Virtual communication has been the mainstay for all of us for nearly 18 months now. As employers consider how they will work post-pandemic, the debate about what stays virtual in the future is going to dominate the next few months. There is always lots of discussion about the negative aspects of endless Zoom or Teams calls, but what would we lose if we return to our old ways of working?
To help provide some perspective on this, I have a very special guest. Jackie Weaver became an instant celebrity after a Zoom recording of a chaotic meeting of Handforth Parish Council went viral. As well as cheering us all up during a very long miserable locked down winter, Jackie has used her platform to champion the work of town and parish councils and increase the diversity of their membership. There are some interesting parallels for employers here, and Jackie most definitely does have the authority.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ That Zoom meeting and instant global internet fame
▪ The positives of virtual communication
▪ Engaging with diverse audiences through virtual platforms
▪ Inclusivity and accessibility
▪ Virtual, face to face and hybrid
▪ What can employers learn from what is now happening to parish and town council meetings?
▪ What Jackie Weaver is doing next
Listen to this podcast in Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:02]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 353 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Virtual communications has been the mainstay for all of us for nearly 18 months now. As employers consider how they will work post pandemic, the debate about what stays virtual in the future is going to dominate the next few months. There’s always a lot of discussion about the negative aspects of endless zoom or teams call. But what would we lose if we just returned to our old ways of working? To help provide some perspective on this, I have a very special guest. Jackie Weaver became an instant celebrity after a zoom recording of a chaotic meeting of Handforth Parish Council went viral. As well as cheering us all up during a very long, miserable lockdown winter, Jackie has used her platform to champion the work of town and parish councils and increase the diversity of their memberships. There are some interesting parallels for employers here and Jackie most, most definitely does have the authority. Hi, Jackie and welcome to the podcast.
Jackie Weaver [00:02:11]:
Hello there.
Matt Alder [00:02:12]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Now, many, many people listening will already know who you are, but this is a global podcast. There may be some people out there who’ve not heard of you, who’ve not seen the sort of the coverage earlier in the year. So for the benefit of those people, could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Jackie Weaver [00:02:31]:
I’m Jackie Weaver and most people who know me these days know me from a zoom meeting that went viral. The meeting itself took place back in December 2020, but went viral in February of this year. And I guess that it was the, the emotional overload of the meeting that perhaps caught the the nation’s attention.
Matt Alder [00:03:02]:
Absolutely. I think once you’ve seen it, you don’t, you don’t forget it. Tell us a little bit more about because I think people may have seen the video, Appreciate your job and what you actually. What you actually do. I mean, tell us a little bit about your role and maybe a little bit about what happened.
Jackie Weaver [00:03:16]:
Thank you, Matt. I mean, I. I guess for me, our town and parish councils are kind of like secret gems that a lot of people just don’t know about. So that we have so many 10,000 town and parish councils across the country, each of them full of local people deciding on local issues. And I’m afraid that because these are local issues and people do get passionate about them, occas, we get ourselves into trouble. I work for an organization called the Cheshire association of local councils. There’s 46 other of us throughout the country. And our umbrella body is the national association of Local Councils, or nauc. Now, I don’t have. As an organization, we don’t have regulatory powers. We’re not there to police our town and parish councils. We’re there to help and support them. But every now and then when they get into trouble, they do come to us and say, can you help? Now, help might be advice, training, guidance, that kind of thing. But in the case of this particular zoom meeting, they asked if we could field an officer to support the meeting, and that was me.
Matt Alder [00:04:25]:
I’m sure you weren’t expecting what happened next. I mean, you know, obviously you certainly became the most famous person in local government, but for about a week or so, you were the most famous person in. The most famous person in the country. I mean, obviously, I’m sure all of it was quite surprising. But what was the. What was the craziest thing that happened during those first few weeks?
Jackie Weaver [00:04:46]:
I think it’s difficult to pick out one particular item because I think really it wasn’t so much any individual requests, and there have been peculiar ones, I can tell you, but it was more the kind of onslaught of it so that, you know, it kind of broke on the Thursday night and on the Friday morning, there were TV vans and reporters and everything literally lined up outside. I said it before, but I’m sure the neighbors think I murdered somebody and they were just about to dig up the garden. At any point, you know, we live on a lane and, you know, I have that thing where people are walking past and looking but not looking. Yeah, I think they were just waiting for them to get the shovels out. So it was. It was kind of that. So I never really had. And in some ways still don’t have that ability to sit back and reflect on it. Yeah.
