Look at this definition of experience bias from the Neuro Leadership Institute: other people see the world differently than we do. Experience bias occurs when we fail to remember that fact. We assume our view of a given problem or situation constitutes the whole truth.
When we have experience bias, our judgements and decisions are influenced – potentially excessively so – by personal experiences.
When it comes to working in an office v working from someplace else, experience bias is a problem. Because, all too often, this is how policy in this space is being made, rather than any actual evidence. These personal experiences, often of a few (or even just one) senior leader cannot ever be truly representative of the many diverse people that work for them.
This was evident last week when a major UK retailer announced a full RTO five days a week including these quotes from their male CEO: ‘There is no doubt in my mind’ and, reflecting on informal conversations specifically,: ‘I know that has been true for me’. This is experience bias in action. This isn’t an evidence based decision making, using either internal or external data. Instead there is a belief that there is a problem, along with a belief about how to solve it.
In other words……
I like to work this way, I am most effective when I work this way, so therefore this must apply to everyone else.
Policy created by preference. Policy, extrapolated from a handful of personal experiences.
The problem is compounded when those experiences on which this bias is based are from a particular demographic, or when it is steeped in a particular privilege. For example, some surveys have suggested that people of colour prefer working in the office more than white colleagues; one suggested reason for this (and I think this is something we need more research on) is that remote work provides a respite from racism and micro-aggressions. Can any CEO who has never had to deal with this in the workplace truly say that they have taken this into account when pondering what has been true for them? Similar arguments can of course be made about sex and disability in the workplace, with surveys also indicating greater working from home preferences from women and people with disabilities. Here’s the thing. When we let experience bias drive decisions, we are not being inclusive. We are also not being guided by the evidence.
Our truth is merely that. Ours alone.
Experience and preference is a poor way to make policy. It is also a failure to consider equality and inclusion.
As part of my doctoral research at Liverpool John Moores University, I am researching the impact of hybrid work on employee wellbeing.
Last year, I conducted a survey of hybrid workers, aiming to understand their experiences in-depth, and how they feel that hybrid work influences their wellbeing both positively and negatively. I am delighted to share, in this second of a short series of posts (you can find the first one on wellbeing benefits, here) some initial preliminary findings.
Overall, survey respondents reported five main wellbeing challenges when working in a hybrid way.
5 wellbeing challenges of hybrid work
Isolation, loneliness, disconnection with others. Hybrid workers find that the remote elements of hybrid work can be isolating and lonely, especially for those that live alone. Another interesting element of loneliness and disconnection can however also arise from going in the office only to find that colleagues are not there or everyone is working independently on online meetings.
Negative impact on physical health including sedentary behaviour – hybrid workers told me that are concerned about how sedentary they are when working from home. For some this, as well as poor workstation set up, has resulted in musculoskeletal issues such as neck and back pain.
Work extensification – working longer hours. The lack of a commute to bring a natural end to the working day often means that working from home results in working longer. Work equipment is present in the home, so it is all too easy to write one more email, or tackle one more task.
Difficulties in switching off. Linked to the issue of work extensification, employees find it hard to switch off when working from home. Contributing factors include blurred boundaries, work equipment in the home and working in communal spaces. Some hybrid workers simply switch from one device (laptop) to another (phone) – although that issue isn’t only limited to those working in a hybrid way.
No challenges at all. Ok, so this isn’t really a ‘challenge’ theme, but it is notable that actually, one of the most prominent responses to this question was some form of none, not applicable, nothing really.
These findings suggest the contradictory nature of hybrid work and wellbeing – for some hybrid workers it bring wellbeing challenges, for others benefits. Often, both are experienced at the same time. This raises the obvious issue for leaders and HR professionals – how do we minimise the former and maximise the latter? You will have to stay tuned for that one, as that is phase two of the research……..
The next phase of my research will involve interviewing senior HR professionals about their perceptions on hybrid work and wellbeing in their organisation. If you would be willing to be interviewed for around 30-45 minutes (you can be anonymous) I’d love to hear from you.
A brief note on methodology. A total of 412 responses were received to the survey, which included both qualitative and quantitative questions. Qualitative data was analysed thematically in Nvivo.
