Shona O’Neill, Head of Employee Engagement, Glanbia

In relation to your day-to-day responsibilities, what challenges did you face when Covid-19 struck? What struggles, if any, are there now?

Glanbia’s priorities from the outset have been to protect our people and keep essential nutrition supplies flowing. We have been supporting thousands of employees who have had to adapt to remote working overnight. Given how fast the virus evolved it was a constant sprint to stay on top of public health and government guidance which varied country by country and state by state in the US. Thankfully our Crisis Command Teams are on top of everything and in some cases one step ahead, in terms of the decisions we took to implement health and safety protocols.

How do you think we can keep our business connections strong while wholly or partially WFH? 

By being creative and working to make sure we connect as best we can. Simple things like making sure that Teams meetings start with informal chat. Scheduling coffee time with colleagues who you normally bump into in the kitchen at work. We continue to run the events on our wellbeing calendar. For example, Workplace Wellbeing Day is normally marked across all Glanbia sites with employees taking part in the lunchtime mile, an array of fitness challenges and healthy treats being shared. This year, we encouraged employees to do their lunchtime mile with their families and share pictures on our internal social media channel. While we missed the physical interaction, it was fantastic to see employees share pictures of their families, their pets and their local beauty spots. We continued this throughout Pride in June when we ran a rainbow colouring competition for our employees’ kids and sent them all certificates and vouchers for art and crafts.

WFH real estate?

The spare bedroom. Our IT support team has been fantastic – we’ve been able to bring home all our office equipment so I’m set up with two screens, a docking station and a really strong virtual private network.