Hybrid Working – the Relationship Divide

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Over two articles, we explore the challenges facing HR leaders as they prepare to implement hybrid working.

As part of our research into future ways of working, we held a series of interviews and a round table event with senior HR leaders from around the world on this topic and have distilled the challenges into two headings:

In this, the second of two articles, we look at the Relationship Divide. The first article can be found here. As the details of the discussion are potentially price-sensitive, participants and their contributions have been anonymised.

Belonging & Connection

Lockdown has given us an insight into some of the psychological and behavioural challenges that could persist in a permanent hybrid working environment, with the biggest threat being to our sense of belonging. A number of HR leaders have reported that whilst overall engagement scores have gone up, belonging has gone down during lockdown. How do you create a sense of belonging in a largely remote workforce, where the employees are juggling their home and work lives – two lives that co-exist in the same physical family space?

In her brilliant TED talks (and books) on shame and vulnerability, Dr. Brené Brown gives us some insights that may well apply here: how do we make the challenges of juggling this intertwined home/work life feel like a relatively safe and natural vulnerability that can be shared with colleagues, rather than a situation to feel ashamed of? Because if we can’t, then those employees are going to feel disconnected from everyone else, like they are the only ones struggling with this.

People feel connected to us, and form lasting bonds, when they can see the whole person, the real you. This whole self is easier to see in the unguarded moments between meetings, in an office environment, over lunch or coffee – but how will we be truly seen when all of our verbal/visual interactions are though structured, time-bound meetings? How will we form new connections if there is no space in the day for serendipity and chance encounter?

Some of our research participants are already doing something about this and have increased the sense of belonging as a result. They have made a focus on wellbeing a top priority, with psychological counselling for staff, family networks, buddy activities to prevent isolation and a plethora of other activities that create a sense of community. This has to go deeper than enforced Friday Zoom drinks though, it has to make safe spaces for employees to share their whole selves and to address their particular causes of disconnection, without shame.

Leadership & Culture

We have seen a significant shift during the pandemic to a form of leadership that has to focus much more on the individual and their unique circumstances. Leadership has become more personal because we have been exposed to the real diversity of our colleagues’ lives – the kids interrupting a meeting, the shocking number of parcels we receive (or is that just me?), the dogs barking, the décor of our homes, our partners walking behind us half-dressed because we are working from the bedroom. And these are just the surface differences.

Some of our participants are also worried about culture-fade. How do new joiners pick up the culture of the company when they are walking into a screen rather than walking into the office? How will they even learn what being a team-member means in this culture if they only visit the office once a week? Will employees forget what they are a part of if their interactions are only through meetings – and will our cultures therefore fade?

Some leaders have struggled with trust – how do they know their employees are “pulling a shift” when they can’t see them? Experiments with productivity tracking and workforce surveillance via office applications (such as Microsoft) has already been exposed as potentially corrosive; and these practices reveal much about where leaders sit on McGregor’s X and Y theory of work motivation.

It is clear from our conversations that some leaders have risen to the occasion whilst others have been exposed. What does this mean for leadership development and advancement? Have the core competencies we look for in leaders shifted?

Relationships

Our participants have noticed how work relationships have been rewired during lockdown and this presents an opportunity – as well as a threat. Prior to lockdown, the office environment tended to dictate which groups you had an “insider” relationship with. This made it difficult for those in remote offices, who often had “outsider” status as a result. Lockdown has begun to show how, when everyone is remote, anyone can become an “insider” – project membership especially can be more diverse and dispersed geographically.

The shadow side of this is that remote workers are also freer to become individualistic when not exposed to a regular set of team members – the influence of the group is less keenly felt when you are sitting at home. Which brings us neatly back to belonging – how do we create the opportunities for bonding and collaboration with a stable “home” team in a hybrid world and avoid the worst effects of ephemeral, fleeting relationships with “distant” colleagues.

In future articles, we will explore these challenges in more depth and provide evidence of what HR leaders are doing about them. I’m quite sure we will discover many more challenges along the way.

If you are looking for inspiration and pioneers in the hybrid working model, you can find a list of employers who have made a public commitment to this mode of working here.

Divided We Stand? The Challenges of Hybrid Working.

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Over two articles, we explore the challenges facing HR leaders as they prepare to implement hybrid working.

