How Cancer Research UK’s workforce became fully remote
No-one could have predicted the unprecedented times we’re currently facing. The coronavirus outbreak has had a huge impact on global health, and is having a significant impact on the way people work.
To enable us to continue in our mission to beat cancer whilst we’re facing near lockdown, my team in the technology department has been crucial in supporting the charity’s large office-based workforce move to working remotely in a very short space of time.
As it happens, long before the coronavirus outbreak, we’d had a big push to be more adaptive, collaborative and flexible in terms of the charity’s tools and ways of working through our ‘Future of Work’ programme over the past year, and in the current circumstances we are realising the benefits.
Using the charity’s move in October 2019 to Stratford in London as a catalyst for the change, the programme rolled out new laptops, Office 365 and Skype Enterprise Voice to replace the desk phones, to over 2000 staff across the UK.
The next phase explored new ways of working alongside the technology, building a new culture for staff through a test and learn method. Staff were encouraged to experiment with informal flexible working, including core office hours and working from home. This made it easier for people to find a work-life balance that works for them and the charity.
We also spent a lot of time looking at online and face-to-face meeting etiquette, to make sure we’re working effectively with those working remotely. Virtual whiteboarding tools were trialled, to enable “all-remote” workshops. Staff embraced these changes, whilst offering feedback and learning from their experiences. Our tech team blogged about it here, about a year ago.
In the run up to the Stratford move last October, we ran a trial in the technology department with everyone working from home for two days a week, and many of our colleagues across the charity did the same. This helped us develop best practice and iron out any glitches, particularly to achieve remote use by our software engineers of the more specialist tech. This gave us confidence, when we did an organisational wide closure of head-office on Friday 20th March, because of coronavirus, that we would be prepared and able to continue with business as usual.
People affected by cancer are at the heart of everything we do; not only does the change to remote working mean we’re able to save money to put into research in the long run, but it also means teams across the charity can continue providing valuable information to those who need our support right now. We’re also continuing to talk to and involve our patient panels remotely to ensure we are working in the best way for the cancer community.
We’re incredibly fortunate to have had the technology and workplace practices in place before the coronavirus pandemic evolved. It’s meant our staff are equipped and ready to work remotely, continuing our life-saving work with limited interruption. The tech team is providing ongoing support and daily virtual “drop-ins” for staff on issues and updates, to make sure everyone can work as effectively as possible to continue our mission in beating cancer, helping those affected now and in the future.