I have been known to say that only fools and science fiction writers try to predict the future. As I am definitely not a science fiction writer, I must therefore be a fool, as I am going to make a prediction for the work in 2024 and beyond.
The rise of the office dodger.
We all know the story by now. Post pandemic, many knowledge workers wanted to retain remote and hybrid work. They glimpsed a life without the commute, without the need for everyone to be in the same place to get stuff done, a life with more balance.
We know from surveys that employees will leave jobs for opportunities to work flexibly. We know that they value it highly, even sometimes more than a pay rise.
Through my academic research and my client work, I estimate that I have now read over 20,000 individual comments on the remote and hybrid work experience. At the heart of all of these is one simple concept. Location flexibility gives people more time, more life, more balance. And they are not prepared to give it up.
All the attendance mandates in the world, all the corporate videos and offers of pizza and free coffee will not return reluctant employees to the office if they can avoid it. For the most part, it is not that people do not want to come into the office at all. On the contrary, many people want to go to a physical workspace some of the time. They just don’t want to do it when they don’t have to and they do not want to have to do it every day.
Instead, they will act on their own terms and in what they see as their own best interests – and this might include strategies for dodging the office.
Some might leave their job entirely, although this will not be an option for all. Others will ignore the mandates and encouragement, and simply hunker down and wait for someone to call them out or take some sort of HR action. Others will do the bare minimum of attendance they can get away with. Some might ‘coffee badge’ or engage in some high profile hybridteeism, turning up for events and making sure that they are seen by those that need to see them and then disappearing again. Others will book holidays or call in sick when it’s the all team day.
Right now, organisations seem to be using a mix of options to encourage attendance, from monitoring badge swipes to tempting employees by creating a worthwhile in-person experience. There is no single strategy that will address the office dodger. Even those organisations that have decided to implement a full RTO rather than manage a hybrid offering will have to face this potential issue, even if it shows up through long tail retention and engagement.
Instead organisations need to recognise that employees have choices and will make them. The pandemic forced many to reflect on what matters most, and the place work has in their lives. We need to understand their reluctance and take a nuanced approach to the challenge. Either that or continue to play an ever complex game of ‘chase the dodger’.
For around two years now, I have been thinking that soon, people will stop talking to me about hybrid work because they won’t need to. There’s been no sign of that yet. One of my latest regular questions is the thorny issue of when employees just don’t come in to the office, even when it is part of the hybrid work model that they must (whether that is mandated or informal).
Many organisations, understandably, don’t want to be fully remote. It is a different model altogether and it is not the one for them. Those organisations see the value in people coming together, and they want that to happen. There has however, been a tension for some time now evidenced in the emerging data (check out Nick Bloom’s work for more on this): employees often want to come in less than their managers want them to.
From my many conversations on this subject, this ‘office reluctance’ tends to come up in several ways:
I have moved further away from the office.
The travel is long / expensive / stressful.
I don’t have the childcare to come into the office.
It isn’t worth it for me.
I spend all day on Teams (other platforms are available) so I might as well be at home.
I am more efficient or productive at home.
It is understandable perhaps, that an employer’s response to this will be greater formality of policy, mandating and monitoring. It is of course entirely reasonable for them to want people to attend work for a specific purpose, and the jump to process is, whilst not necessarily good for engagement, a logical one from a managerial perspective.
In order to address this problem, I believe that organisations need a healthy balance between push and pull:
Making the office worth going to.
Addressing non-compliance with policy.
Both the push and pull approaches have several elements.
Making the office worth going to
People want to come to the office to be with other people. To collaborate and to learn. They don’t want to come into the office to spend most of the day on Teams or in booths. Whilst it will likely be impossible to completely separate work types, days in the office should be mostly about people wherever possible. Organisations need to facilitate this. Create the conditions in which people can engage. Encourage whole teams to get together and come in at the same time. For some this might mean office redesign. For others, it might mean events or activities. From organising a lunch to holding a networking event – and actively discourage online meetings during this time. Understand the specific activities, for the unique organisational context, that make coming together important for your people. Leesman call this purposeful presence. Microsoft talk about moments that matter. Within this dialogue needs to be something else too – clarity on why an organisation want people to come in and why you have picked a particular number of days (if that applies). Without this, employees might just feel like they have picked a number out of the air, increasing their reluctance.