As part of our research into future ways of working, we held a series of interviews and a round table event with senior HR leaders from around the world on this topic and have distilled the challenges into two headings:

In this first article, we look at the Location Divide. As the details of the discussion are potentially price-sensitive, participants and their contributions have been anonymised.

The Location Divide

As one participant put it, the workforce has already been split into two groups during COVID – the “home” team and the “away” team. The “away” team are those whose jobs can only be performed on-site, and the “home” team are those who can benefit from hybrid working going forward. This creates the potential for a new form of social divide, with those who can work from home being perceived as having additional privileges and more comfortable working arrangements than those on-site. Will this perception of privilege fade or will it create new tensions? As on-site work becomes more automated, will more and more employees be able to join the “away” team?

The most common hybrid working arrangements being explored are 3 days at home and 2 in the office – what Salesforce have termed a Flex arrangement. However, even in the “home” team there will always be those who can work from home and those who can’t or won’t – either because of privacy, lack of space or because they are early in their career and may need to be in the office for their development. The nature and extent of hybrid working will also likely differ from country to country and by job family.

Even so, some are already seeing the freedoms and diversity opportunities from the move towards greater geographical dispersion – with talent no longer restricted to the neighbourhood or region and project participation no longer dominated by the “centre”.

Many of the HR leaders we have spoken to are already considering a redesign of the office; not just the question of how much space is needed but how it should be shaped and used, with more areas being converted into collaboration zones. If home is where solo work and regular catch-up calls take place, the office building then becomes the “village square”, the place where collaborative events take place on specific days of the week, with some thought going into the physical design and décor of these spaces to create the right atmosphere.

But what are the practicalities of these arrangements? How will the office-based collaborative events be scheduled, such that employees don’t find themselves being required at the office 5 days a week by accident? How do you avoid everyone choosing the same two days to be in the office, so that office-space savings can be achieved? There are many unanswered questions and lessons to be learned.

Whichever way employers decide they want to go with hybrid working, we are also seeing increasing numbers of senior candidates who expect to be given the option in their next role – and they will only look at roles that offer this. An employee-led revolution is emerging.

In the second article, published later this week, we will explore the challenges around the Relationship Divide – trust, belonging, leadership and insider/outsider relationships.

In the meantime, you can find a live list of employers are moving to hybrid working here.

Employers Who Are Implementing Hybrid Working

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Hybrid Working: two different types of work location arrangements (usually home and office) that combine to perform essentially the same function.

Of course, the true definition of hybrid working is still emerging, as employers experiment with what works and what doesn’t. The COVID pandemic has accelerated a trend towards more remote working by many years and it is largely being driven by employee preferences. With some employers reporting a 30% improvement in productivity during lockdown, it is no surprise that employees are being listened to.

For those of you considering going hybrid or grappling with the challenges, the table below gives you a list of organisations who have gone public with a permanent commitment to hybrid working, so that you can follow and learn from their pioneering efforts.

Please contact Andrew Thompson at andrew@paskpartnership.com if you want to:

  1. Add your business to this list
  2. Request a pdf version of the list
  3. If you have any questions about hybrid working and where you can find help or advice on its implementation.

You can also check out our articles on hybrid working here.

Aviva

Aviva has announced the closure of offices across the UK alongside plans to allow staff to work from home, beyond Covid restrictions.

The investment company, which employs 16,000 people in the UK, said the plans would not lead to job cuts and offices would still be available for staff on a rotation basis. It said it expected most staff to spend one day a week in an office on average.

Source: BBC News | Aviva Podcast

BP

BP has told 25,000 office-based staff that they will be expected to work from home for two days a week as part of a post-pandemic shift to flexible working patterns.

The global oil company introduced the new hybrid model of working to staff last month and expects the 60-40 split between office and home working to take effect from this summer as Covid-19 restrictions begin to ease.

The hybrid working approach will extend across BP’s global network of offices and is expected to affect 6,000 staff in the UK, including more than 2,000 in central London.

Source: The Guardian

British Airways

“The global pandemic has shown us that many of our colleagues enjoy working remotely and want to continue, and this has accelerated our approach to offering more agile and flexible ways of working.”

