The COVID-19 Support Pack, which is available on Emerald Works’ Mind Tools platform, offers more than twenty articles and videos on topical subjects such as working from home, running virtual meetings, mental health, and decision-making under pressure.

The most popular articles accessed to date are around the topics of staying focused while working from home and problem solving.

Other topics covered in the Support Pack are working in a virtual team, managing emotion in a team, keeping calm in a crisis, and mindfulness in the workplace.

Under current UK government guidance, everyone is required to work from home unless it is impossible to do so, in order to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

While some companies have previously introduced a culture of flexible working, many people have never worked from home, leading to new challenges and additional stress in already worrying times.

The National Office of Statistics reported that in 2019 around 1.7 million people were working mainly from home – with the evolving coronavirus outbreak, that number is rising dramatically.

With so many people working from home, Emerald Works is also seeing a significant surge in interest in people accessing the resources from Minds Tools. Figures from client sites show an increase in engagement and number of users to the Emerald Works Mind Tools toolkit – with a 33% increase in traffic week on week, a 43% increase in traffic compared with the previous month.

The package of online learning solutions is drawn from the Mind Tools library of almost 2,500 resources, which are divided into 12 skill areas such as leadership, creativity, strategy, and project management. The resources are accessed by more than 24 million people each year.

In addition to the COVID-19 Support Pack, Emerald Works also uses its Minds Tools platform to provides and create customised online learning solutions for companies such as Tata Steel.

Louise Burge, Lead Projects Advisor at Tata Steel, said, "The Working From Home and Living Well custom pages created by MindTools during COVID-19 have enabled us to provide practical resources quickly to people on a range of relevant topics such as virtual meetings, managing remote teams, and working from home. This gave people some much needed practical support during this challenging time."

Peter Casebow, CEO of Emerald Works, said, "Our mission has always been to make a difference to people’s lives and give them the solutions they need to work smarter, overcome challenges, better their wellbeing, and enrich their careers. With COVID-19 forcing so many people to work from home for the first time and disrupting normal ways of working, the challenges have never been greater and people need support more than ever."

Emerald Works was launched in January when it brought together three established international learning organisations - GoodPractice, Towards Maturity and Mind Tools – to form one global company.

Emerald Works, which has offices in Edinburgh, London, Horsham, the US, and Australia, works with global brands such as Virgin Money, Standard Life Aberdeen, Rolls-Royce, Edrington, and AstraZeneca among its growing client base. With a focus on the USA, UK, and Australia, the company now serves more than 2.5 million learners and learning professionals each month, based in 180 countries worldwide.