Fifteen months of unprecedented challenges for businesses upended by the Covid-19 pandemic have forced most into a major rethink as to what the future holds for their previously humming physical offices spaces.

The past year has seen the emergence of a new concept of blended working, as firms take the first tentative steps towards a more flexible approach to in-office versus remote, after adopting the full work-from-home model last year as the crisis hit.

For Siobhán Finn, the recently appointed National Hub Network Manager with the National Association of Community Enterprise Centres (NACEC), the clear move in the direction of hybrid working means a brighter tomorrow for hundreds of Ireland’s enterprise centres and remote working hubs, long regarded as conduits for entrepreneurship and innovation across the country.

“There’s no doubt about it, there’s a very bright future ahead for this sector, driven by the progression and development of the enterprise centre and hub community, both privately owned and community owned,” she asserts.

“The growth of the sector has been accelerated probably by between five and seven years because of what’s happened with Covid in the last 15 months in this country, never mind what’s happened internationally. We now have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build and grow a really strong and sustainable sector with very solid foundations.”

And while she remains particularly bullish on the prospects for Ireland’s community enterprise centres, she knows the coming months and years will not be without their challenges.

A marketing graduate with a Masters in Change Management, the Cork woman who grew up on the family farm “at the foot of the Galtees”, knows more than most the challenges faced by the small business-owner, largely the type of tenant populating enterprise centres the length and breadth of Ireland.

Jobs with the European Commission in Brussels and for the non-profit Cork Innovates bookended a spell of self-employment lasting from the onset of the Celtic Tiger boom through the subsequent recession, the latter years clearly leaving a deep appreciation of the struggles faced by micro businesses during tough times.

“The years I spent self-employed gave me a really good sense of what the indigenous micro-SME goes through on the ground. I lived through both the Celtic Tiger years and the subsequent recession, so that was interesting, challenging and, I would say, very educational,” she says.

Joining NACEC as its first full-time National Hub Network Manager in the midst of a global pandemic has also been quite the education for Finn, who in ordinary times might have expected to have spent the first several months in her new role travelling the country, meeting managers and staff in every county.

“It was really strange in the beginning because you’re sitting in your house on hour one of day one and you’re thinking ‘Now what do I do? Where do I go?’ You know what the ambition is, you know what has to be achieved, everybody knows what their KPIs are, but how do I start to do this from home?

“But I got tremendous support from the Chairperson of the board, the board themselves, the centre managers and the staff were incredible. I can’t articulate how amazing everybody was in terms of the level of support that was shown.”

The common denominator in her previous roles she describes as “collaboration, bringing communities together, working with communities to drive projects and deliver on the ambition of people to do better within their own communities”. In other words, her work was all about achieving social impact.

Such a background has prepared her well for her latest role, where it’s all about developing and supporting community enterprise initiatives. NACEC’s members host over 1,800 businesses and support over 5,500 jobs. Their hubs are more than simply physical spaces for remote workers, entrepreneurs and SMEs - they are the driving force behind enterprise creation and regional ecosystems that offer a pathway towards economic growth and job creation in the regions.

“I feel very privileged to be the person chosen for this role because of the work that has been done to date. And I feel a massive duty of care towards all those individuals who have already committed so much to this sector and to the communities across Ireland,” Siobhán Finn says.

“One of the aspects of this role that struck me most at the outset was the legacy that sits within the network: the legacy of knowledge, the depth of the relationships, the skills, the know-how, the expertise and the tremendous impact these individuals have had in the last 20 years in managing their centres and hubs right around the country.

“The untold story, to a large degree, is that these people are all so busy dealing with the challenges common across many of the hubs, like occupancy rates, working with voluntary boards, part-time staff, minimal resources and now recovering from the impact of the pandemic - but also emerging from Covid and understanding that there is a very bright future ahead.

“There are so many opportunities out there now because progress has been accelerated so much in the thinking around the hybrid model of working.”

There are still many uncertainties, of course, but Finn very much sees her role as supporting the centres as they emerge from the current crisis. “There is still a sense of the unknown but it’s a very different unknown to what we had 12 months ago,” she remarks.

One of the primary goals for NACEC over the next 12 months will be convincing employers that remote working hubs around the country are up to the mark in terms of providing high-quality professional working environments designed to meet the current and future needs of a diverse workforce.

To that end, the association has embarked on a project to introduce a new quality standards framework throughout its network. Working with stakeholders like Enterprise Ireland and the National Standards Authority of Ireland (NSAI), the initiative is expected to be launched over the summer months.

“And from that, a growth pathway will be developed which will allow centres and hubs to continue to improve their service offering and to meet the needs of different sectors and different profiles of employers, depending on what the demand is within their particular area or region.”

The Cork woman is in no doubt that digital hubs have a major role to play in reimagining the economies of the regions in which they operate. “There are combinations of ingredients that serve to make a hub a success – you’ve the physical infrastructure, the quality of broadband, the people within the hub, the staff and the calibre of the manager: their skillset, their vision, their innovation drive and their ambition for the hub, their ambition for the community within the hub and their ambition for the broader community.”

She singles out the Dingle Hub and its Dingle 2030 Strategy as an example of one centre community making a significant contribution to its region and continuing to innovate by being “thought leaders and game-changers”. But there are many more.

It’s about getting to a point “where emerging entrepreneurs recognise they don’t have to be in the heart of Dublin any more to be successful. It’s where highly-qualified individuals coming out of third-level institutions realise they don’t have to go to London or New York to secure key positions with big-name employers,” she adds.

She also believes Ireland can be a world-class destination to which overseas start-up entrepreneurs can look once the solid infrastructural and technological foundations become embedded. “Now more so than ever because our thinking has opened up as to what’s possible. Fifteen months ago, if anyone had said we are about to enter the biggest experiment in the world in terms of reimagining our workplace, reimagining the future of business, reimagining how business is run, none of us would have believed it.

“But we were very quickly forced into a situation where it was ‘do this or don’t survive’. And we managed and we adapted. We were very innovative in our approaches. It wasn’t without its challenges, but we proved it was possible.”

Siobhán Finn reckons that type of versatility is simply part of the Irish way of thinking. “We have demonstrated our adaptability, our innovative mindset, our creativity, our solutions-driven approach yet again. Ireland isn’t unknown for its ability to adapt and pivot and change very quickly. We have proved that down the centuries and I think we’ve proved it yet again in the last 15 months.”

 Reporting: Ken Davis for the EnterpRISE Interview Series