How to Maintain Good Relationships in Treasury with Anh Duong

When working from home came as a direct consequence to Covid, it actually made my work life balance a little bit better. The three hours I would spend commuting a day, I could use to spend time with my family, my young family. And also it meant that because we were working in an office that was fairly tight in terms of capacity, organizing meetings was easier. So in terms of productivity was easier. And it also had a positive influence in terms of my staff, who also shared the same experience with me with commuting. Some of them really struggled to commute and so working from home worked better for them. It's not going to work well for everyone. Members of the team, some of them did struggle, especially those living in London who would walk into the office and they were the young team members who had flats in London. So in terms of operational impact, I think bp, because of the way that we were set up, always had laptops. We could work fairly well. Initially there was concern about security and things like getting signatures, but we'd already had processes in place that overcome those problems. So from an operational perspective, it worked well and it actually worked a lot better than I thought it would do. You know, meeting up with banks, it wasn't really a loss. We just speak to them on zoom. We miss a couple of lunches here or there, but that's not something we desperately upset about. I know that you can ask me a question on what sort of skills and attributes you need as a treasurer or somebody working in Treasury. You need to have fairly good relationship management. And why is it important? Because you need to get on well with your bankers, you need to get on well with your lawyers and the accountants. There's no better way of getting on with them than face to face interaction. It's important that you don't just come in and tell people to do things. I think respect is earned and not just granted. Just because your CV might be sparkling or you might work for a wonderful company in the past you come in, I don't think you can just tell people to do the things that you want. Especially, you know, my experience at working at Imperial College or working at erm. I think you have to work with people and I think after a while you'll gain respect. You need to deliver good, quality work, you need to support them when they need to be supported and to be there for them. I read a lot about management and how to do things. It sounds weird, but whenever you have a situation and you don't always know how best to resolve them, happen for the first time in your career, you actually do need to read things on how to resolve them and obviously just go down to Google. But it does help. For example, if somebody asks you, oh, can you do this for me? And say, I'm too busy, is that the right answer? You need to answer, you know, so it's very, very important that you kind of say things in the right way.