In this podcast Meg speaks with Emma Hares, an Operational Manager at Companies House. They discuss our brilliant services and how they give great user experience. This is the second podcast in a six part series, each one discussing our strategic goals.  Megan Hayward: Hello and welcome to another podcast episode of “Meet the team” by Companies House. We have recently launched our new five-year strategy and one our strategic goals is ‘Our brilliant services that give a great user experience’. Our customers are at the heart of everything we do and today I am here with Emma Hares, who is an Operational Leader at Companies House. Emma is going to give us an insight into how that great user experience is provided and the inner workings of the team that speak to our customers every day. Thanks for joining me Emma, how are you?  Emma Hares: Thank you for having me. I am really good, thank you.   MH: Oh, good. So, I am just going to jump straight in with my first question. I remember us having a meeting back in January in the office before all of this working from home started. So, how have you adapted to working from home in 2020. I remember saying that I did it, you know, on and off and I knew that other teams, the directorate, would work from home from time to time but you were like “Oh, that’s not really an option for us. We don’t do that. We are only in the office”. So, how have you found it? How has it been?   EH: Yeah, well, it feels like such a long time ago that we had that conversation now. So, not only a long time ago in time but a long time ago in our technical abilities to work remotely as well. So, some of the operational area could already work from home but it depended on their job role. But they really were the minority of the area really. At the time we spoke in January, we were definitely planning to enable a lot more people to work at home, but we wanted to make sure that we were fully supporting them to do that. Especially, our customer facing colleagues. I’d say we were looking at taking about 18 months for us to get there all together but got a big push from COVID and it ended up taking us a few weeks to roll it out. It was a massive co-ordination of which work streams are priority and who needs what type of equipment and stuff. So, but, throughout all of that time, the safety of our colleagues has been the absolute priority and enabling as many people as possible to stay at home was always top of the list. And, it hasn’t just been keeping people safe in a physical sense but also their mental wellbeing. So, we’ve done a lot of communication to make sure people are talking regularly and checking in on how people are and really trying to keep the amazing sense of community going, that is really loved by so many people in Companies House.   MH: Yeah  EH: So, but I would say that even though we have got the vast majority of people working at home, some of the work we do in the operational area can’t be done at home. So, we do still have a small number of people in the building. But, a lot of work is being done to provide a safe environment for us to be working in when we are in the building. So, it’s a complete change of direction from what we were in in January working towards smarter ways of working, sharing desks and taking up less space in the office and now we are in a situation where we’ve got our own desks spread really far apart with lots of hygiene and social distancing measures in place. And I would just like to add one thing to that as well that it’s really important that we’ve got someone in the building because we do provide a service to our NHS tenants. And without us being in the building, we wouldn’t have been able to do that during the lockdown. So, that’s been something that has been just as important for internal customers as our external customers.   MH: Yeah, definitely. So, how have you found that balance between delivering our excellent services and protecting our colleagues. It r