10 minute read
Trust for life
HYBRID’S SOFT FOCUS
With hybrid working founded on greater autonomy for teams and individuals, is the conversation about how workers are managed – and how services are provided for them – likely to be a constantly evolving one from hereon? Martin Read and Bradford Keen report
A s of July, figures suggested that around twothirds of employers were planning to either introduce or expand on hybrid working over the next 12 months. FMs polled at the recent Workplace Futures conference believed by a three to one ratio that there is no chance of occupancy levels ever returning to Q1 2020 levels. A KPMG Outlook survey published as we went to press detailed a huge decline in CEOs having already or planning to downsize their physical footprint, from 69 per cent last year to just 21 per cent this. Workers themselves are watching as this extraordinary global ‘work in progress’ plays out; employers, aware of needing to keep their workforces happy while they assess the operational change options the pandemic has opened their eyes to, are sending strong signals about offering new freedoms to work to final output goals instead of one-size-fits-all routines.
Andy Alderson, CEO of Vanarama, expresses it this way: “So long as you’re working hard and living our
PHOTOGRAPHY: ISTOCK / GETTY
values, we trust you to work it out.”
Elsewhere this is the introduction of cute new maxims – ‘office is for input, home is for output’.
So the key ingredients of hybrid working comprise a significantly more trusting attitude towards employees and, as a consequence, their relative autonomy within teams compared with the immediate post-pandemic environment.
There may be variety in the basic design and implementation of hybrid policy, but little in terms of general direction.
“The most important thing for me is to create the best working environment for my team members,” says Nicholas Goubert, chief product & technology officer at CLARK. “It is important after all to create enough flexibility to try new ways, monitor how the team and the company perform and to keep iterating and improving.”
Goubert thinks the debate about work policy will continue to be top of mind for years to come. “The worst option is to remain stuck in the past and apply theories that might have been relevant years or decades ago but are completely obsolete today.”
‘Completely obsolete’ is a pretty stark assessment, but it is indicative of the current state of play. Goubert talks of “building a strong culture of autonomous teams”, accepting that there will be multiple iterations of his firm’s office space as the extent to which ‘virtual clusters’ of autonomous teams feeding into an operational whole ultimately impacts on the workspace offer.
Hybrid’s give and take
Others speak of the opportunity represented by hybrid to expand their recruitment footprint nationwide or even internationally, evolving their team structure alongside their workplace offer. So while hybrid means giving, in terms of operational freedom and improved office conditions, it also means more opportunity to pick who those team members are in the first place.
This kind of calculation, and with corporate eyes on a longer-term reduction in spend on space for both cost and environmental reasons, will be the drivers that keep hybrid in the spotlight long after any short burst of Q4 2021 surge of ‘good to be back’ stories hits the headlines.
Ben Willmott, head of policy at the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) spoke on hybrid recently at the Workplace Futures Summer 2021 conference. For Willmott, what is most important for organisations is agreeing “a strategic position on hybrid working and developing a policy and supporting guidance that reflects that strategy”. And then, “organisations should be defining hybrid working with regard to this specific organisational context”.
All of which will require more focus on that most frequently recurring theme, management’s soft skills.
“Effective hybrid working will hinge on the ability of people managers to manage properly those who are increasingly going to be split between the workplace and those who are working from home on a much more regular basis,” says Willmott. “They’ll need to get much more comfortable at how they do that, so equipping people managers with the necessary skills is an absolute foundation for effective hybrid working.”
The task in hand
It is also a case of offering hybrid working alongside or as part of other flexible working options, suggests Willmott. The CIPD is part of the government’s Flexible Working Taskforce, initially set up during Theresa May’s administration to improve workplace equality by understanding the barriers preventing employers offering and individuals taking up flexible work options.
This task force got a second wind in February with CIPD CEO Peter Cheese asked to continue in the role of chair and the body newly tasked with specifically seeking to understand and support “the change to ‘hybrid’ and other ways of working which are emerging because of the pandemic”.
The right to request flexible working, while enshrined in legislation, still suffers from having no single, universal definition. Doubtless the government is seeking to do just that, but the pandemic has pushed definitions back as hybrid’s impact is assessed. Because while ‘hybrid’ principally comprises what would previously have been termed ‘teleworking’, there lies in hybrid the opportunity to address other aspects of the flexible working pro-pandemic mega trend with all its perceived benefits: attraction of talent, improved engagement, improved job satisfaction, loyalty to the business, productivity and improved wellbeing.
