Most internal meetings within various teams in the office and external meetings between the company and clients handled online through video conferencing platforms making it a lot easier to handle the work that was coming their way, without putting themselves at risk of the virus. However, the flip side was that companies and team had not met their members in person, which was becoming a challenge. While remote working was not something that all businesses could practise, the ones that could, began working on improving their processes. Additionally, while there were industries like hospitality and construction that could not, toward the start of the pandemic, around August the Government began making changes to allow these companies to get back to work as well. There were a couple of rules that they had to follow, but they were in the right line and working hard on making up for their lost time. While the unemployment rate was still at 3.9% at the beginning of August, which is where it was since the start of the year, people found it surprising that it was not going any lower while many were losing their jobs from almost all companies. However, toward the end of the month, the unemployment rate started increasing for the first time throughout the pandemic and reached 4.1% as another 700000 people started losing their jobs. The Government stated that they would continue with their furlough scheme to assist the people for as long as they could and decided that it makes sense that they wrap it up by the end of October. The entire scheme with companies in the UK would finally close after eight months of navigating through the pandemic. The initial idea was to have companies ad businesses to be able to stand independently, which is why they began opening up offices. Unfortunately, it did not seem like that was working very well since most companies were still dependent on the scheme, and they were still laying people off since they could not support them. Additionally, the Government was providing unemployment benefits for all the people who were currently not working. One of the earlier signs to know that there were a lot of people without jobs, who had not registered for unemployment, was through the number of people showing up to avail of unemployment benefits that were given out by the Government.
