24th May 2021
How to return to the workplace (or not) – in a post covid world – Gethin Nadin
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.
Gethin Nadin, Director – Employee Wellbeing, Benefex
For anyone that was paying attention before Coronavirus was part of our lives, the ‘new’ issues of remote and hybrid working weren’t that new at all. Millions of employees across Europe and the US were already working at home some or all of the time before a pandemic forced that choice for many.
The pandemic has removed the luxury of time to be able to plan for a more flexible work model – which has its pro’s and con’s. My advice to employers is to embrace where we are – if it wasn’t for a pandemic, there are organisations that may never have experimented with different working models. This is a process for employee and employer. It will take employees time to work out what is best for them and it will take time for them to build their lives around that choice. Ask your people and listen to what they want. Try as much as you can to accommodate people’s flexible requests and work with them to make sure their choices provide you and them with what you need to succeed.
I firmly believe that when we give employees the choice of where and when they work, we get the best results – and there is a mountain of evidence to support this. So for employers who are struggling, take the lead from your people. They’ve had first-hand experience of remote working for more than a year now and while normal circumstances wouldn’t involve a pandemic, they have got an idea of what works best for them; when they are most productive, what challenges they and their team have had, what they want from the physical workplace etc. Think about using the physical workplace as a way to give employees what they can’t get at home – collaborative tasks, building communities, social time together etc.
The global evidence is clear – most employees who have the choice, want a hybrid model if they can. They want to spend some days working more flexibly than others. Trust your managers to work with their teams to find the best way to make this happen. Trust your people to work together to make sure they are all in the same location when they need to be, to make sure shift patterns are covered and employees responsibilities outside of work are supported. Some of the earliest research into results orientated work environments (those that focussed on the output, not where or when the work was done) show us that trust is an incredibly important factor in successful remote and flexible working strategies.