Here’s the full transcript of work keynote speaker Christinee Armstrong’s chat with Jane Farnham of Great British Speakers:
00:00:08:04 – 00:00:21:52
Jane Farnham
Hi, I’m Jane Farnham from Great British Speakers and I’m here today chatting to the amazing work culture, entrepreneurial and highly motivational work keynote speaker Christine Armstrong. Hello, Christine, Thanks for joining us today.
00:00:22:08 – 00:00:23:51
Christine Armstrong
Hello Jane, it’s a pleasure to be with you.
00:00:24:19 – 00:00:29:27
Jane Farnham
It’s lovely to meet you. Just tell me a little bit then about your background and your early career.
00:00:30:07 – 00:01:03:48
Christine Armstrong
So I did a politics degree and then I worked in politics for a bit and then I went into public affairs, worked in Washington, D.C. and Toronto for a bit and came back to the UK and worked for an advertising agency called MV. I was working for the network, which is BBDO and I was a communications specialist and our European head of planning decided she didn’t like her job and walked out one day and she was running these big research programmes into what people thought about their mobile phones, what they thought about the green agenda, what they thought about the economy, what 20 somethings are in to, 30 somethings.
00:01:04:04 – 00:01:17:27
Christine Armstrong
And somebody said, Oh, could you just run these projects for a few weeks until we find someone else? So I was like yeah, sure, I’ll do whatever. And I just loved it. And I really discovered that like, research is my passion. I just love it. I’m so nosey Jane, and that’s what it is…
00:01:17:36 – 00:01:19:22
Jane Farnham
I was just about to say are you nosey?
00:01:19:58 – 00:01:39:43
Christine Armstrong
Bloody nosey, really. I just want to know everything or know what you’re thinking and why and what motivates you to do that. So it just really tapped into something, really interesting trends, really interesting data, love interviewing people. So it just sort of changed the direction of my career really. And so since then almost everything that I’ve done has been research led.
00:01:39:43 – 00:01:46:49
Christine Armstrong
So what’s going on out there? What are the new things that are emerging? What are people thinking about and how do we turn that into practical, useful things?
00:01:47:29 – 00:01:57:12
Jane Farnham
Yes. So that’s great getting all this research, but how did that then develop into a business and what sort of data are you creating for people?
00:01:57:37 – 00:02:15:37
Christine Armstrong
Okay, so that’s a good question. So how did it develop into a business? Well, first of all I started working for other people. So after I left the ad agency, I went to work for a research agency and then co-founded Jericho Chambers, where we did a lot of research and also worked a lot on the future of work particularly. So that was a deep dive into the future of work.
00:02:15:59 – 00:02:40:31
Christine Armstrong
And the way that we do it is I have a team of people that I work with and we go and do interviews, we get data and also we take all the big data that’s coming out from the big audits, amazing data coming out there. It is just such a brilliant, wonderful time in the research world because you got all the big consultancies, you got all the big tech firms doing global pieces all the time, put all that together and kind of be able to go into companies and say, These are the big trends.
00:02:40:46 – 00:02:57:28
Christine Armstrong
This is how it plays out on the ground. And often when we’re doing a talk, we might go in to talk to some people before we even get there. So we know this is how it’s sitting in your organization and this is what we’re hearing from elsewhere that’s working for them. Here’s some ideas. Here’s some very practical things. They have this issue. They’ve changed a bit.
00:02:57:28 – 00:03:08:43
Christine Armstrong
This is working loads better for them. Maybe it’s something you want to consider and try. So hopefully by the end of it there are four or five things they can go right, I’ve got four or five things I can take away, think about how I might implement them here.
00:03:09:36 – 00:03:14:33
Jane Farnham
So what type of assignments would you normally get involved in? I mean specifically?
00:03:14:51 – 00:03:39:07
Christine Armstrong
So a lot of our work is in professional services, so we get called into a lot of law firms, management consultancies, financial sector, FMCG we do. I actually love doing nonprofessional services, nonknowledge workers, so I really love it where you’ve got organizations, say retail, where you’ve got half the team who are in stores maybe more than half, and then you’ve got a team in head office and they’re trying to work out how they work together.
