I’ve been in the PR industry for 18 years and the Covid-19 pandemic changed everything. What is normal in business now would have been unthinkable pre-Covid, and initially it was something I resisted.

The buzz-phrase ‘flexible working’ started coming up when we were recruiting during and immediately after the pandemic and, eventually, everyone was mentioning it.

I realised the crux of the matter was four key factors, which if you get right will enable you to be successful regardless of the working setup.

The first is that it’s all about people. You need to find the right people with the right work ethic who are the right fit for the agency and the core team.

The second factor is playing to people’s strengths. I’ve always been interested in people, and it was when I was at university studying Business and Public Relations that I really started to notice the difference between people in a working environment.

When you’re part of a project team, you find there are natural leaders, confident presenters and people doing work behind the scenes. It’s about accepting that all are equally important, and to get the best out of people, you need to play to their strengths.

You can have the brains of the operation working behind the scenes, who will develop a presentation to give to someone who’s Teflon when it comes to public speaking. Put simply, you’re getting them to do the things they’re really good at, and not the bits which cause them to feel uncomfortable, stressed or anxious. Happiness equals productivity.

In this situation, if people feel anxiety or negativity around a certain aspect of work, I will do the best I can to remove it from them.

The third key factor is having a flat structure in the organisation. There is no major hierarchy at R&Co, just an emphasis on the team. You hear all sorts of horror stories from other PR agencies where people sink because they can’t go home until the work is done, and we don’t have that problem here.

We have at least two account directors working on all of our clients, so we share the responsibility and accept we can’t individually do the job without the rest of the team. It means people don’t find they are sinking under a large workload, so they are relaxed at work and you get the best out of them.

Because of these factors, you build trust and loyalty and thanks to these secure relationships, it doesn’t really matter whether you work from home full-time or are based in the office.

The major consideration around this is to make sure being at home doesn’t create a negative effect. As humans we need interaction and the comfort of the ‘water cooler chat’ in the office.

During Covid, that was lost and I felt a loss of control – for example, I could see people weren’t as engaged on Teams because of the distance in the relationship created by the pandemic. Sometimes you need to sit and look each other in the eye, which is why I think it is important to be in the office every week.

The fourth factor is allowing people to find a work/life balance. People have mortgages, relationships, childcare issues or simply need to get their hair cut or go to the dentist – if you can allow them the flexibility to deal with these things knowing the time gets made up, everyone wins.

It’s all about treating people with kindness and respect, as you never know what is going on in their lives. I have a principal in business of ‘never a cross word’ – rather than getting angry or cross, it is always about finding a solution to a problem.

I am a people person, and the most important thing to me is the team here, who are all brilliant.

I remember reading a Richard Branson book where he talks about the importance of employing people who are better than him. That principle has enabled me to create a team who all bring unique skills to the table, and work well together regardless of their physical location.

Peter Robinson is managing director of award-winning West Midlands PR agency R&Co Communications.