift to a new team dynamic and help all the employees work out how to use the new spaces. It is exciting stuff, but right now feels just like a game of Sims (a game in which you build virtual worlds and populate them with virtual people), albeit with some real-world consequences.

We will begin consultations with staff in the next week or so and it feels like a return to the real world, as opposed to this virtual game of work I have been playing from my home office. I am hopeful that the assumptions and theories we have used to develop our strategy will hold water but am ready to pivot away from them if ‘real life’ proves to be too resilient to change. Either way, it looks like the conversation menu is about to get an upgrade.

More cheesy nibbles anyone? w