00:03:39:07 – 00:03:58:51
Christine Armstrong
So generally it’s very work based and it’s people who are kind of looking at how the world has changed, they’re processing it, they’ve probably made some adjustments. They kind of did their COVID adjustments, they’re going to come out the other side and now they’re just trying to figure out what sort of works, but not quite. What are we missing?
00:03:58:51 – 00:04:08:00
Christine Armstrong
How do we make it better? How do we make this feel more stable? And they kind of come and go, you know, what can we learn from outside? What are we missing? What are the next steps for us?
00:04:08:56 – 00:04:16:38
Jane Farnham
So time to blow your own trumpet then, Christine. Where have you made an exceptional change that you’re most proud of?
00:04:17:42 – 00:04:38:33
Christine Armstrong
I would say that the biggest change that I’ve made was when we co-founded Jericho, which was way back in 2013, we actually inadvertently created a hybrid work environment without knowing the words. The words didn’t exist at that time, but we had a central London office that you could come to or not. You come in for meetings that you could book.
00:04:38:49 – 00:04:56:43
Christine Armstrong
And at that time it was a really unusual idea and it wasn’t entirely unique. Of course, other people were doing it. We had big management consultancies coming and saying, We need to know how you do this, but how do we make this work at scale? What does this do? And I think it just gave me that really head start world view that there are better ways of working.
00:04:56:58 – 00:05:20:22
Christine Armstrong
There are lots of things that people assumed were working just because we’ve done them for a long time. But if you did the research, you knew that they weren’t. And an example I would give is flexible work, which sounds brilliant. Who doesn’t want flexible work, right? You’re like, yeah, everybody loves flex work, it’s the answer. And pre-COVID, it was very much put out there as the answer to all of our problems, to overworked, working and parenting, working and caring.
00:05:20:22 – 00:05:44:47
Christine Armstrong
But when you really dig into that, it very often didn’t work well for people at all because quite often they’d be being paid for four days a week but actually be online for five days. They would be treated as part timers, not committed by their organizations. They were paid less, promoted less often, get a smaller bonus. So actually it wasn’t sort of this magical solution, that on paper it was designed to be it was designed with good intentions.
00:05:45:18 – 00:05:52:12
Christine Armstrong
It was quite tricky. And so now we’ve got an opportunity to really reframe that in a new way, which I’m very excited about.
00:05:53:04 – 00:06:25:12
Jane Farnham
Now I have to ask you, do you think it’s because you are a working mum that you pioneered the hybrid working environment because, you know, if you’re starting a business and you’re having lots of women working for you who are also parents and mothers, do you think that’s inherently where you have a trust that, you know, women will still give 100% even and maybe more if they felt that flexibility at home with their home lives?
00:06:25:49 – 00:06:46:55
Christine Armstrong
Maybe, I actually co-founded it with three men and it was jointly agreed. So I think it suits, I think one of the things is, yes, it does suit you really well if you’ve got small children, I think one of the big changes we’ve seen more recently since the pandemic is particularly younger men being much more vocal about wanting to be active and engaged parents, which is wonderful.
00:06:47:40 – 00:07:04:54
Christine Armstrong
And also, I think we see this real move to people wanting to work further away from their offices come in. So I think it certainly worked for me because when we started Jericho, I almost immediately became pregnant with my third child. So I was really in the trenches of small children in those days.
00:07:04:54 – 00:07:23:49
Christine Armstrong
So it certainly worked very well for me. And it led me to write a book about it in 2018, for publisher Bloomsbury, The Mother Of All Jobs: How to Have Children And A Career And Stay Saneish. Sometimes I read bits of it and wonder who wrote it, it feels like another world, you know, it’s pre-COVID. And so I think it did give me a different world view.
00:07:24:05 – 00:07:30:34
Christine Armstrong
But actually, I think it’s a world view that what we’ve discovered in COVID touches many, many more people than just working mums.
00:07:31:01 – 00:07:39:52
Jane Farnham
Yeah, it absolutely does. You’re right there. So you have now an almost parallel career in speaking. So how and when did that start?
00:07:39:52 – 00:07:52:22
Christine Armstrong
So I did a lot of speaking ad agencies. So we used to do these research projects and then go and present them to our clients and workshop them. We’d be out with Pepsi or P&G, like, you know, how are you going to use this as an insight, how you can use it in your campaigning?