Matt Alder [00:05:45]:
Absolutely. And I think. I think one of the. One of the interesting things and maybe one of the reasons that it kind of went so viral, is it, I think everyone’s been on a crazy zoom call, or was just doing zoom calls in situations that they weren’t expect to. Expecting to. I think it just resonated from that perspective, I suppose. I mean, that’s really what I wanted to talk about, really. In our industry, obviously, in, as in every other industry, everything’s had to move online. Companies are doing virtual hiring, virtual communication, all those. All those kind of things. Talk us through what sort of happened with, with. With local government. How did you sort of get to this virtual communication so quickly and what were the challenges that you had to overcome?
Jackie Weaver [00:06:26]:
That’s a really interesting question, because I think, you know, although I am most definitely the poster princess for parish, it’s they. They do have their idiosyncrasies and they don’t move fast. So the idea of suddenly taking council meetings and putting them onto a virtual platform, you might as well have said that, you know, we’re all going to build our own space stations, I think we would have viewed it as being, you know, a similar challenge. And yet in the space of two months, I think everybody was up and running on some platform or other. I know that certainly Chalk, and I’m sure the other county associations were doing the same, were running training sessions on it, and suddenly it really captured their imagination. Suddenly parish council saw the benefit to them of zoom meetings, and so much so that actually, we’ve now lost the ability from 7th of May to hold virtual meetings for council. And there has been a lot of work going on behind the scenes pushing for the retention and. And why? Well, there’s lots of reasons why. I mean, first of all, we have a. A challenging demographic with town and parish councils. We are often older. And that means that although a lot of the restrictions are being lifted, I think a lot of us are feeling still very cautious about that. We’re not quite ready for our first rave yet. So, you know, there’s that issue. We don’t really want to go back into. Into buildings and holding them. Secondly, a lot of the places where we would hold those meetings are certainly unsuitable for social distancing, you know, old village halls, church halls, that kind of thing. Also, we have begun to see a lot more interest by the communities in what their parish council is doing. And the things that we keep banging on about is trying to attract a wider audience and a younger audience. And I guess one of the things that I’ve kind of really appreciated over the last three months is if you want to engage with young people, you have got to do it where young people are. There is absolutely no point in saying, here we are, you come and find us. And so that first we’ve been able to kind of reach out to that audience, albeit in a very small way through virtual meetings. And as we could see that this was really building a kind of head of steam. It was. It suddenly became something that was tangible to us. We could see how we could make it work for us. And now we can no longer do it. And whereas 12 months ago it was, well, I don’t think, I don’t think, you know, this kind of thing that’s not going to work, we can’t do that, has suddenly become. We can’t lose it. It’s really important to us.
Matt Alder [00:09:28]:
We’ll go into some parallels with employers in a second. Before we do, I just wanted to sort of pick up on the work that you’ve been doing to, to attract more diverse audiences and obviously using the platform that you’ve always created, created for you earlier in the year. I mean, tell us a little bit about, about that. What have you been doing? How have you. Have you sort of tried to engage with different audiences from people who’d normally be involved in Paris councils?
Jackie Weaver [00:09:54]:
Well, I mean, again, speaking personally, it been. It’s been such an opportunity to find people. I mean, that, that’s, that’s kind of the, the issue for me is that there’s always been a willingness there to engage with young people, for example. But where’d you find them? You know, it’s not as if you can go to the, the young person’s hub as a central kind of, you know, thing, and suddenly you’re talking to all the young people in the country. So getting hold of them has been, you know, enormously difficult over the years. And then suddenly my diary is full of invitations to talk at schools, to talk at universities, to talk at young parliamentary groups, etc, so they kind of came and found me. And the fact that we were able to do this during lockdown by, by Zoom. Other platforms, of course, being available meant I could do so many of them. You know, there’s no way I could have reached as many small, discreet audiences that I’ve done over the last three months if I had to go and meet them.
Matt Alder [00:11:02]:
And I think very often people talk about the negatives of video communication, virtual communication, lots of articles about Zoom fatigue and companies dragging people onto video the whole time. And I’VE done a lot of coverage of that, but I think there are so many positive things that have come out of this and I think, you know, you really sort of highlight some there. I mean, tell us a bit more about why. Why has it been decided that the council meetings have to go back face to face? What. What’s the. What’s the sort of the story behind that decision?
