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Monday 18 January is officially Blue Monday, also known as “the most depressing day of the year.” It isn’t, of course. Or it might be for some, but certainly not for others. But it’s undeniable that a bleak Monday in January – especially this January – can be a pretty miserable prospect. And that has implications for business. In a nutshell, unhappy workers are less productive. That’s particularly true if they are actually suffering from SAD (seasonal affective disorder), which the Mayo Clinic calls “a type of depression that’s related to changes in seasons.”

The Brexit transition period ended on 31 December last year, so we’ve all been operating under the rules of the trade agreement struck between the British Government and the EU for the last couple of weeks. If you’re a business whose operations and customers are based entirely in mainland Britain, you might not have noticed much of a difference. If you’re a company that exports to the EU or imports from it, you might be getting used to new paperwork and even, in some cases, delays at Channel ports.

Lockdown 3.0 wasn't the start to 2021 that anyone was hoping for, but the vaccination rollout means there is light at the end of the tunnel. Businesses are starting to think about a return to the workplace, and what form a post-pandemic working model might take. Some...

How do you motivate employees? How do you identify team members who may be struggling with workload or inspiration? How do you monitor productivity and acknowledge effort?

In the post-Covid environment, offices will have to change and adapt, and commercial property operators will have to work harder to attract tenants. But experts agree that the office will still play a central role in our working lives. It’s too important for collaboration, team bonding and simply having somewhere to go. We’ve all embraced the benefits of home working during Covid, but not many of us want to do it all the time.

Covid has vastly accelerated a number of workplace trends already in play, forcing companies to adopt new strategies, policies and technologies at breakneck speed. From digital transformation to remote working, 2020 feels like the year when everything changed in the blink of an eye.

So how should organisations react to this constant cycle of change? At times like this, a certain amount of trepidation is natural. Business doesn’t like uncertainty, because it leads to indecision. How can you plan for a post-pandemic future when it’s impossible to predict what will happen next week?

When lockdown hit in March, thousands of us rushed away from workplaces and set up office in back bedrooms and garden sheds. It wasn’t ideal, but it was good enough. We made the best of it, despite cramped spaces, intrusive children and stuttering Zoom meetings.

And with the arrival of Covid’s second wave this Autumn, that’s the position many of us still find ourselves in. We’ve become used to remote working, though some of us want to go back to the office. Our expectations around work/life balance have changed. We’re looking forward to the end of the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean we want to wind back the clock to exactly the way things were before.

Around a third (32%) of businesses and two in ten charities (22%) report having cybersecurity breaches or attacks in 2019, and the numbers are much higher among large and medium operations (60%), as well as high-income charities (52%). This means that every business – from SoHo to the biggest conglomerate – needs to consider its cybersecurity risks and implement plans to mitigate against them. Our blog and ebook provide the detail you need to get started.

The trend towards remote or home working – either to replace or in hybrid with a typical office environment – has taken a massive leap forward following the COVID-19 pandemic. While an uptick in a business’s green credentials might be an immediately obvious benefit, remote working does come with its own unique set of challenges.