It seems to be everywhere, it is spreading. You can go out then you can’t. The schools get closed and then they reopen. You can’t go on holiday but then you can but only to certain places. We have been in ‘unprecedented’ times which few generations have ever experienced anything like it and businesses continue to be closely watched in the way in which they treat their staff. I’m not just talking about furlough as this runs deeper than redundancies and continued support. Overnight the world as we knew it changed completely and this certainly had an impact on me as well as many others. Many companies historically and even into 2020 had this purely office-based 9am-5pm chained to your desk mentality. Clock watching ‘leaders’ who only thought you were working if they could physically see you. On the other side of the spectrum there are a vast number of forward-thinking companies who promoted flexible working and amazing benefits like unlimited holiday. The gap between old and new working styles started to move closer together in a way never seen before. People struggled to adapt to remote working, whether the company they worked for promoted the new way of working or not it certainly isn’t for everyone. Don’t get me wrong the tech services side of things like VoIP systems and cloud access does need to be on point to successfully work remotely but does that mean you want or like to? Not always. Old school business leaders however forward thinking they have become will and have slowly started to fall back into their draconian ways. Some companies inevitably won’t survive the dreaded 2020, but the ones that will are the ones that continue to empower their employees. That identify individual’s strong points and nurture them. That provide the tools and the services needed to work anywhere any time. A leader once said to me ‘If you can’t trust your employees to work remotely, you can’t trust them to work in your business at all’.