Jackie Weaver [00:11:32]:
Yeah, it really isn’t a decision. It’s one of those things that when the government was drafting the coronavirus regulations, they probably had a lot of things on their mind at the time. You know, bodies piling up in the streets would be one of them. So that when they were drafting the legislation, unfortunately, they only gave the ability to hold virtual meetings for a year. And so the year came to an end. There was a challenge in the High Court that some of the principal authority solicitors felt that it didn’t actually need primary legislation to extend it, but the High Court decided otherwise. So that means that we need to take up government time to pass some legislation to allow meetings to continue that we’ve not had. I mean, we’ve been lobbying very hard. And when I say we, I mean all sorts of people have been lobbying. I mean, for example, mumsnet, who are, you know, quite an influential group, although not one that you would normally expect to be associated with town and parish councils. They feel very strongly about it on the basis of accessibility, because of care, you know, care obligations, that kind of thing, and how it fits around that and makes local government more accessible to them. So we have been lobbying and also the government has put out a call for evidence. So that’s live on the.gov.uk website at the moment. So, you know, keep encouraging people, when I can, to, you know, make sure you make your views known there. So, you know, I. I genuinely can’t understand why we would resist it.
Matt Alder [00:13:14]:
It’s interesting because, as I say, it’s something that lots of employers are wrestling with at the moment in terms of, do they go back to work face to face? Are they hybrid? Are they virtual? So I think it’s going to be a discussion around sort of all aspects of society for sort of many months to come. I mean, in an ideal world, what would it look like for you? Would it be a mix? Would it just stay all virtual? What do you think the best sort of solution would would be in the parish council world?
Jackie Weaver [00:13:42]:
I certainly think it would be a mix. I think that the hybrid meetings seem to me to be the obvious choice so that, you know, that some people can meet physically in the room, some can, you know, but I mean, that’s going to require a bit of, a bit of technology and a bit of getting to know additional things. The alternative being that some meetings are held virtually. So, for example, we might have virtual committee meetings and then face to face council meetings. That, that, that seems like an ideal way forward. But, but I guess one of the reasons why this is such a, a kind of debatable topic is that we’re not going to find one size that fits all. And I suppose that there, you know, every, every office situation, every industrial situation is going to require discussions with the, the people concerned as to how it’s going to work best. I mean, I must admit I started from a position of saying there is no way on this earth I am ever going to work from home. It doesn’t work. You can’t manage a team. Now I rather feel that the team are trying to leverage me back into the office and they’re getting a bit of resistance to it because I have quite a nice nest here. Thank you very much.
Matt Alder [00:15:00]:
Absolutely. So, as a kind of final question, what’s next for you outside of the Paris Council world? Because obviously you’ve built up this, this, this level of, you know, Internet fame. What can we expect to see from you next?
Jackie Weaver [00:15:12]:
Well, I, I suppose, I mean, the whole, the whole agenda is new to me, but I think the one thing that I’ve kind of twigged with this is that the two parts go hand in hand. I think that if I, if I want to talk about Parish Councils to a wider audience, I have to offer something else. I have to offer what my father in law used to call a latch lifter. And that means that I have to keep doing some of the, I guess the fun stuff to encourage people to say, well, I want to know what else she’s got to say and kind of slip it in through, through the back door in that way. So all sorts of interesting things. What can I tell you about. Oh, check out the Brit Awards tonight.
Matt Alder [00:16:02]:
The British Awards, Brilliant awards.
Jackie Weaver [00:16:04]:
Check out the Archers coming up. There may be a book. Book. There may be a half written book actually, there may be a mastermind.
Matt Alder [00:16:17]:
Wow. There, you’ve been busy. You’ve been busy. And I, I hear you’re launching a podcast.
Jackie Weaver [00:16:22]:
I almost forgot about that. Yeah, podcast launches next week. And again, I guess that going back to the original video, there were things, it was a, it was a challenging video to watch. There’s angry people in it and it brings out all sorts of issues about, you know, how we treat people in, in situations like that, etc. But there’s also something inherently funny about, you know, a grown man literally losing it, you know, so. So there is something amusing about that. And bless them, somebody saw that and thought it was worth running with. So the podcast Jackie Weaver has the authority is really a kind of sitting down with, you know, some, some tremendous name or I think tremendous names. Jeremy Vine, Anton Du Beck, Tom Allen. Talking about the burning questions of the day. We drift in the things that are serious from time to time, but we also deal with the important things like what to do in the zombie apocalypse.
Matt Alder [00:17:41]:
Absolutely. Well, on that note, that’s a stunning way to end an interview. So, Jackie, thank you very much for joining me.
Jackie Weaver [00:17:50]:
My pleasure, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:17:52]:
My thanks to the amazing Jackie Weaver. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
