In the old normal, every Friday lunchtime employees at ad agency Mellor & Smith used to receive a regular order of beers which they would drink, while chatting in the office and finishing up their work ahead of the weekend. Then the pandemic hit, upending work routines as everyone departed the office. The Friday beer tradition continued. Drinks were dispatched to staff who drank them at home while decompressing with colleagues over Zoom.
Paul Mellor, managing director, says drinks would have been the obvious cost to cut but he wanted to lift morale. “You can erode that culture if you make snap decisions around Covid.” Yet binding a remote workforce together faced challenges, particularly when it came to furloughed staff, who in the end continued to receive beers but did not join the online gathering.
For Adam Rogers, chief executive of DeskBeers, the company that Mr Mellor used for the deliveries, the Friday tradition was desperately welcome, as his business of sending bulk orders to workplaces had disintegrated overnight. While some clients “jumped at the chance” to send their orders to employees, he would be surprised if he was making 20 per cent of pre-lockdown sales. The new work-from-home model, sending drinks to multiple locations, created fresh challenges. “There [are] a lot more moving parts — more boxes to fold, tape, pack and ship, more labels to print. It's nothing we can't handle, but definitely more labour intensive — and less cost efficient — than before.”