The job of Mayor is full-on and usually, it revolves around meeting with a lot of people on a day to day basis. With many meetings, engagements and community events to attend to, they are accustomed to being on the go all day. But now, like most of New Zealand, they are navigating the world of working from home. LUCY HENRY chatted to our three southern mayors about governing from the kitchen table.

Invercargill Mayor Sir Tim Shadbolt said he's been enjoying getting to spend more quality time at home with his seven-year-old son.

"In the morning I get up and go for a walk around the block with my seven-year-old, we've been getting to know the neighbours a lot more (from a distance of course) and I've noticed a lot more people are gardening."

However, he said working from home has come with a few challenges. 

Aside from getting into a new routine that works and "establishing a stricter routine on eating", he said operating the technology required to do video conference calls had been quite difficult. 

"The challenge for me at first was Zoom... for a dinosaur like me, it's been quite a challenge." 

But one he is learning to master. The Invercargill City Council is now recording all of its council meetings via Zoom and posting them afterwards on their website for public viewing. 

Becoming adept with technology has been a common theme throughout the councils.

Southland District Council Mayor Gary Tong said, at first, making sure everyone at the council could properly access Zoom was tricky, but now they've ironed out those problems. 

"We just had a [Zoom] meeting before and it worked great," he said. It's now working so well that the SDC will start live streaming its council meetings. 

Mr Tong said he'd also found his workload had drastically increased since just before and during the lockdown, with many people and business reaching out to the council in need of support and answers to questions in response to COVID-19. 

"We were doing a lot of hours before [COVID-19] but now it's increased a lot."

He said his key focus was making sure "everyone is looked after". 

Gore District Mayor Tracy Hicks said adjusting to work-from-home life had gone smoothly and he had been able to retaind a good amount of structure is his day, with many daily meetings with councils and various groups. 

He said it had been a blessing to have the technology available, like Zoom, which allowed people to communicate and work from home so freely during a crisis like this. 

In fact, he said in some cases it had proven so efficient that it had highlighted the redundancy of some meetings needing to be held face-to-face. 

"I think it will change the way we do things in the future... I spend a lot of time travelling [around Southland] at face-to-face meetings that can probably be cut down and done online instead."

"I think this will also change the way we do business," he said. "So many things can be done online now, not everything needs to be done in person".

Mr Hicks said holding Gore District Council meetings online had been an "interesting experience" as staff adjusted to the new way of work, but it had been going well.

Mr Hicks said the meetings were then uploaded to the GDC YouTube channel.