Working from Home: is your Boss Spying on You?
Two years ago, working from home was a rare luxury: something you might do as an occasional one-off or as you recovered from an illness. Then came the pandemic and suddenly WFH – it soon became an acronym – went mainstream. As the vaccine roll-out accelerated people gradually returned to…
Who Was the Richest Person in History?
According to the latest Forbes Rich List, the richest person in the world is Jeff Bezos, founder and, until recently, CEO of Amazon. Forbes estimates Jeff Bezos’ wealth at $177bn (£133bn), which puts him ahead of those other well-known billionaires, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. These days it…
The Charters Annual Summary – 2021: A year of uncertainty
As the calendar year nears its conclusion and the festive period gets underway, I hope you will have the chance to spend quality time with family and friends. 2021 has without question been another eventful and demanding year, with the move towards normality continuing to be disrupted by the emergence…
No Chips – so No New Car?
If you have read the headlines recently, you may well have seen some along the lines of ‘Car Chip Shortage to last until 2023’. What exactly is the ‘car chip shortage’ and – as the headlines suggest – if it does last for another two years, what does this mean…
What is ESG? Will it matter more than the bottom line?
There have been a thousand-and-one articles written since the pandemic on people’s changing attitude to work. Millennials and the generations that follow them – so we are told – want different things from work. Flexibility, the option of working from home and, above all, to work for a company that…
Will the 4 Day Week become the New Normal?
The effect the pandemic has had on people’s mental health has been well documented. Many people have been juggling work, a home, a family, a relationship, as well as elderly relatives they haven’t been able to see, or daren’t take the risk of seeing. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic has changed attitudes…
Is cash too safe?
One of the great themes of the past 16 months has been accidental savings: the amount people in the UK have “saved” by the simple expedient of not being able to go out and spend. “Thrifty Brits stash the cash in lockdown” has been a typical headline, quickly followed by…
What Lessons can Businesses Learn from Gareth Southgate?
In 1996 England went out of the Euros on penalties. The man who missed the crucial penalty was Gareth Southgate, now the England manager. Speaking about the miss recently he said, “I’ve had a couple of decades to think about it. I was a volunteer. The type of character I…
Back to Normal? Or ‘the Great Resign?’
Two articles were published in early June. One, on the BBC website, had a very simple headline: “Five day office week will become the norm again.” The other article, in City AM. was equally straightforward: “Avoiding the great resignation will require some creative thinking.” They can’t both be right. So…
The Mental Health of Business Owners
It may not have appeared on your radar, but the week of June 14th to 18th was Loneliness Awareness Week. We’ve heard a lot about loneliness over the past 15 months. Mental health in general has, rightly, occupied a lot of column inches during the pandemic. Understandably, there has been…