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Wharf Life Aug 26-Sept 9, 2020 wharf-life.com
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Years since Amy joined the team she now leads at Level39
how the head of Level39 wants to make the tech accelerator the best connected community in the world by Jon Massey
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ollaboration is the word on the lips of Amy French. Promoted to head of Level39 at Canary Wharf in April, her fiefdom has been unusually quiet since lockdown, for obvious reasons – although some members of the tech accelerator are breezing around its cafe space (albeit in an appropriately distanced manner) when we meet for this interview. “We’ve been very flexible with our members to make sure that we can support them and retain them through this key time – that’s been our main focus,” said Amy, who joined Level39 in 2014 as its events and marketing coordinator. “The key thing for me is that Level39 is still active, still welcoming new members, and we’re still collaborating in the physical space as well as digitally. “We can’t get complacent. We need to make sure that flexibility, value and communication are there. During this time we’ve made sure that we’ve stayed in really close touch with our members. “We’ve run surveys to ensure that we know what they need, to understand their unique challenges and to do everything within our power to support them, whether they’re coming into Level39 now, or whether they’re preparing for their return. “The amazing thing is we are seeing more and more people coming through our doors again and I’m looking forward to welcoming even more. “There’s a real appetite among our members to return to Level39 for many different reasons there’s the opportunity for collaboration and making sure that their teams are getting the chance to see one another in person. “For some it’s about touching base more frequently or the leadership element – just making sure that they have one centralised hub where brainstorming, innovation and creativity happen. “In the future, they may become more flexible and there might be a blend of working from the office and working from home. “I think it’s so important to make relationships at work in person. People need to feel that they can come and talk to you if they’ve got problems, or if they’re stuck somewhere. “Perhaps working from home,
people may not be so comfortable sharing. “The Level39 team are all back in the office it’s something we worked really closely with Canary Wharf Group on. We wanted to demonstrate that we’ve done this with our team and we’ve prepared a very comprehensive ‘Return To Operations’ pack, which has been shared with all our members and tenants, so they know what steps are being taken and what measures are in place to make this a Covid-secure environment. “It’s fantastic to have all of our team back – it feels like it’s a return to some kind of normality. Even with social distancing, it’s amazing to have everyone back. “While things won’t be going back to how they were 100%, we have to be there to support people when they’re ready to return. “One of the positive changes is that anyone who didn’t have a work-from-home strategy before, now does, and they realise they can trust their employees to be productive, to make sure projects are done and to communicate their objectives and their milestones. “Working from home can be good for wellbeing and the pandemic could lead to a better work-life balance for some, as employers know their staff can be trusted to spend some days at home if they’d like to. “But I think it does vary from company to company and from person to person. If you’ve got kids, for example, you may not be as productive working from home. “People also need a good environment in which to work and not everybody has that where they live. We were operating through lockdown for our members who needed access to the office and, for them, being able to come in and get on with their work was a way of preserving those boundaries.”
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orn of a drive to make Level39 the most connected community in the world, the accelerator’s recently launched Digital39 initiative rapidly took on a fresh role as the pandemic took hold. Established as an online platform for members to stay in touch with each other, to express their experiences and offer advice and insights wherever they were in the world, its podcasts, blogs and interviews have, unsurprisingly, been focused on dealing with the situation at hand.
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Image by James Perrin – find more of his work at jamesperrin.com or via @millerjamesperrin on Insta
