Boris Johnson has suggested that for many large families, Christmas this year may in effect be cancelled. Meanwhile, Ryan Ward has spoken about his commitment to his staff.
Leadership in Focus
Ryan Ward (pictured) became business director of Nottinghamshire-based welding and fabrication company Arromax Engineering in 2010 and has since progressed to managing director.
Writing in The Parliamentary Review, Ward stressed the importance of looking after, and trusting in, your staff:
‘At Arromax Engineering, we are genuinely committed to investing in people, apprentices, training and creating the right culture. This means obtaining the correct staff to create an Arromax Engineering brand mantra, whereby both employer and employee strive towards the same goal. As a company, we take pride in what we do and in the quality of products and service we offer.
‘Customer retention, after all, is key and paramount to any success. To have that retention, we need commitment from all areas – something we can only achieve by proving our commitment to them.
‘This general approach has already brought results: with regard to job vacancies, there is no longer any need to advertise; we now find that quality professionals seek us out for employment. Worth noting also is that a happy workforce makes for a productive workforce – as glib as it might sound, its significance cannot be overestimated.’
Recent global developments have made the culture of a company more relevant than ever. With working from home and various social distancing measures, it is hard to build new connections between staff. Having established connections is therefore particularly crucial. Ward will hope that the culture created at Arromax Engineering will stand them in good stead.
Leadership Today
The Telegraph leads with the suggestion that Christmas may ‘bring little cheer’ with the looming possibility of family gatherings being curtailed. The prime minister said it was ‘too early to say’ if such measures would need to be taken.
The paper also reports on Mr Johnson’s new ‘Covid-secure marshals’ who would be recruited to ensure social distancing rules were being enforced.
A senior government source said: ‘If we look over the next three months there is nothing that’s going to work in our favour and several things that may work against us – particularly the closing in of the seasons ... because people live indoors, in closer confines, with windows shut.’
The Times leads with the news that a number of experts have raised questions about Boris Johnson’s mass testing ‘moonshot’ plan to avoid a second lockdown.
Under the plan, which leaked documents suggest cold cost more than £100 billion, over ten million people per day would take Covid test and be given a ‘passport to mingle’ if the test was negative. A memo said ‘this is described by the prime minister as our only hope for avoiding a second national lockdown.’
Sir David Spiegelhalter, professor of the public understanding of risk at the University of Cambridge, raised the point that false negatives could throw the entire system into disarray.
“That doesn’t matter so much perhaps if you’re just being stopped going into a theatre — the point is it is not just a matter of testing. You’ve got this whole downstream business that that person will be told to isolate, their contacts will be told to isolate, and so on.
“And if you only have 1 per cent false positives among all the people who are not infectious, and you’re testing the whole country, that’s 600,000 people unnecessarily labelled as positives.”
The Telegraph focusses on the fact that
Leadership in history
On this day in 2008, the The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, thought to be the biggest scientific experiment in the history of mankind, was powered up in Geneva, Switzerland. This followed more than two decades of preparation.
‘It’s a fantastic moment,’ said project leader Lyn Evans, ‘we can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe.’
