Many of the clients I have worked with over the years have held fast to their belief that, whilst working from home has a time and place, the greater good of the company will be better achieved by having employees spend much of their time in a physical location, as this is where they can best interact and exchange with colleagues to stimulate creativity and innovation.

The current situation has overthrown this thinking entirely, as organisations have been forced to ‘get on and do’ within unscheduled new parameters. What I find interesting is how many times in the last week I’ve heard peers, customers and friends observe that interaction with their teams has been so much better throughout the last five working days than during the previous five months!

Driving this is the requirement for distributed teams to be more structured about the frequency, content and cadence of their virtual interaction. Done successfully, this will be achieved efficiently and expediently, with everyone having the chance to have their say. And on the upside, a business owner in the professional services market observed to me only this morning that he feels more in control of what his staff are prioritising now than he made time to appreciate when sitting in the same building.

We all think that at whatever stage this crisis is over, we will immediately revert to the practices we were familiar with in February. One lesson I trust we will take with us from March will be the priority we have placed on interacting with each other ‘digitally’ without the inflexibility required to do so physically.