I have found however, that employees sometimes make a very individual decision about whether it is useful / productive for them to come in – without considering what is also necessary or valuable for their manager, team and the wider organisation. Which brings me onto the next point…..
Addressing noncompliance with policy
Whether it is a policy or informal approach, employees first of all need total clarity about what is expected in terms of office / in-person attendance. They also need to know that it is non-negotiable and not a nice to have (assuming this is the organisations position). If pre-pandemic attendance at a team meeting would have been non-negotiable other than an emergency, then so it should be in a hybrid model. Pre-pandemic and pre-hybrid, if someone had said they have moved too far away from the office to commute to it, most managers would have said that is an employee problem to solve. And it still is. This isn’t about getting all heavy handed and HR policing, but a realistic, adult conversation about expectations and consequences.
I’m finding that some managers don’t know whether they can insist that people attend in person, or how to have the conversation when people don’t come in as required. They need clarity and guidance on this too.
There is no single answer to this particular hybrid work challenge. To maintain both employee engagement and compliance, a balance between pull and push combined with clarity for all concerned, can provide part of the solution.
Warning – flexible working legislation geek post ahead!
I have seen quite a bit of discussion about a recent flexible working case, and thought it might be useful to break down the relevant law and decision.
The case was covered in People Management Magazine here and geeks can find the full judgement here.
In summary – the individual worked for an organisation with a hybrid working model but asked for full time remote work and this was refused by the organisation. The employer argued that if Wilson worked entirely from home, it would have a detrimental impact on quality and performance. They provided a rationale for this argument.
A tribunal case followed. If it has succeeded, then the Tribunal could have provided some limited compensation and ordered the employer to reconsider. In this case, the claimant did not win their case.
Before looking at this decision, it might be useful to understand the relevant law. First of all, if an employee makes a flexible working application and it is turned down, there are several potential areas of claim they could bring, depending on the facts. These include:
Constructive unfair dismissal – where the employee resigns because they believe the way their request was handled / decided upon means their employment is untenable (Employment Rights Act).
Discrimination – where the employee argues that due to their claim they have been treated less favourably under a protected characteristic (possibly because they care for a disabled person or because of their sex – typically in the latter case indirect sex discrimination as women are generally more likely to be caring for children) (Equality Act)
Reasonable manner – that (inter alia) the request was not considered by the employer in a reasonable manner or they rejected an application based on incorrect facts (Employment Rights Act). This can include that the request was not handled within the required timeframe.
Employees cannot complain to a tribunal just because their flexible working request was rejected.
This case, as I have understand it, is the latter – a claim that the case was not considered in a reasonable manner because it was considered on incorrect facts and was not considered in time. It is important to note that this is not an especially common ground of claim – more often we see cases about flexible working request refusals under discrimination law. So we don’t have a lot of precedent here to work with.
Talking about precedent – this is an ET decision. Decisions here do not bind future decisions – only if the case went to the Employment Appeal Tribunal (and above) would the decision there create precedent. It may be persuasive to future hearings but it does not have to be. The judge noted that these cases will often turn on their own fact (more on that in a minute).
When hearing claims like this, the decision for the Tribunal is whether or not the employer considered them in a ‘reasonable manner’. The ACAS Code covers what this looks like in practice: https://www.acas.org.uk/acas-code-of-practice-on-flexible-working-requests This includes both process and time taken to consider and respond.
An organisation can turn down a flexible working requests for one of several reasons stated in the Act including extra costs and detrimental impact on the business. A full list can be found in the ACAS code and within the legislation.
It is important to note is that a Tribunal cannot substitute their own view for the organisations. So they can say ‘the company did not consider this reasonably’ but they cannot say ‘I think the organisation should have allowed this request and I would have done if it was me’. If a company can set out reasonable justification for their view (such as in this case, some in-person attendance at the office is important to them and their particular context) it is unlikely, in my view, that as long as that reasonable explanation, justification or evidence is provided a Tribunal will interfere with an organisation’s decision unless it is perverse or manifestly unreasonable (or perhaps a sham).