00:07:52:55 – 00:08:10:19
Christine Armstrong
So I’ve done a lot of that. And when the book came out, I kind of went back into doing talks about the book and doing that about working parenting and remembered how much I enjoyed it, actually, and kind of got more and more bookings and it sort of grew from there, really. And a lot of people were asking for working and parenting talks, which I’m happy to talk about.
00:08:10:19 – 00:08:30:14
Christine Armstrong
But, you know, I don’t want to narrow it down to working parents. This is making work, work for a lot more people. So for me, the future of work is the subject and then looking at how it impacts on different groups. And I’m really energized by the, huge extrovert surprise, I’m hugely energized by big groups of people, by engagement.
00:08:30:14 – 00:08:35:38
Christine Armstrong
I love the interaction, I love the adrenaline rush of it. It’s just a fantastic way to spend your time.
00:08:36:27 – 00:08:49:22
Jane Farnham
Yeah I can see the passion. You obviously love speaking. Let’s go back to the subjects and the content. How would you sum up the major employment and HR trends that you’ve seen since COVID and the lockdowns?
00:08:49:57 – 00:08:51:01
Christine Armstrong
Oh, where to start.
00:08:51:10 – 00:08:53:09
Jane Farnham
There are quite a lot of them aren’t there.
00:08:54:37 – 00:09:19:33
Christine Armstrong
I think what we see the big picture stuff is, you have people who are 100% office based and you go, on the 20th of March 2020, you’ve got eight/nine million people, leave their normal place of work, and they go to work in their homes. And when they do that and I’ve got a great slide that I used to use a lot from the American government on how we respond to a collective trauma.
00:09:19:44 – 00:09:37:04
Christine Armstrong
When everyone does that, we get this huge surge of adrenaline. We all try and make this work, and we’re all doing Joe Wicks every day, we’re homeschooling our children, got a lot of stationery loitering around. You know, we’re all kind of in this sort of, you know, blitz spirit. We can get through this mode. It’s only going to last six or seven weeks.
00:09:37:04 – 00:09:56:22
Christine Armstrong
Remember? And so we kind of take everything for the office and we sort of make it work at home, albeit people with small children really struggled during that period. And some of them were really traumatized by what they were trying to do, especially if their businesses were in crisis. And then that went on and on and people lost energy and they kind of, oh, it was hard.
00:09:56:22 – 00:10:16:10
Christine Armstrong
They are working long days. They had no boundaries. They lost connections with people. And then we kind of come out of the other side. And I think the really smart organizations went, okay, now we need to reset. Like how do we now make the world work? How do we make our communications work internally and externally? How do we help people manage their time better?
00:10:16:26 – 00:10:34:31
Christine Armstrong
How do we decide how when we come into the office and when we do it in a strategic way that matches what we’re trying to do as a business? But there weren’t that many of those businesses, most people kind of cobbled it together and they were sort of relying on the goodwill that had emerged during COVID and it wasn’t working.
00:10:34:31 – 00:11:00:10
Christine Armstrong
And I think that’s why we ended up with so many calls to go back to the office full time. It’s because we haven’t really, in many cases, adjusted our systems to make it work in a post-COVID world. So I think that’s what everybody’s got their head in at the moment is how do we make some adjustments? How do we really kind of get this back into a place where we feel like we’re in the office for the right things If we’re in hybrid or working at home for the right things, we feel connected.
00:11:00:21 – 00:11:07:03
Christine Armstrong
We can build some culture, some energy, and feel like this is quite a stable environment. I think a lot of people are still not quite there yet.
00:11:07:53 – 00:11:12:46
Jane Farnham
So how do you see the next 2 to 3 years panning out for both employers and employees?
00:11:13:30 – 00:11:39:34
Christine Armstrong
Well, I think we’ve seen this pendulum swing, haven’t we? So we sort of went from employers, had the perception, had the power in offices. Suddenly employees seem much more powerful and have got lots of brilliant interviews. You know, people were really frustrated that employees aren’t coming in when they wanted them to or not even turning up on calls when they wanted to sort of, you know, all of the great resignation stuff and the sort of talent wars and now I think we’re probably shifting back to somewhere a little bit between the two.
