Covid-19 Bridging The Gap From Home in Seville
Here in Spain and working from home, because of the Covid-19 situation, has been a considerable learning curve, but thankfully our business has continued to function more or less the same. The majority of our clients are big players within the food and drinks industry and if anything we are busier than ever. The first week or two had it's teething problems, as to be expected when you move from a purpose built state of the art office, with it's top of the range technology solutions, to the spare bedroom of my house with a 5 year old laptop and house of Wifi hungry kids addicted to playing Fortnite.
After the first two weeks I found I had adapted to my new routine and, would go as far as to say, discovered that I had more quality time to spend concentrating on the complex analysis I have to do. One of the things I’ve certainly noticed when working from home is that the style of communication has changed, even in the month and a half that I’ve been confined to the four walls of my spare bedroom.
Business communication, predominantly by email, can tend to be very direct and devoid of niceties especially in the line of work that I do. Culturally, I have also found that the style of communication is very different, depending on the countries you are communicating with. My portfolio of clients include companies in The UK, Ireland, Benelux, France, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Czech republic and Greece amongst others and it’s fair to say that email etiquette varies greatly and there is great variance between Northern and Southern Europe in particular.
The one common denominator that I have found though, as a result of this dreadful virus, is that people have started to open up and show a little more of their human side when communicating, both by email and by conference calls. People are starting to share a bit more personal information and ask about how families are coping and they are taking the time to find out a little more about the people they are actually connecting with.
One of my regular contacts, within a Dutch beer manufacturer, was always very brief and to the point but now, given the fact we are both working from home, this person has recently told me things about their life and family, only small things, but it’s building a bridge of confidence and a kind of kindred spirit that was maybe lacking before we were ordered to stay at home. This isn’t an isolated case. I have got to know many of my clients better in the last two months and all of this results in a feeling of well-being and helps to restore a little bit of faith in humanity once again.
In my opinion, the world we live in has been revolving too quickly for too long. I was born in the 1960s and the advances in technology and the unchecked desire of companies to turn a humungous profit at the expense of everything else has resulted in us losing sight of the human aspect of business. So I’m embracing this opportunity to take a step back and make the most of these human moments while I can, yes they are only small glimpses but I see them as something positive that I can take out of the uncertain situation that we find ourselves in.
On the whole, home working has proved to be a good experience in my particular case and maybe after we’ve come out of the other end of this tunnel of uncertainty I hope it’s something that can be considered by my company when they evaluate their day to day strategy moving forward. In Spain there is a constant debate about work and home life balance and working from home from time to time would certainly be an option I’d like to see made available having had the chance to experience it first-hand.
Read more about our blogger Ian, his job, life and our connection
I’m Ian Houghton and I live in Seville, in Andalucía, Southern Spain. I’ve been living here for the past 15 years and I work as International Project Manager for a Logistics Consultancy company that specialises in the management of Pool Pallet accounts for some of the most important FMCG manufacturers throughout Europe, such as: Heineken, PepsiCo, Schweppes, Asahi etc. ”Pool pallet accounts?” I hear the majority of you ask. We’ll get to that in more detail later.
I first met Margaret, from Inspire, back in February 1995 when I fell in love with her au-pair. I was in Scarborough, at the time, on a rugby tour that culminated in the most unlikely encounter, in one of the local hostelries, with a young señorita named María, who had travelled to England from Seville with the aim of improving her English by living and working in an English household as an au-pair for a year. Destiny did it’s job superbly on that February weekend, on a number of counts, and 25 years on I have Margaret and her family as close friends and of course Maria as my wife of 18 years.
Maria and myself lived together in the UK for 10 years, where I worked in the manufacturing industry, firstly chemicals at Nufarm and then later in brewing at Tetleys, Leeds which went on to become Carlsberg, the latter position probably being the best job in the world…. In 2005 we upped sticks, with our first baby barely talking, and came to live in Seville in order to experience a new way of life. The work situation in Spain and in particular Andalucía was quite different from what I had been used to and I spent quite a few years teaching English and eventually started doing Business English classes and some Technical translation work, which led me to meet my current employers.
The company I work for are specialists in everything related to Pool Pallet management. That’s to say, rental pallets, which are used in the majority of FMCG manufacturing facilities throughout the world. The pallet rental business is a multi-million-pound industry that many people aren’t even aware exists. The next time you wander round your local supermarket keep an eye out for different coloured pallets, the blue ones belong to Chep, red belong to LPR and orange to IPP, the three main big players in the pallet rental business. Our company essentially keeps check on the Pallet poolers, manages company accounts, negotiates tenders at National and European level and makes sure things run smoothly. All of this without actually physically seeing any pallets as we work remotely from Seville.
If you’d like to contact Ian directly with enquires about Pool Pallets his contact details are ian.houghton@logloval.es