“Our aim is to find a hybrid working model that suits our business, blending the best of office and remote working for our people. We’ve also re-structured our business to emerge from the crisis and are considering whether we still have the need for such a large headquarters building.”

Source: BBC News

BT

The company says that its 8,500 call centre staff who are currently working remotely will given the choice of whether or not they want to come back to the office. A staff survey revealed that 65% wished to work from home. HQ staff will be givenflexibility on how they divide their time between office and home but the office will remaina  core part of life at BT.

Source: Dailymail.co.uk | Evening Standard

Capita

“We have permanently closed 11% of our floor space in 2020, including our head office in London. We are now moving to a more flexible workspace model, allowing collaboration when needed but also recognising that our people want to spend more time working at home than before the pandemic. We plan to reduce office space by another 15% in 2021.”

The company has now told 64 per cent of employees – 35,000 out of a total of 55,000 – that they will be able to work from home for the majority of the time.

Source: Annual Results 2020 | The Independent

Centrica

Chris O’Shea, CEO of Centrica, tells the FT that they won;t be back 5 days a week in the office, adopting a flexible mix of working arrangements instead. He felt it was good for both staff and customers.

Source: FT.com

Dropbox

Dropbox announced it would become a Virtual First company. Remote work (outside an office) will be the primary experience for all employees and the day-to-day default for individual work.

Source: Dropbox blog

Ericsson

At Future of Work 2021, Priyanka Anand, Vice-President and Head of HR, Southeast Asia, Oceania and India at Ericsson, revealed some of Ericsson’s plans and philosophy around how it is reimagining the workplace to adopt hybrid working.

Source: YourStory.com

Facebook

About half of Facebook’s workforce will work remotely over the next decade, according to Mr. Zuckerberg. “We’re going to do this in a measured way,” he said. “I think we could get to about half of the company working remotely permanently,” in five to ten years, he concluded.

Source: Forbes

Gitlab

Before the pandemic, GitLab were the world’s largest all-remote company with over 1,300 team members working remotely across 65 countries. They have shared their excellent “Remote Manifesto” on their website.

Source: GitLab website

Hitachi

The tech conglomerate’s eventual goal is to have 70% of its workforce — about 23,000 people — work remotely for two or three days a week.

Source: CNN

HSBC

HSBC has announced that it is moving 1,200 call centre staff in the UK to permanent home working on a voluntary basis. This decision comes after an employee survey and HSBC have offered £300 a year to cover expenses such as high utility bills.

Source: Reuters

Infosys

33% of staff to work permanently from home – although a timetable for this has not been confirmed

Source: Yahoo News

KPMG

KPMG UK announced in February that it would be embracing hybrid working for its 16,000 colleagues. Staff will have the opportunity to tailor their working week to suit the type of work they are doing and their balance of work and home commitments.

“We see hybrid working as a once in a generation transformation, not only in the way people interact with their workplace but in the way they approach career opportunities and contribute to businesses – and for value to be recognised somewhat differently.

By being clear that working within KPMG will involve less commuting to offices and less travel to meetings, we want to attract a wider pool of talent than ever before, helping us to be a more diverse and stronger business as a result.”

Source: KPMG UK blog

Lloyds Banking Group

77% of Lloyds’ 68,000 employees said they want to work from home for three or more days per week. As a result, the company is to reduce it’s office space by 20% over the next two years as it adopts hybrid working as a permanent lifestyle change.

Source: The Guardian

Microsoft

Microsoft published an update to their hybrid working model in March 2021, describing a nuanced approach underpinned by experiments with new technologies and work space design. They recognise the need to create space for inclusive conversations and “to support individual work styles, balance business needs and ensure we live our culture”. It goes on to say, “we view working from home part of the time (less than 50%) as standard for most roles – assuming manager and team alignment. Now and in the future, we have an opportunity to reexamine traditional notions of aligning particular jobs to particular settings.”

Source: Microsoft blog

Nationwide (the UK building society)

13,000 office staff can choose where they work; whether that be from home, a local High Street branch or the office.

Joe Garner, chief executive of Nationwide, said: “The last year has taught many of us that ‘how’ we do our jobs is much more important than ‘where’ we do them from. We are putting our employees in control of where they work from, inviting them to ‘locate for their day’ depending on what they need to achieve.”