00:11:39:52 – 00:12:07:03
Christine Armstrong
What I see in terms of working models is six emerging models which range from being all remote, which is you may have an office or not, but nobody has to go in any times, to work from anywhere, which is also all remote. But with regular retreats or getaways every four weeks, six weeks, two months, whatever, where everybody gets together, you’ve got fluid hybrid, where people are, you can come in when you want to, when it suits you, you’re all grown ups and you’ve got fixed hybrid.
00:12:07:03 – 00:12:38:31
Christine Armstrong
You must come in Tuesdays and Wednesdays. You’ve got a four day week, very emerging, very interesting trend. And then you’ve got the full return and essentially companies are now fitting themselves into one of those six buckets. And I think we will see that over the next 2 to 3 years. And I think the companies that succeed will be those where the bucket that they’re in matches the way that they run their actual work, the projects that they do and getting people together at the right times and being really analytical about that, that it matches their client brand.
00:12:38:45 – 00:12:54:10
Christine Armstrong
So you wouldn’t expect Marks and Spencers to say everybody back five days a week if you’ve got a knowledge based job and they haven’t done. And John Lewis you know. But you’re not that surprised that Goldman’s done it. So it’s got to fit with your brand, you know what I mean? And then the third thing is, does it fit with your talent pool?
00:12:54:10 – 00:13:02:22
Christine Armstrong
And that’s the really big one. Do people want to work with the model you’ve got? Because we know that model is the number one thing people are thinking about the moment when they change jobs.
00:13:03:19 – 00:13:14:04
Jane Farnham
So here’s an interesting question for you, Christine. If you are writing a letter to your younger pre-employment self and you’re coming into the world of work today, what a thought! What would it say?
00:13:14:56 – 00:13:32:40
Christine Armstrong
It would say, Dear Christine, they are not as clever as you think they are. I think I just grew up with the view that everyone somehow knew a huge amount more than I did, and it took me a really, really long time and a lot of meetings.
00:13:33:59 – 00:13:54:36
Jane Farnham
I agree. It’s funny, isn’t it? Because as you get older, I was talking to my friend who’s got a really hugely successful career and I haven’t seen her for 20 years. And you know, we were talking about what we’ve done and what we’ve achieved and I said, I can’t believe you’re MD of this big corporation. And she said, Yes, because I still think I’m going to get caught out because you just you feel exactly the same as you did when you were younger.
00:13:54:36 – 00:14:14:52
Jane Farnham
But you’ve, you know, 20 years in the industry gives you that natural experience and gravitas. And, you know, you then work your way up and you can’t take that experience away from anybody. And I think sometimes you just think, well, I haven’t done anything special. But yeah, I do know what I’m talking about.
00:14:15:07 – 00:14:26:25
Christine Armstrong
Yep, yep. Yeah, I think that’s right. And I think it’s just so easy when particularly when you’re young, just to assume that everyone knows so much more. And then there’s just those moments when you think you don’t really know either do you.
00:14:29:22 – 00:14:31:46
Jane Farnham
We’re not all just making it up as we go along, are we?
00:14:33:20 – 00:14:44:58
Christine Armstrong
Maybe that’s what they’re doing Christine, they’re all making it up. Yeah, I think it is that confidence just to say I might be right, I might be wrong, but I have a view and it’s just as valid as anyone else’s. And so let’s talk about it.
00:14:45:25 – 00:14:48:43
Jane Farnham
Yeah. And finally, then, what gives you the biggest buzz about speaking?
00:14:49:53 – 00:15:06:09
Christine Armstrong
Oh, it’s people. I mean, I’m just a wild extrovert, you know, I just I love going into a room and I love that feeling of when you delivered a good talk and, you know, the audience is really engaged and you come off and there’s just loads of people that want to come and say, yeah that happened to me and this happened and I want to talk about that.
00:15:06:09 – 00:15:10:58
Christine Armstrong
And what about this, that buzz is just you can’t replicate that, can you? It’s an absolute joy.
00:15:11:33 – 00:15:18:45
Jane Farnham
I can actually see it oozing from you and I’d love to watch you speak one day. Thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been lovely chatting to you.
00:15:18:45 – 00:15:20:45
Christine Armstrong
Lovely to talk to you. Thanks for having me.
00:15:21:05 – 00:15:31:48
Jane Farnham
And if you’d like to book Christine to speak, simply contact myself or Steve at Great British Speakers on 01753439289 or you can email bookings at bookings@greatbritishtalent.com. Thanks very much.
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