One of the hallmarks of this pandemic has been the great homeworking experiment. Since early last year, we’ve rallied around this shared experience – finding our feet from a business-continuity perspective and coordinating with team members as they set up home offices. Along the way, group treasurers and senior managers have become alive to team members’ personal circumstances as never before.
The work challenges we’ve faced in treasury would be hard to overstate. At Informa, around 50% of our business model prior to COVID-19 rested on face-to-face events, so the impact of the pandemic put the balance sheet under close scrutiny to ensure we maintained a strong profile when considering a range of potential outcomes. There was much board and executive management focus on the treasury function. The pandemic and subsequent lockdowns in numerous markets delivered technical challenges in droves and a pressing need for rapid answers and solutions.
All that said, there have definitely been gains. Prior to lockdown, the Informa treasury team was in the middle of implementing a treasury management system and well placed to begin delivering greater efficiencies and insights into our cash position. Bringing the completion date forward from June to February 2020 has changed our day-to-day processes and enhanced our contribution to the business. We are now able to report our consolidated global cash position on a daily basis, providing our senior management team with much-needed, and timely, visibility.
It has been essential, though, to take account of people’s lifestyles and challenges. Informa’s treasury team is diverse. Some have had childcare issues. Younger members of staff living in flat shares sometimes struggle for adequate space and bandwidth within their households. Others are from elsewhere in the world and a long way from their families. We’ve had to be mindful of all of that.
Like many other businesses, we’ve coped by offering flexibility. Staff members with small children have adjusted their hours to address their workloads while also dealing with the realities of home life. One member of staff from Australia moved back home for a period of time in the first lockdown working through the Australian night, interacting with us via direct messages and video calls. None of this was planned; we adjusted as we went along.
There is a great deal of interpersonal and team dynamics to address in all this. I’m very aware that isolation and the prolonged sheltering in place can affect any of us from a mental health perspective. Asking the right questions and probing how people are doing definitely falls under the duty of care of a manager – but we tread a fine line here in terms of the kind of questioning that might be considered thoughtful and appropriate versus approaches that might be received as overly probing or even intrusive. Managing people under these circumstances is a new skill for many of us and requires a pretty nuanced approach.
Seniority has its costs, too. I’m old enough to remember working through the global financial crisis and 9/11. But this experience is far more all-encompassing. This time senior professionals also lack the peer-to-peer contact that used to take place casually in the workplace. Keeping in contact with former treasury colleagues in similar roles helps, but like so many other things needs to be planned.
Promoting the success of the treasury team to colleagues in the wider finance team or our senior management is not as readily achieved as in the office. And a treasury career is heavily dependent on networking. Finding ways to facilitate that continues to be a concern, especially when we think about the importance of that to developing our younger treasury professionals.
This online edition of The Treasurer looks at all of these areas and more. The diversity and inclusion conversation has become much more front of mind since mid-last-year. Choices around who joins our team or who makes it onto a key work project, for instance, need to be much more consciously done. And that’s a welcome shift.
There is doubtless more uncertainty ahead. As we return to offices – and hopefully that will start to occur in the not-too-distant future – there will greater acceptance of flexible working. That’s to be welcomed, but it will come with its own challenges. I’m aware that my own desk is no more and that a hot-desking future looms. Some of us will need to adjust to that particular change. And there will be still more issues to address in terms of bringing the whole team together and ensuring we get to interact with others in the business – let alone the wider treasury profession.
A longer period of change and adjustment beckons for many of us. In the meantime, I offer the following thoughts:
• Treasurers have achieved great things during lockdowns – working cohesively even when dispersed. Day to day, it is important to celebrate small wins, something we don’t always take the time to do in business.
• Social calls for all team members – ones that dispense with the business agenda of the day – have become a regular feature of our working lives and for good reason. They are essential and I would encourage all treasury teams to make time for these social calls, even if they have to remain online for the time being.
• Life is undeniably hard at the moment; human beings don’t like to be constrained. In the long term, however, we will emerge from this experience with more resilience. We will appreciate what we have all the more and we’ll be richer for it. That might be hard to take in at the moment, but it is one prediction I am happy to make.
Richard Garry is group treasurer at Informa where he is responsible for treasury, insurance and pensions. He also holds a non-executive role for Sovereign Housing Association. Prior to his current role, Garry led treasury teams at IMI plc, High Speed One Ltd and Toyota Financial Services.