Source: BBC News | Nationwide website

Nationwide Insurance

Downsizing from 20 offices to just 4 and the majority of staff will be working from home.

Source: BBC News | Nationwide website

PWC

Following the pandemic the accountancy giant is offering its 22,000 staff much more control over their working pattern. Called the “Deal”, from now on employees will be able to work from home a couple of days a week and start as early or late as they like.

This summer they can knock off early on Fridays too.

PwC chairman Kevin Ellis said he hoped this would make flexible working “the norm rather than the exception”.

Source: BBC News | PWC website

Revolut

Revolut, one of Europe’s most-valuable startups, will allow its more than 2,000 employees to work overseas for as long as 60 calendar days over a rolling 12 months. This follows an announcement in February regarding plans to move the majority of its 2000-strong workforce to a permanent remote working model.

Source: Finextra | Revolut website

Salesforce

“Going forward, Salesforce employees will have the choice of three working models; flex, fully remote and office-based.

When it’s safe to return to the office, most of our employees around the globe will work flex. This means they’ll be in the office 1-3 days per week for team collaboration, customer meetings, and presentations.”

Source: Salesforce blog

Santander

5,000 staff will be asked to work from home more often or travel into one of its six offices, amidst the closure of 452 branches and 4 offices across the UK.

Source: BBC News

Siemens

140,000 of its 385,000 employees may work from wherever they want for 2-3 days per week.

Source: Forbes | Siemens website

Slack

“One thing that we know: Slack is going to become a much more distributed company. That means that most employees will have the option to work remotely on a permanent basis if they choose, and we will begin to increasingly hire employees who are permanently remote.”

Source: Slack website

Spotify

“Starting this Summer we’ll be offering more flexibility to employees by introducing My Work Mode as well as flexibility when it comes to work location.”

  1. My Work Mode – our employees will be able to work full time from home, from the office, or a combination of the two.
  2. Location choices –more flexibility when it comes to what country and city each employee works from ….if someone chooses a location that is not near a Spotify office, we will support them with a co-working space membership if they want to work from an office.

Source: Spotify HR blog

Square

Announced at the same time as Twitter that employees would be allowed to work from home permanently.

“We want employees to be able to work where they feel most creative and productive,” a Square spokesperson told CNBC. “Over the past several weeks, we’ve learned a lot about what it takes for people to effectively perform roles outside of an office, and we will continue to learn as we go.”

Source: CNBC

Standard Chartered

Standard Chartered Bank have announced their intention to implement a hybrid approach to work, with greater flexibility in working patterns and locations; whether that be Standard Chartered premises, a near-office premises, or from home. Additionally, the Bank is partnering with a third party (IWG) to provide additional ‘near-home’ workspace. It is anticipated most employees will fall into a hybrid pattern but the plans are being phased in, with phase one covering 54% of their 86,000 employees across nine markets in 2021.

Source: SC website

Tata Consultancy Services

By 2025, only 25% of employees will need to be in office at any one time in order to be just as, if not more, productive.

Source: Tata website

The Very Group

The Very Group, operator of Very.co.uk and Littlewoods.com, has transformed its Liverpool-based campus into the ideal setting for collaboration, innovation, learning and socialising, as the £2bn-revenue retailer sets its sights on a new, permanent hybrid working model. Sarah Willett, Chief People Officer, said, “…our plans aren’t just about productivity. They’re about how we can offer our colleagues true value and get value back in return. By offering better balance, increased flexibility, interesting work, and an amazing place to come together, we can attract even more outstanding people – and retain the ones we already have.”

Source: The Very Group website

Twitter

In May 2020, Twitter announced it’s decision to allow it’s 5,200 employees to decide where they want to work.

“We’ve already been on this path, and the crisis just catapulted us into a future state,” said Twitter human resources chief Jennifer Christie, who said she believes flexibility for workers is the “fourth industrial revolution” because it will fundamentally change the way people work. “The future of work is offering employees more optionality.”

Source: The Washington Post

Zillow

Effective immediately (July 2020), we will offer about 90% of our (5,400) employees the flexibility to work from home as an ongoing option, at least part-time, allowing them the ability to work where they are most productive, whether that is in the office, their home, or a combination of both.

Source: Zillow website

Debbie Pask

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