There was an increasingly vocal group of (mostly younger) professionals who were demanding more flexible forms of working. This was the same prescient generation who made much of the early running on such ideas as corporate purpose, sustainability and work/life balance. But their preference for working from home was often seen as a step too far.
For many years, Investor Relations (IR) was every global firm’s forgotten function. If businesspeople thought about IR at all, they usually assumed it was some sort of glorified comms job, a necessary buffer between an overworked Finance team and information hungry investors.