60 seconds with…John O’Brien, Founder & MD - LCMB Building Performance Ltd.

Looking back on 2020, which was your professional most successful initiative/achievement? 

It has to be supporting our NHS clients to reconfigure their estates and organisations to be able to successfully treat the first wave of COVID patients during lockdown one. 

This involved a huge cross section of activity including relocating a cancer facility to a new location offsite in 3 days to free up ICU capacity, when ordinarily a project of this nature would take up to 2 years and creating the welfare facilities to rejuvenate exhausted clinical and nursing staff. 

My team and I are proud of the small difference we helped make for our NHS colleagues and the families they helped during the year.

What are your most priorities in terms of planning for this year?

This year our priority is to support our clients with the transition out of COVID and preparing for a post COVID world. We are launching new services this year to help our clients improve their workplace health, wellbeing, performance and productivity. 

With the ending of the BREXIT transition period and new rules being here, what do you think the impact will be? 

After some initial cross border goods disruption, things will settle down. I think we’ll not see the true impact for 3 to 5 years and this will depend on whether the UK Government and UK organisations can define a compelling role for a mid-sized nation such as the UK outside the EU. I’d love to see the UK reinvent itself as a high growth, highly educated economy focusing on creating world leading capability in technology, education, the creative industries and science. The Governments ambitions should be to move the UK from 15th in the global UN Human Index, which measures life expectancy, educational attainment and per capita GDP, to 1st creating a country everyone would aspire to live in.

The Government has put in place several measures in order to help business owners and operators throughout the pandemic and lockdowns. What are your thoughts on what is available to you? 

I think they are to be commended for the speed, pace and ability to think laterally, for what they put in place initially in response to the pandemic. We were in the fortunate position of not requiring any help but did see many businesses fall over unintended consequences in the initial measures. I think this is bound to happen when policy is implemented overnight. I’d now like to see the Government looking forward and creating measures that help us move past COVID. 

For example, pump the UK’s previous EU innovation and research investment share, into stimulating the economy through Innovate UK. 

As we all know, employees’ and people’s well-being & mental health have been critical points during 2020. How have you incorporated them in your operations, and have you changed your ways of working in order to accommodate different working patterns (flexible hours, working from home…)? 

We were a business that already operated remotely and flexibly before the crisis. As the crisis has gone on, our team have missed the opportunity for getting together, so we’ve increased the opportunity to create water cooler moments, by speaking to each other more frequently and celebrating our achievements with little surprises for our team, such as hampers etc.

What positive lessons do we need to learn from what the industry has been through? 

We are far more resilience and flexible than we think. We can all pivot on a sixpence and quickly adopt new environments and ways of working, when we need to. Going forward we need to harness that capacity and make better versions of ourselves and our organisations coming out of COVID.   

 LCMB Building Performance Ltd. website: https://www.lcmb.co.uk/ 

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