Get Travel Leaders Talking with CWT Meetings & Events' Ian Cummings

How have you been looking after your mental health and physical wellbeing over the past few months?

“Everybody was really severely affected when we all went into the first lockdowns. That was quite a depressing time for many people to get their heads around what was going on. None of us had experienced lockdowns before, and of course we were all moved straight into working from home. Initially people thought it was going to be a short-term measure and were looking forward to getting back to the office, then it began to dawn on us over the summer that that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. Now we’re into the second year… I think once you began to realise that this was set for a longer term than we had initially thought, I think people began to make adjustments.

“Initially there were lots of memes about, you know, drinking lots of wine and stuff like that. But then people began to set new routines, and found a new norm being at home. And what was challenging for a lot of people, myself included, was that our homes became our offices. Working from home seemed like a great idea when we had an office to go to because then you could work from home on a Monday or a Friday, something like that. But when your home becomes your office, you have that challenge of making sure that you switch off and actually, you know, shutting your laptop down.

“I’ve got two, two small young kids, and it was very important for me to switch off for them and make sure that they have time in the evening. And then I spent time with them during the morning, even walking them to school on quite a few days, which was very therapeutic. I enjoyed that, as it wasn’t something I used to do when I was at the office. We got into eating more healthily and cooking at home all the time. We actually started to focus a little bit more on our own cooking and our own health. We said three, four nights a week, we’re going to start cooking, but we decided to go down the ‘Mindful Chef’ route – which was great fun until I got to the point where I was getting a bit fed up with vegan recipes! I’ve also joined the F45 gym in Wandsworth and I go there three lunchtimes a week. And I go cycling with the kids and stuff like that. So it’s been about getting into a routine of being at home, as opposed to being in the office.”

“You have to force it a little bit, I think it’s very easy just to slip into ‘your home is your office’ and just spend all your time working. And then when you’re finished, just sit down on the sofa and watch some television. I think you really need to make an effort to push yourself into a new set of routines that you might not have done before. I do think that for everybody, it really helps good mental health to be doing some form of exercise and eating a bit healthily during the week.”

What’s been your most challenging moment of the crisis?

“A couple of things: firstly when reality set in and people began to realise that costs were not where they needed to be for the ongoing business that we had, both in travel and meetings and events, and that we were going to have to have people on furlough leave, and reduce some team sizes as well. We have seen people go because they’ve got other jobs, which is great for them, but some people have left the company that we really didn’t want to see go as well. And that was tough. So there’s been some difficult conversations over the past 12 months, with people that you didn’t want to have, conversations that were purely a result of the pandemic and, and the cost situation of company.

“Secondly, my remit is global and at some point in time, I’ve always had somebody in the team who’s been affected by the crisis - whether they’ve actually had Covid themselves, or whether their parents have had Covid, or if they’ve had regular illnesses that have been affected by the pandemic. Those things are really tough. And you feel for the team members that are going through a tough time and that’s still happening now. And you’re trying to support them over Zoom calls but it’s just not as personal.”

What strategies have you been using to strengthen your personal resilience?

“For me it hasn’t really been so much about personal resilience. I mean, as, as a senior leader you’re just trying very hard to support others around you. I felt that was much more my role than putting things in place for myself. I’ve got a team of people around the world who are all at different stages of life. And I want to make sure that both myself personally and CWT do everything we can to support them, to understand what personal circumstances they are in, and to keep them motivated. I found my own motivation through keeping others motivated, and that to me was incredibly rewarding.

“One of the other things that that was satisfying was finding out once we reduced teams that we had some skill sets in the company that we never knew we had. People came forward and said ‘Hey, look, in a previous role, I used to do virtual events!’ Some people had unbelievable creative skills in the company that we didn’t know about because they used to enjoy doing creative stuff in their personal life. All of a sudden we had people popping up all over the world – Asia, Latin America – saying I’ve got these skills. And we started acting really as a global community, the pandemic forced us into becoming much more of a community, where we became borderless. And I really enjoyed trying to motivate others through that.”