There has been a lot of talk of levelling up recently. Unfortunately the old grey suits are also talking about getting back to the office. Yes, yes, I know there are some good reasons for being together, but let me witter on before complaining.
When I worked setting up international meetings i sort of bent the rules and started to set up on-line meetings. I found a mixture of real time and personal time worked really well. In other words you meet on line and talk, go away for the rest of the day, then meet the next day and so on.
The meetings I was holding were open to all countries, but were traditionally held in Europe. As soon as we went online we saw countries attending that had never attended in person. They could afford to participating online – it gave them a voice and it gave use an incredible extra resource. It was a dramatic example of levelling up. It worked straight away.
One thing we did discover was that a face to face physical meeting really helped the online meetings to work. And that is the equivalent of having to get back to the office. Yes, we do need to keep that face to face contact, but we can do with a lot less of it.
So I have been wondering about an idea for the future. We have the idea of serviced offices where you can rent a desk, rent admin. But what if we could rent a manager as well? I would really like to have a researcher working for me in Boston Spa, but I can’t manage them there. To level up we need to find a way for London based countries to train young people up north.