“We know there’s real unmet demand for different forms of flexible working arrangements such as flexitime, compressed hours, analysed hours job share part-time working,” says Willmott, “We think there is a real risk of a two-tier workforce where home and hybrid workers enjoy considerable flexibility and other workers have very little.”
POLL (WORKPLACE FUTURES ATTENDEES, JULY 2021) WILL THE OFFICE OCCUPANCY EVER RETURN TO PRE-2020 LEVELS?
10.3%
YES
13.2%
DON’T KNOW
76.5%
NO
Servicing multiple working locations all at once
Hybrid working means accepting that the move to workers spending many hours at their home office desks is a permanent one. So what legal responsibilities do workplace and facilities management professionals now face – and how did they initially adapt to the new reality?
Depending on their job role or the organisation they work for, workers at home might enjoy the luxury of an ergonomic office chair, a desk and suitably set up display screen equipment (DSE) paid for by their employer while others could well be hunched over their laptops on a sofa or lying in bed.
Legal obligations from a health and safety perspective have always been difficult to decipher for locationindependent working – and this was the case even before the pandemic, says FM consultant Lucy Jeynes.
“There’s a mismatch between the liability for employers and the practical ability to mitigate that when people are at home,” Jeynes explains. “If somebody came to assess my own homeworking setup, I’d show them my office with an adjustable chair and eye-level monitor. But then I work on the sofa, in bed, in the garden, in cafés, in co-working spaces, at my house in France; there isn’t any way to make me sit properly in my chair and to stop me hunching over the coffee table on my laptop. So I don’t know how that’s going to be defined.”
A more equitable result
For David Sharp, managing director of International Workplace, a solution powered by artificial intelligence is the likely long-term solution for guaranteeing H&S compliance. Consider, for example, a DSE assessment. At home, reveals Sharp, he works on a decorating table with two monitors on top and his grandkids’ beds behind him. But he might move to the lounge to work from his phone or tablet. “You can’t do a DSE risk assessment for me with one form. You’ve got to look at my life, my scenarios where I work, I might be on the train.
“There’s got to be a really big change in the way that software and applications exist to help people do their job. It’s going to be much more equitable; employers have to be ethical, and employees have to be more responsible and granular when sharing information about how they’re working.”
During the past two years, Dentsu’s FM team has closed seven of its London offices in favour of higher occupancy at a single HQ. This has enabled the team to send office chairs to remote working employees, but their procurement focus has also been on sourcing suitably sized desks for home use. Ideal dimensions are 600mm deep and 1,000mm wide “being mindful of people’s living scenarios”, says Dentsu’s London-based FM Russell Wood.
ITV took a similar approach. “We denuded many buildings of their screens and sent thousands home,” says Ian Jones, director of facilities. “Then we realised we needed to do more so we set up a £250 bursary for everybody to buy themselves a chair and a desk.”
Dentsu is using technology to improve all aspects of remote working, including workstation compliance. Says Wood: “We’re about to launch an automated ergonomic workstation solution from Ideagen (a
governance risk management and compliance software provider) to provide regular, automated prompts for computer users to review their workstations. How we do it now is quite reactive, using forms, but this new technology will allow us to send out reminders at certain intervals.”
At Amnesty International, all workers were provided with DSE, a chair and mouse, while those with known DSE issues were given desks. But many employees were stuck working from their bedrooms.
“To combat the way we know some of our young people are working, we opened up very early last year in June,” says Kellie Lord-Thomas, UK workplace manager at Amnesty International. “We knew some people didn’t have the best work environments; however, we haven’t seen an influx of those young people come back.
“We’ve also sent guidance on how to sit comfortably, we’ve issued lots of wellbeing information, and all of that is going to stay, but ideally we want them coming back into the office a little bit more frequently than they are.”
Lord-Thomas explains that there is uncertainty about the extent of the company’s legal obligations. “This is going to require a whole different way of PAT testing and I’m not quite sure how we’re going to do that. Obviously, there are concerns about privacy in the home. We’re secure in the office but it weakens our systems when everyone’s working from home.”
A new third way
One solution to this kind of concern is the emergence of a more ubiquitous class of third space, one based on the repurposing of high street retail units to offer the kind of meeting and quiet work locations that coffee shops typically cannot. A government task force to assess the future of high streets is likely to see facilitating this new generation of third spaces as part of its remit.
It is easy to envisage businesses seeing the advantage of using such spaces, and thus reducing their own overall corporate footprint. But with firms now reporting much less inclination to offload workspace, in contrast to what they were saying at the heart of the pandemic last year, it is far too early to paint a clear picture of what happens next.
