Guest blog: ‘You’re yes then you’re no, you’re in then you’re out, you’re up then you’re down’: the complexities and paradoxes of hybrid working in the Covid-emergent era.
/By Dr Harriet Shortt, Dr Stuart McClean, Dr Charlotte von Bulow, Gemma Pike, University of the West of England
What is the lived experience of hybrid working? How do knowledge workers really define hybrid working? And how have our home and office working practices changed since the start of the pandemic? These are just some of the questions we are asking as part of a new research project that intends to explore the lived experiences of hybrid-working in the knowledge workforce, and the potential role inclusive and resilient workspaces have in helping individuals and teams thrive in the future.
We know that the pandemic has brought uncertainty and challenges to how knowledge workforces engage with and experience forms of hybrid working in the Covid-emergent era. Hybrid workplaces will play an important role in workforce recuperation, decompression, mental health, and wellbeing. We want to understand more about people’s everyday hybrid working experiences, and we are using visual research methods to help us do this.
We are halfway through the data collection phase of our research and over the past few weeks we have asked our participants to take 3 photographs that capture their experiences of hybrid working. We have conducted in-depth photo-elicitation interviews to understand more about their images, why they took them, and what the images represent. So far, our participants have shared detailed stories about being in the office and out the office, how much they enjoy home working but why it is challenging. They have reflected on the blurry boundaries between work and home life and how they negotiate this daily. Some have shared personal stories of going into “unloved offices” and “sad spaces” in their organisations, reflecting on how empty and different these environments can be.
These stories and the images that go with them have so far revealed some interesting interpretations for us as a group of researchers:
a) We have seen how working at home has moved from a temporary, liminal space during the pandemic, to one that is more fraught with identity work as the workspace increasingly imposes itself in the private home. As such, working 'at home' becomes more like 'home working’ – the nomadic workers we often see in the de-personalised, open-plan, hot-desking office, are being mirrored at home as staff become nomads in their own personalised spaces at home. Talking to our participants has highlighted lots of interesting ideas about the strategies and approaches they use to manage their spaces, productivity, identities, and emotions – this is often through the personalisation and curation of their space (some of our participants have made their own desks from bits of wood and old furniture), territoriality and claiming ownership over spaces (especially when sharing home workspaces with family and partners), and their use of technology (deciding what to display when on a Teams call and what to hide)
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In any other time, we might celebrate the fact that homeworking is on the rise. New figures from the ONS show that 49.2% of employees are now working from home (up from 45.8% in just one week). But the definition of flexible working is about employees having a choice about where and when they work. Enforced homeworking, as a result of the COVID-19 lockdown, doesn’t seem to quite fit this bill.
Homeworking in the current environment
What else do we know about homeworking in the lockdown? Well we know that:
· many employees feel that as soon as work returns to anything approaching business as usual, employers will row back on homeworking, whatever the perceived benefits
· homeworking is a privilege, of sorts, only afforded to professional occupations, with lower-paid workers in precarious work less able to work from home
· working from home is more widespread in some sectors than others. A new YouGov poll for Acas shows that it’s easier for those in IT/ telecoms (90% work from home all or most of the time due to Coronavirus) and finance/accounting (84%), but not so easy for those in retail (22%) and hospitality/leisure (26%)
· homeworking is double-edged, bringing both rewards, with a sense of empowerment for some, as well as no dreaded commuting; and difficulties – in an IES survey, over half of respondents reported new pains, especially in the neck, shoulders and back; and the Acas survey reported workers missing informal/social interaction (71%) and feeling ‘out of the loop’ (51%).