Guest blog: New laws are needed for fair, flexible working rights for all after the pandemic - By Frances O'Grady, General Secretary of the TUC

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Guest blog: New laws are needed for fair, flexible working rights for all after the pandemic - By Frances O'Grady, General Secretary of the TUC

The government order to work from home if you can is likely to be lifted on 21 June.

Some people will be itching to get back to their usual workplace. They may miss the social interaction. They may feel they can be more productive at their usual workstation. Or they may have found the last year hard because their home environment is not adequate as a shared space with family or housemates. New and younger workers, in particular, may have missed out on vital learning and development opportunities.

But many others will want to continue working from home for at least some of the time. Perhaps their employer had been sceptical in the past, but the last year has shown that workers can be trusted to work from home and can be just as productive.

There are good reasons to hope that the right kind of home working will be on the menu of flexible working in the future. Home working can be a positive way to help people better balance their home and work life, especially for parents, carers and older workers. It can also help disabled people who too often face barriers to entering the workplace.

Of course, the majority of workers are simply not able to do their jobs from home. And there is a risk that the benefits of positive flexibility only flow upwards to managerial and professional grades. For many other workers predictability is the priority, with set hours that allow carers to manage commitments, rather than the disruption of coping with different shift patterns day-to-day or week-to-week.

So as more workplaces reopen, employers should consider new working patterns that meet everybody’s needs. And they must properly consult on the policies to deliver them.

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Guest blog: Getting 'wise' to the future of work: creating humane workplaces after the pandemic - By Dr Harriet Shortt, Associate Professor of Organisation Studies - Bristol Business School

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Guest blog: Getting 'wise' to the future of work: creating humane workplaces after the pandemic - By Dr Harriet Shortt, Associate Professor of Organisation Studies - Bristol Business School

When Work Wise UK asked me to write a blog for this year’s Work Wise Week, it got me thinking about what the word ‘wise’ might mean in the context of work in the current climate – what does it mean to be ‘wise’ about work as we in the UK emerge from the pandemic? Broadly, we know the word wise suggests some level of knowledge, understanding, and to be wise is to have the ability to analyse your experiences and gain insight. So, to be ‘work wise’ right now could not be more important. But what work-based insights have we gained over the course of the last 12 months?

Despite the blur of the last year and all the challenges so many of us have had to juggle – turning our dining rooms into offices, home schooling, and the ongoing concerns for friends and family – we have certainly gained great insight into home-based working. This has, of course, not been a ‘normal’ period of time to be working at home – it’s been a sort of forced social experiment. But it has encouraged all sorts of organisations and knowledge workers to see and understand how working from home works, and for many leadership teams to see that office based work is not always necessary, or indeed, productive.

However, as we move out of the crisis, have we really thought about what positive changes we can make in the workplace (wherever that workplace might be!), and have we really stopped to think about the lessons we have learned that might make life better for our employees? If organisations have spent time meaningfully reflecting on what a better workplace looks like post-Covid, and they’ve consulted their staff on how working practices have changed whilst working at home, then great! And I hope these stories of change and re-organising are shared far and wide. If organisations have not yet pressed paused to think about these things, then now is the time.

One of my concerns about ‘what next’/ ‘post-pandemic’ is that organisations are blindly moving towards hybrid ways of working without thinking about the lived experiences of their workers. In much of my research and consultancy work I focus on helping organisations understand their employee’s lived experiences of space and place at work. I’m a sociologist, and business and management workspace specialist and I help companies think differently and creatively about their spatial change projects. So often I see top-down decisions getting made that lack the authentic staff engagement needed to make long-lasting, impactful change.

It seems to me that what matters now is the power of reflection – organisations and leadership teams, and employees themselves, taking some time out to celebrate achievements over the past year, as well as asking themselves – how has the pandemic changed the way we work? What positives can we take from these new ways of working? What have the challenges been? What have we learned about others and ourselves? Taking the time to re-evaluate and re-frame our thinking about the spaces and places of work, and how these impact working practices and working life will be a valuable part of how we effectively move forward.

