‘Don’t overwhelm yourself with thinking ahead to the coming weeks. Instead, focus your energy on what you can do right now, today’ – The Mind Medic.
Welcome to Behind the Business, where we’re asking a cross-section of Avenue HQ’s members and wider connections all about their current day-to-day. It’s a strange and confusing time for many, and so we hope reading a specific day’s diary written by other like-minded professionals, will help to steer you in the right direction towards remaining positive and productive, and provide a few take-homes for how best to tackle your day that lies ahead.
This week, we’re chatting with Rich Smith who works for Liverpool based employment iniative, Thrive. Rich’s role includes: engaging with businesses in the Liverpool City Region, such as Avenue HQ and our fantastic member companies. Rich identifies how companies can help provide hope and inspiration to Liverpool’s care-experienced young people. This is achieved through offering career enhancing opportunities; such as work experience, mentoring and interactive careers sessions… to name but a few!
Industry: Not-for-Profit
Profession: Employer Engagement Manager
Date: 04/12/20
Depending on which day you catch me, my morning routine can look very different. Today, I’m working from home. Since lockdown on WFH days, my partner and I go for a walk around the neighbourhood. Over the last 10 months I’ve learnt that when working from home, it’s essential to get out and about, so I don’t go mad looking at the same four walls!
Walking is great exercise. It gives us a chance to have a chat and check out the competition when it comes to local Christmas decorations – a pretty good way to start the day!
Back home, I make and eat breakfast, have a shower, and set my laptop up in our newly refurbished home office. The first order of the day is to check my emails and respond to any unanswered ones.
Next, I like to jump on LinkedIn, where I scroll through the local news and update myself with what everyone else is doing.
Today I have a few pre-arranged video calls with contacts who are interested in supporting Thrive. (We’re focused on connecting with local companies to help identify career opportunities for our young people!).
I tune into Liverpool Chamber of Commerce’s WellConnected event via zoom, and listen to Chamber updates, presentations on Digital preparedness, and participate in some breakout room networking, spreading the word of Thrive to a new audience.
Off the back of this, I quickly follow up on conversations had and successfully set up some meetings for next week with businesses who are keen to explore how they can support Thrive, similar to the support Avenue HQ’s tenants are showing! Avenue HQ Members, The Anfield Wrap, and AHQ partners Eagle Labs, seem keen to get involved.
I clock off for lunch to watch last night’s I’m a Celeb highlights. We’re sticking to our online click and collect shop once a week during COVID, so our lunch is a bit of a cobbled-together salad… surprisingly nice!
I always make time to break my day up with lunch. In the past, I have routinely skipped lunch, and other than the obvious health implications, skipping lunch has a massive drain on my afternoon productivity.
Following lunch, I’m back on my emails, clearing my inbox in preparation for an afternoon on the phone.
Earlier in the week, we started promoting our latest Interactive Careers Session, an ‘Introduction to a Career in Construction’, delivered by Laing O’Rourke. So, I call all support worker partners and discuss the session in greater detail.
On these calls, I hope to get an understanding of how many young people we could expect to welcome, while also gather some intelligence on what subjects we should be concentrating on in future sessions. All our sessions are youth-led!
For me, 4pm on a Friday has always been the moment to reflect on the week, tie up all the loose ends and make myself a list of tasks that need to be taken care of next week. I find this gives me an appreciation of what I’ve achieved and peace of mind and clarity over what next week may hold.
I’ve finished for the day and finished for the week! I shut my computer down and walk through to the other room, heat a glass of mulled wine, flop on the sofa and prepare myself for a weekend of relaxation.
Anyone who knows me might be surprised to learn that I’m making my way through the Star Wars movies for the very first time and my fiancée has promised me we can watch Return of the Jedi tonight!
It’s had less of an impact than you’d think. I’m very lucky. There is this massive realisation that even a job like mine (a mostly social one), can still be done through effective use the technology at our disposal.
I feel COVID, for all the grief, pain, and many, many inconveniences it has brought us all, has also provided an accelerated evolutionary step, in the way businesses think and operate, and the technology we use.
This step has increased my efficiency, and like many people working from home, my day has become much more flexible. Thus making it easier to achieve a more rewarding work-life balance.
If you’d like to discuss how your business could support Thrive’s care experienced young people, whether it be through employment, sponsorship or sharing your experience. Please contact me Rich directly on: richard@thrive-cic.co.uk. For more information on joining the Avenue HQ community, get in touch with Team AHQ.