Thousands of Shropshire people adapt to working from home

More than 2,500 of those workers are staff at Shropshire Council, who have adapted to working outside their normal office environment.

From the chief executive to the IT specialists, the authority has all staff working from home where possible.

Val Cross is a health and wellbeing officer at the council who is working from her makeshift office.

She said: "I'm working in the spare bedroom with one of my house rabbits Benny, who is an excellent stair climber but has no concept of coronavirus unfortunately, so he's not a very able public health work colleague. I'm missing my workmates."

Chris Warrender, ICT specialist dealing with infrastructure and security, said he has been making the most of the recent balmy weather.

“As part of the ICT team keeping the infrastructure working and secure, it has been a rather busy time this last few weeks," he said. "We are also working on new technologies to improve working from home experiences. I've been taking advantage of the weather to work in my garden with fresh air. I do miss chatting with colleagues face to face in the office, but with Teams and Skype we can keep up to date.”

Andy Begley, acting interim chief executive, said: “Since the start of the lockdown we’ve had more than 2,500 staff from a wide range of service areas working at home, including our customer service team, IT staff, planning officers, finance colleagues, our legal team, social care staff – to name just a few – and, of course, our directors and chief executives. As you can see in the photo, I’m working from my new work station at home.

“Everyone has very quickly had to get used to a new way of working, to not going into the office, and to not seeing colleagues on a daily basis – and we’ve all quickly become accustomed to holding virtual meetings. It’s not always easy but everyone has adapted brilliantly, meaning we’ve been able to continue providing services to the people of Shropshire, just from different locations.

“As well as the commitment of our staff, key to this has been having the technology to make it possible for such a large number of people to work from home at the same time.

“Over the past few years we’ve invested in technology that allows us to work from anywhere. The logic of this pre-coronavirus was to give our staff flexibility, putting them where the work is, to improve services, save time and money. With the current situation, we have been able to increase capacity and add additional features to the range of tech available.

“Essentially, we had a really solid foundation in terms of technology and we’ve been able to build new and improved solutions at pace – allowing us to focus on supporting the people and businesses of Shropshire as the solutions to communicate, collaborate and manage data were already established.”

Jeannie Bailey, financial assessment officer, said: “My working day is very different to before I now randomly have little people running in asking me for drinks/snacks sometimes when I’m on work calls, I can say though the people of Shropshire have been very kind and in the past few weeks I have noticed a real change in the attitudes of people who have contacted me. "

Nicola Bramah-Taylor, occupational therapy assistant added: “My main role at present is phoning people on our waiting list and our allocated clients, to check that they have access to support for essentials such as shopping and prescriptions, and that those who need additional support have it in place. This includes carers, many of whom are now supporting people whose day and support services have closed – this is a very challenging time for them.

“I also reassure people that we haven't forgotten them, that we will be doing home visits for assessments again.”