24th May 2021
How to return to the workplace (or not) – in a post covid world – Steven Frost
This snippet is part of our Ebook How to return to the workplace (or not) – in a post covid world. Advice and suggestions from our Top 101 influencers. You can download the full eBook with all the advice here.
Steven Frost, CEO, WorkBuzz
Firstly, before we talk about managing the return to the office, it’s important to recognise the millions of key workers who weren’t able to work from home and kept our countries going during the pandemic. We owe them a debt of gratitude.
During the past few months, employers have been grappling with what their business model looks like when it is safe to reopen offices. My personal view is every organisation is different and the goal is to design a policy which considers both their employees’ preferences and their business’ needs, finding that sweet spot which overlaps. Organisations which don’t do this will either find themselves losing key talent that now expect more flexibility or reversing some changes in the future.
Take a software company desperately trying to recruit developers in a competitive local hiring market. By going remote, they significantly expand their talent pool and for many developers, remote work is their preference and improves their wellbeing. On the flip slide, in creative industries, many leaders I’ve spoken to really value having people in the same room, the energy and ideas it helps to create which virtual meetings can’t match. And it just happens that many of their extroverted colleagues get their energy from being around their teammates too.
At WorkBuzz, we invited our team to take part in one of our surveys, keen to understand their working preferences, what they’ve liked about working from home and what they’ve missed about the office. Hybrid working was the clear winner – WorkBuzzers on average wanted to spend 2.5 days a week in the office, with Mondays and Fridays the most preferred days for home working. We expect to re-open our office in late June, on a semi-structured basis: encouraging all teams to be present in the office on Wednesday’s to help create room for creative workshops and unplanned conversations which cut across teams.
Finally, we’ve recently started to hire for a dozen new roles, advertising a hybrid 50/50 split. We’ve immediately noticed a jump in applications, including talent from a wider geography, which is exactly what we wanted.