Can you describe a typical day in your role?

As I'm sure everyone will say, no two days are the same!

I start the day about 8.45am checking emails and our Teams chat. We love a gif in our wider Design team so there's always a flurry of 'good morning' gifs on one of our channels! It's nice to check in and the gifs are a great way to see how people are feeling, especially as we work from home so much and it's harder to judge the mood of the team. If I'm travelling to the office, I start earlier at about 7am as I'm 2 hours from Paddington, so I tend to work on the train into London.

I would say I spend half of a typical day on video calls, which for some might seem a lot but for me is a good balance of talking time and thinking time. Fridays are definitely quieter so I sometimes nip out for a takeaway coffee in the morning, a little treat for reaching the end of the week! Generally people are really respectful of blocked time in diaries so my lunch is always clear - I often go out into the garden (to see my chickens!) so I get time away from the laptop too.

Video calls cover 121s with my team, hearing how their week has gone and what they need from me for the week to come. It's incredibly important for me to prioritise these and I also hop on Teams for an ad hoc 10 or 15 min chat through the day too. I catch up with the other managers in the team and we discuss challenges and plans and how things are going. I talk a lot to other teams too, perhaps CMI, perhaps HR - depending on the topic and the need. The 'thinking time' is spent on a wide variety of topics... anything from setting up new suppliers on our procurement systems to preparing articles to post on Yammer. I spend time on resource plans and exploring how we can develop the capability of the team. Recently we've spent a lot of time reviewing our 8 week summer digital research internship and creating plans to make it better next year.

I log off between 5pm and 5.30pm if I don't have anything urgent that has to be completed. If I'm in the office, I try to leave a little earlier, maybe 4.15pm so I can get home at a decent time. While I work on the train to London, I don't on the way home... a little bit of catch up TV or a magazine is a perfect wind down!