Brian’s take on working from home.

On Friday last, I celebrated seven weeks of working from home. I hadn’t worked from home a day in my life before that! But like most people, I’m adjusting to the “new normal” and I must say there are parts to it that I’m really enjoying.

Living in Kinsale, I love to now try and get for a walk before work which is new to me as I normally wouldn’t have had time and I’m certainly not missing the commute although you do need to be diligent to “get away” from the home office and enjoy the down time.

Not that there is too much down time, two young daughters see to that!

As an office, we were lucky, as we moved early on when Covid-19 began to break and put all the necessary plans and hardware in place to allow everyone work from home. Being honest, I never thought for a moment that these operational plans would need to be put into action, but being organised has paid huge dividends as we were never scrambling to get ready or haven’t had any business interruption issues and our staff have been brilliant in simply getting on with it.

We hold a zoom call each morning (zoom was new to me until about 8 weeks ago) for all staff giving general updates, financial market movements along with fund manager views and of course for some banter which is badly missed by us all during this time!

From a technology perspective, I believe it’s been fantastic. Although I’m certainly not in any way technical, I am passionate that technology should play a bigger part in our business. I believe as a business this is an amazing opportunity to embrace new technologies and apply them for the better from both an operational and client perspective. My colleague Rachel and I attended the Wealth Tech Summit in London in November searching for the new technology that we believe will improve clients interactions and outcomes.

My wife’s parents got two kittens recently and seeing how they now happily Facetime their grand kids showing off the kittens and chatting to them daily, shows that its probably the kick we all needed to force us all to use this freely available technology for all our benefits.

For the time being however, whilst we all long to get back to some sort of normality, I am happy that the kittens are only on the screen ……much more of a dog person!!

Look after yourselves and stay safe

Brian

Author: Brian Goggin, Operations Director

bgoggin@olearylife.ie