Lockdown diaries: L&Q’s Fiona Fletcher-Smith

Fiona Fletcher-Smith is group director for development and sales at L&Q. She shares a day on 21 September, from walking a virtual stage with the shadow housing secretary, to digesting the news of a national uptick in Covid-19 cases. I usually love Mondays, but this morning was particularly dreich (a wonderful Scottish word meaning dull or gloomy), and the weather wasn’t inspiring me. I am a lark and generally on my first cup of tea before Farming Today starts on Radio 4. Days begin with a scan of the online newspapers. During lockdown, I started to subscribe to a number of national and international papers. Inevitably, I don’t get further than skimming the headlines, but there are a couple of interesting articles that I hope I can get back to this evening. I filed that away for reading later. A second cup of tea is another lockdown habit that I am keeping. In common with lots of people with caring responsibilities, my mornings include making sure that my son is in the right uniform (is it PE today?) and is not trying to sneak in any Covid-insecure contraband, such as his own pencil case. I start the day with the inevitable to-do list and check some key data about how our sales are performing. They succeed in inspiring me where the weather failed. Things are going well. We stood down our pandemic crisis response team last week, so I no longer have to call into my morning briefing about how the business is responding to the crisis. We are a major landlord, housing over 250,000 people in 104,000 homes. The pandemic meant that we had to change our working practices and make sure that we could deliver key services such as repairs or tenancy support, making sure that our residents were kept safe. Our teams did a brilliant job during the last six months and I am so proud of them. Like many, work for me now involves the arduous commute from the kitchen to the dining room. Early in lockdown, my husband staked a claim to the study and I was left to do the endless rounds of video calls with a well-stocked drinks trolley visible in the background. Learning how to blur the background on these calls was an essential skill in the early days. My diary today is pretty crazy, but there is an important gig in the middle of the day. I am on a panel at the Labour Party’s online annual conference. It is a fringe event sponsored by the National House Building Council on the subject of building more quality homes. Lots to unpack here, but I am looking forward to this for two reasons. Firstly, I am sharing the virtual stage with Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow housing secretary, and Lewis Sidnick from the NHBC. Secondly, I am really passionate about making sure that all new homes are of the utmost quality in terms of design, construction and placemaking. I could talk all day, but we had an excellent chair in the shape of Anne Ashworth, the former Times Bricks & Mortar editor who kept us all on topic and on time. Next, I lead a meeting with my new and refreshed group of employee engagement champions. Keeping people engaged with the direction of the business and being able to take the pulse of my teams has been tough over the last few months. I had put off this meeting a couple of times in the hope that we would be able to meet face-to-face, but as this was proving increasingly unlikely, we went ahead. So glad I did. I have a wonderful group of energetic people who are so keen to help me engage with the wider staff group. They have loads of ideas about how to do this within our current remote working arrangements and I am relieved to see little mention of the dreaded Zoom quiz night. As they speak, I am struck by the diversity of the group and how few of them looked, sounded or thought like me. I love it. My work day ends with a check-in with my executive team colleagues. This is always a really informal catch-up and the increasing number of positive Covid-19 tests is on our minds. Some of us caught the highlights of the press briefing by Professors Whitty and Vallance this morning. As always, we don’t panic – we are upbeat, if resigned. We have dealt with the difficulty of full lockdown and risen to the challenge. We look forward to the prime minister’s statement the next day, confident that whatever he says, we will cope. My son arrives home from school full of 10-year-old rage about the increasing amount of single-use plastic and an inability of either the catering company or the school head to be willing to take responsibility. Everyone is passing the buck. I love his passion and we spend the time before bath and bed planning how to fix things. Image courtesy of L&Q