Work life balance

I met a committee of Senedd Members this week to discuss the seismic change brought by the pandemic and how it could shape our future.

As a council the biggest change for us has probably been the move to remote working with the vast majority of our office-based staff now working from home. Before the pandemic about 80 staff a day were connecting remotely, now it’s over 3,000. That change was almost overnight and the response of staff has been amazing. Before the pandemic many of our staff weren’t keen on home-working, but our staff survey in September showed about 90% want to continue working from home for at least part of the week.

All our call centres now work remotely and we’ve seen a shift in the way the public access our services with greater telephone and online contact. And other organisations and businesses, including retail and hospitality, have undergone their own transformation and things won’t go back to the way they were pre-pandemic.

But some of that change was already under way. In Swansea we’d started responding to the reduction in city centre footfall caused mainly by online shopping. The pandemic has accelerated that shift to such as degree that the very future of towns and city centre are now in the balance. They need to become areas to live, work and enjoy leisure and cultural offers, bringing in new patterns of footfall and visitors.

We started that journey a few years ago with better transport and pedestrian access – just look at the Kingsway. We’ve also made and will continue to make the city centre greener and more welcoming. There’s new city centre residential developments, better digital infrastructure, and we’ve transformed the cultural offer with museums, galleries, digital arena and the cultural quarter on High Street.

Another key ingredient is creating opportunities for city centre working. Despite the recent shift to home-working, not all employees will be working at home all of the time. This gives us the opportunity to create hubs where different public sector organisations can work from one place. We’ve already been doing this at the Civic Centre with university and NHS staff taking office space previously occupied by our staff who moved to agile working.

To boost this further we need both the Welsh and UK Governments to relocate jobs to public sector hubs in regional cities to help create extra footfall and spend. We’re unlikely to see huge numbers of shoppers fill our city centre every day because they’re increasingly buying online, but bringing office workers into a hub will see them using cafes, restaurants, bars and shops during lunchtime and after work, as well as creating local jobs. We hope for some positive news on this for Swansea very soon. But to do this we also need the infrastructure to support these hubs and home working through 5G technology. We’ve provided extra support to our staff who’ve been struggling at home, but internet coverage in some parts of Swansea remains patchy.

In preparing for the Senedd committee meeting I reflected on my own personal thoughts about the current ways of working and how these may change our future actions.  Personally, I think it’s hard to predict how people will react post-pandemic.  On the one hand the technology has simplified things and become a part of many of our lives.  On the other hand there’s no real substitute for human interaction and our naturally social behaviours.  Many of us are surely looking forward to working alongside our colleagues again, exhausted by back-to-back virtual meetings.  The distinction between work life and home life is an important one and I suspect that the future holds a more hybrid model of working for most people rather than a purely home or office based environment.

Either way we need to factor the possibilities into our plans for the city and the Council.

Stay safe and well.