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Guest blog: Smarter Working in Europe: Plenty know-how, lagging adoption - By Philip Vanhoutte, Author of the Smarter Working Manifesto

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Guest blog: Smarter Working in Europe: Plenty know-how, lagging adoption - By Philip Vanhoutte, Author of the Smarter Working Manifesto

Thanks Philip Flaxton, CEO of Work Wise UK for mentoring me and many others relentlessly over 15 years. I couldn’t be more fortunate to live and work in the UK whilst Smarter Working blossomed. Authorities like Philip Ross and Jeremy Myerson of WorkTECH, Tim Oldman and Annie Leeson of LEESMAN and Andy Lake of Smart Flexibility blessed me with great insights and actionable advice to produce award winning workplaces across Europe. It was my duty to share the journey and best practice with Guy Clapperton in the Smarter Working Manifesto in five languages.

The proverbial phone rang off the hook early last year when new work dynamics were needed to deal with a pandemic of never experienced proportions: any recommendations Philip ?! It was sobering to learn that Smarter Working is still a niche, as evidenced in low search volumes beyond UK, the Netherlands and Italy. And recent academic research reported that Activity Based Working hasn’t reached general management nor boardrooms. Not to speak of the poor office workspace ratings gathered by LEESM AN in comparing to the better home work settings. Employers are warned: give us more productive and healthier offices as home is the new benchmark. Awareness, consideration and serious Smarter Working adoption has yet to hit the majority of European Countries. But you’d be surprised to hear that hard-working Poland is embracing smart working with unseen devotion ! It’s all there to be applied, we just need better marketing and education.

Good time then to flash back and forward, taking stock of what was accomplished and is yet to be done.

In the beginning.

For me, what happened around the pandemic last year is rather déjà vu. As MD of Plantronics EMEA (now Poly), the 2008 financial crisis catapulted me into Agile Working with a Less is More project. What started as a space (and cost reduction) program turned into a big reflection on ways of working. As one of the first Leesman workplace satisfaction survey customers I learned that our offices were out of date and had poor acoustics, our collaboration tech was too diverse and needed integration. And our leadership styles were well ‘behind the times’ too.

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Covid and the role of home working in a small business - By Elizabeth Hewitt, Director of Marketing at Iconic Project Management Limited

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Covid and the role of home working in a small business - By Elizabeth Hewitt, Director of Marketing at Iconic Project Management Limited

It’s fair to say that the last couple of years have been a rollercoaster for Iconic Project Management. Founded in 2018, we are a small, family run consultancy practice who provide project management for construction projects across the retail, leisure, hospitality and commercial sectors. Our whole team have always worked remotely so we were ready to continue working from home when the first lockdown was announced. However, nobody could have predicted exactly what the impact of the pandemic would be, and it has led to us making some major changes to the way we do business. At last, we are looking forward to playing our full part in a resurgent UK construction industry.

When we established our business in July 2018, our model was to hire project managers on contract, as and when we needed them. This worked well for us because we had an established network of strategic partners we could call on; reliable and trusted people we had worked with before. It gave us the flexibility to react to the ebb and flow of our clients’ requirements.

Our team of project managers all worked remotely, either from home or from the client’s premises. Not only did this save us money on office space, but it meant that we weren’t tied to a physical location. We had the freedom to be able to service all parts of the UK equally.

Our business model was serving us well. By January 2020, Iconic Project Management had a full order book for the year ahead. We were delighted that our new company had made such a promising start. We were confident about our future. So much so that we started making plans to expand the business, by recruiting some more permanent members of staff.

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Guest blog: The secret of smarter working: not just when and where, but how? - By Susan Clews, Chief Executive of Acas

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Guest blog: The secret of smarter working: not just when and where, but how? - By Susan Clews, Chief Executive of Acas

The Gov.UK website describes smarter working as a way of empowering us all “to make the right decisions about where, when and how we work.” Arguably, the national experiment in homeworking, engendered by the pandemic, has helped to sharpen the debate about where and when we work; but the ‘how’ part is perhaps the hardest to pin down.

The Acas experience

Within a couple of weeks of the first national lockdown, Acas went from having 12% of its staff working at home all, or almost all of the time, to close to 100%. Our staff have been fortunate in this regard, and we had good technology to make it happen. We must remember that homeworking is not an option open to everyone. But we have also faced many of the same problems as people up and down the country, with colleagues shielding, caring for vulnerable relatives, home educating young children and trying to develop their personal coping strategies.

Thinking differently about the way we work makes sense for us. Here is a quick snapshot of how we are doing in meeting the government target of achieving smarter working by the end of 2022:

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