One such example was in the case of Commotion Ltd V Ruty (this is an EAT decision and binding) , where it was held that the decision to turn down a flexible working request was made on incorrect facts. In this case, the organisation did not give an proper consideration of the request and there was no evidence provided that the request was not feasible. They had not really looked into what the impact might be of agreeing to the request, in this case to go part time. This case helpfully tells us that whilst a full enquiry isn’t required into the situation / refusal, a Tribunal may look at the assertion made by the employer to decide whether it is factually correct and test it, as well as look at the surrounding circumstances.
Where does this leave us then? This decision is not binding and may be limited to its own facts. The judge said that the employee’s manager was an impressive witness and had genuinely considered the flexible working request rather than just following a policy. The judge also noted the detailed assessment of where the company felt in-person attendance was important for them, including supervision, ad hoc support to team members (the claimant was a manager), leadership meetings and attendance at events and conferences. The judge did however seem to believe, from their wording in the decision, that some aspects of work are less effective when conducted virtually – not everyone will share this view.
Ultimately, a different set of facts could well give rise to a different decision in a future case. The issue of ‘factually correct’ (in terms of considering a request in a reasonable manner) will also be a challenge when it comes to remote and hybrid work as the evidence is still in emerging. Where we do have evidence it is often highly contextual and in some cases contradictory.
From the decision:
‘The need for staff to provide a physical presence at an office location is a debate which many companies are now engaged in and which the solutions arrived at will no doubt differ considerably from employer to employer, there will not be one solution which will work for all companies or even for all roles within a company. There is at the heart of many of these considerations a ‘qualitive debate’ as to whether face to face or virtual contact is better. Ultimately it maybe the case that each situation requires its own consideration.’
As part of my doctoral research at Liverpool John Moores University, I am researching the impact of hybrid work on employee wellbeing.
Last year, I conducted a survey of hybrid workers, aiming to understand their experiences in-depth, and how they feel that hybrid work influences their wellbeing both positively and negatively. I am delighted to share, in the first of a short series of posts, some initial preliminary findings.
5 Wellbeing Benefits of Hybrid Work
Five main wellbeing benefits were identified from the analysis of the survey responses. These are:
More time for family and home life
More time for wellbeing related activity
Improved mental health including reduced stress and anxiety
Improved work life balance
Improved physical health including sleep and diet
Many of the themes interlink and overlap. Many of the respondents gave very detailed responses to this question highlighting multiple wellbeing benefits, with some respondents giving up to five personal examples. One response listed 18 separate points!
The idea of time as a benefit as benefit runs through several of the themes. Hybrid workers value the additional time that working from home provides them and they use it in a variety of different ways.
This graph shows what people do with the time they save when they don’t have to commute:
Responses to survey question: When you do not have to commute to your workplace, what is the main way that you use the additional time?
Within the themes that relate to ‘more time’, survey respondents talked about time for exercise, fitness, hobbies, relaxing, interests, cooking, other people, spending time outdoors, with their children and even dealing with the minutiae of life. Domestic chores, medical appointments and school runs all become easier to balance when working from home for some of the week. ‘Doing the washing’ came up often. Hybrid workers no longer need to load these activities into weekends, utilise annual leave or struggle to fit them around a commute.
This word cloud shows the responses visually, in which you can see the prominence of the idea of ‘more time’. If you look to the bottom right you will see a reference to ‘dog’ – there were a surprising number of references to having time to walk or spend time with the dog. Alas for the cat lovers – only one reference to them!
Word cloud depicting ‘what are the wellbeing benefits to hybrid work’
Early in the enforced remote work period that resulted from the pandemic, there were concerns about the mental health impacts of remote work, especially in relation to isolation. My research has found that, although some people do report this, others say that being free from the stress of the commute, as well as stressors that relate to attending the office, is actually good for their overall mental health.
Of course there are challenges alongside the benefits too. I will be sharing more about those in a future post. In the meantime, it looks like the dog lovers are winning!
