Lack of social interaction, isolation and boredom are just some of the issues people from across the 海角视频 have been forced to deal with during lockdown.
But home-working has brought with it own set of unique challenges – including endless Zoom calls and juggling meetings with home-schooling.
But HR expert-turned-entrepreneur Wendy Dean believes lockdown has actually opened up a lot of opportunities for women in the workplace.
Wendy – the CEO of business consultancy Strategi Solutions, based in Newcastle -under-Lyme – says the pandemic has forced businesses to embrace flexible working and has laid the groundwork for women to be able to do their job from home, while juggling family life, on a more permanent basis.
She said: "The best thing that could have come out of lockdown is the fact that it has really pushed businesses to embrace flexible working.
"Lockdown has opened up a lot of opportunities for women because we can work from home now and it's shown that we don’t have to be in an office and be at ours desk for 9am to be able to do our jobs.
"I have been the only woman on the board at two separate companies and if I’d have had a family it would have been really hard because you were expected to go to events, travel abroad and go to visit sites overseas. There were never any questions about whether you could do it or not, that’s what you had to do.
"But it’s acceptable to have your family involved in your work now, I can’t tell you the amount of children I’ve seen in Zoom backgrounds.
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"When it happened with Professor Robert Kelly back in 2017, we all laughed about it because it was so unusual, but actually that’s normal today.
“It’s now acceptable to have a life that you can bring into the workplace a little bit and I think that’s a really positive thing, particularly for women.”
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Having spent her career surrounded by men at big-name firms including FedEx, Steelite International and Royal Crown Derby, Wendy now juggles running her own business with a role on the board at the Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire LEP and running a free mentoring group for 15 local women.
She said: “I’ve never seen myself as a woman in a male-dominated industry, I’ve always thought of myself as one of the team. Quite often women restrict themselves because they think they don’t fit in or that they can’t do it, but I’ve never thought like that and that’s made a massive difference.
“It’s the unconscious bias which I came across the most, and the thing I found the most difficult, actually, was conversations.
“For example, going to a board meeting and everybody’s talking about football, I had to learn how to get involved.”
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Wendy added: “That’s why I decided to set up Strategi Mentoring. A lot of women I’ve come across suffer from imposter syndrome or lack confidence and they wanted that golden nugget from me on how to overcome these challenges and achieve their goals – and it’s been really successful.
“It’s never been about selling them a service. Somebody gave me a hand up once and I’m trying to repay that.”