Back in 2018 and 2019 I spent over a year working with my colleagues in Heuristic developing a new workshop called Transport Planner. The designer we worked with helped us to create a very tactile and engaging implementation that allowed participants to work with a physical model of a city.
Just as we were about to launch this new product, the COVID pandemic hit and we were unable to bring people together to participate in the workshops. Post-pandemic it took a while to get that part of our business going again, and when we did we found that things had changed…
Working from home and transport demand
One of the key aspects of our Transport Planner workshop is considering the role transport has in delivering net zero, and you can’t consider that without talking about transport demand, so we incorporated the idea of companies and policy-makers encouraging people to ‘work from home’ as one way of creating a demand reduction. We had long debates about how far you would push this kind of policy and concluded that back in 2019 a radical local authority might seek to encourage up to 10% of its population to work in this way. Oh what difference a year makes…
While I was chairing a meeting of the Independent Advisory Board for IDCORE, one of the topics on our agenda was ‘modern working practices’ and the impacts these are having on the students that are part of this Centre for Doctoral Training. We had a long discussion about our own experiences of different working practices and how you balance the benefits of more flexible working practices with the needs of individuals joining an organisation early in their careers when working closely with others in a face-to-face context can be so valuable for learning and development.
…it takes commitment from all of us to create a structure and as many opportunities as possible for them to work with others from whom they are going to learn.
Building a culture
I sit here writing this from my office at home, as the owner of a very small organisation that employs two early career researchers because of the value they bring to the work that we do. They both work remotely. In fact, they both live in different parts of the country from me and from each other. I am doing everything I can to build a culture that supports and develops them, but it takes commitment from all of us to create a structure and as many opportunities as possible for them to work with others from whom they are going to learn. There is a cost associated with this, not just the train fares, but I think it is one that is worth paying.
These kinds of arrangements would have felt much less workable before the pandemic, and so perhaps there is a lesson in this about the acceptability of energy demand reduction measures. As with all decisions, we have had to make trade-offs and compromises in our organisation, balancing effective work, personal development, and environmental impact. But perhaps these new modes of working illustrate how well these priorities can coincide if we’re willing to try things that feel quite radical.