The next phase of my research will involve interviewing senior HR professionals about their perceptions on hybrid work and wellbeing in their organisation. If you would be willing to be interviewed for around 30-45 minutes (you can be anonymous) I’d love to hear from you.
A brief note on methodology. A total of 412 responses were received to the survey, which included both qualitative and quantitative questions. Qualitative data was analysed thematically in Nvivo.
My echo chamber is one again showing me lots of content about organisations pushing for a ‘return to office’. Of course most people have long since returned to offices since the pandemic. What this term really means is ‘a return to more office’. Pre-Covid, many of us were tied to a 5-day in person working week. Flexibility looked like the occasional day from home – if your boss allowed it of course. The pandemic changed all of that. We learned that you could actually get quite a lot of stuff done remotely after all, and it would not lead to a wave of skiving. Many organisations figured out that a blend of in-person and remote work could be the best of both worlds.
It has not, however, quite worked out as hoped in all cases. Some leadership teams remain desperate to return to the old ways and the old days (pro tip – if you are using the word ‘again’ a lot, you might just be going in the wrong direction). There remains a disconnect between how much in-person time leaders want and how much time employees want (leaders obviously wanting more than their people do). This has led to a range of initiatives from mandated days, monitored presence, links to performance reviews and even cringey corporate videos extolling the benefits of the often fabled watercooler.
Here’s the thing. If you want people to come to work in your office, mandating it, making unevidenced statements about the benefits of the office and monitoring attendance is not the right way. All this does is suggest you don’t really have a compelling strategy for creativity, innovation and culture – all those things so often quoted as better in person (spoiler – not necessarily).
Contrary to some beliefs, most people don’t hate coming into the office (although the evidence is fairly conclusive that many people hate commuting to one though). They don’t want to come into the office for no reason at all, to spend all day doing things they could do at least as, if not more, effectively at home.
It’s not like most offices were ever awesome places in the old das. Many of them are distraction factories full of noise where it’s hard to concentrate on deep work. Others are poorly designed, lit or ventilated. Getting there sucks too. Despite some opinions they are not hotbeds of creativity or spontaneous innovation.
Organisations have a choice. If they want people to come into their offices they can mandate and monitor it, or they can chose to make it worth their employees’ while. They can make being in the office meaningful – and deliver actual useful business and employee outcomes.
If you believe that people need to come into the office to collaborate and build relationships, facilitate them in doing so. Put the effort in. Bring them in for the stuff that matters, not update meetings, Teams calls or to sit in sterile spaces or even worse, behind their closed office doors. Microsoft talk about ‘moments that matter’ in the office, like onboarding and new team formation. Leesman talk about ‘purposeful presence’ in the office. Whatever you call it, work has changed and organisations can look backwards or look for something better.
The primary purpose for going to the office must be communication, collaboration and connection. Otherwise, why bother?
Don’t hide behind the watercooler trope. If organisations want to get people together for creativity, innovation and collaboration then they need to create the conditions, not assume it will happen as a by-product of attending a physical workspace. There are many ways to make in-person work effective and useful. To make it feel worth the commute.
Have a defined purpose for in-person work. Define what is done together, and what is done remotely. Invest in your office time and physical spaces. Create a community and connect people. Focus on creating those desired interactions, relationships and cultural moments. Listen to people about what they need to work at their best, rather than what leaders think about how people work best. Empower them to put that into practice. Make your office a place that people want to come.
Or you know. Force them. And have an unhappy and disengaged workforce.
Post pandemic, everyone was talking about hybrid. A few notable exceptions aside, organisations responded to the overwhelming employee demand to retain some WFH by implementing hybrid working policies. Remote work guru Nick Bloom estimates that we’ve had around 40 years of progress based on the pre-Covid WFH data.
It has not however, been plain sailing. Employees generally like hybrid, but there are tensions and frustrations under the surface. There’s no single reason for this. Sometimes, it’s about implementation. Sometimes, it’s about the policy and specific hybrid arrangements. Also at play are personal preferences, organisational culture and managerial attitudes.
I wrote a report for a client recently after completing a detailed review of their hybrid working arrangements and employee experiences. One of the things I said, and it is equally true of many organisations, is that the differences of opinion about hybrid between some employees are irreconcilable. For every manager or employee that thinks hybrid work is the best thing ever, there is someone who loathes it and wishes everyone was back in the office. Flexible work brings out strong opinions, beliefs and biases.
There are however, within those tensions and challenges, some key areas of commonality. Where, when these difficulties emerge, there are similarities underneath.
Here are my top five problems with hybrid work today – and how we can fix them.
We haven’t made enough changes to ways of working
In too many organisations, the switch to hybrid work was a lift and shift of old ways of working. We used to have an in-person meeting? Great! Now we can have a Teams one. It’s the same old work, being done in the same old way, but occasionally people get to do it from some place new. Effective hybrid and flexible work needs new ways of working as well as supporting systems and processes. Solution? Talk to your employees about what needs to change to enable effective and productive hybrid work. What are the barriers they experience? What needs to stop, start and continue? Top of the list should be how do people communicate, share knowledge and work as a team.
The office isn’t working well enough
The office, as many of us know it, was not designed for the hybrid era. There are a whole range of practical issues in many workplaces. Not enough spaces to accommodate online meetings or quiet work. Conversely, space that also does not truly facilitate people getting together to do the important social, connection and relationship stuff. The result is a place some people just don’t want to visit unless compelled. Solution? Not everyone will be able to afford a redesign of space. But there are some simple steps that can help. Create quiet spaces and spaces where teams can be together and be noisy if necessary. Make it easy to book a space to work if its needed – and make it a place people want to come to. Think food, opportunities for socialising, great coffee. If you have more scope for change, start considering a key question. Today and tomorow, what is the purpose of your office? Is it for meetings? Relationships? The stuff that can only be done in a physical place? The future purpose of your office should define how it is used and how it is designed.
Employees aren’t getting as much autonomy as they really want and they are frustrated
Part of the preference for remote work is about autonomy – and a desire for more of it. Employees want choice and flexibility, not just in location of work but generally. They know that work can take place around life, and not be the centre of it. Mandated office time is demotivating. Employees understandably wonder ‘why am I here’ when they believe that they could just as effectively be working from home. Having rules about in-person time or physical presence might be operationally essential – but too many employees feel that it is less about a need back up with evidence, and more about trust and manager preferences. It’s common to hear employees complain that they just don’t know why a particular attendance requirement was set. The solution? Within the constraints of the role, provide as much autonomy as possible. Bring time flex together with location flex, supported by ascyronous tech. Empower people to choose within a framework. And if you need to mandate attendance, explain why.
There’s not enough connection and co-ordination.
This point is linked to the previous one. Employees often say that they lack connection with colleagues when they work in a hybrid way. This isn’t just about how often they are in the office but the pattern of the whole team. Because there’s no point commuting to the office to spend the day alone, to spend it on Teams calls, or to do work that can be done effectively from home. Teams who have regular, scheduled office time at the same time, such as anchor days, have a more positive view of hybrid work and report better organisational outcomes. Solution? Co-ordinate in-person time. Establish regular all together time where relationships, development activities, creativity, discussion and socialising is the focus. Create a way of sharing who is where, and when. Make it common place for people to share how best to contact them and their hours of work. Make in-person time together non-negotiable – but also make it valuable.
We have neglected learning and development
Not in general, just in terms of hybrid. For many people, hybrid is a very different way of working. It is easy to think that we have all been doing this sort of thing for a few years now and no further development is required, but I do not believe this to be true. We are all still learning about hybrid and how it works in practice, so equally there continues to be learning and development needs too, especially for managers. How to co-ordinate and communicate, how to fully use supportive tech to its best effect, how to make it inclusive, support wellbeing….. The list is potentially long. Solution? Talk to your employees about what would help them do hybrid better, either as an individual or a manager. For managers in particular, provide them with facilitated, supported spaces to talk about their challenges and how they overcome them. Keep refreshing your learning opportunities as hybrid evolves.
Hybrid work does work. It can deliver positive outcomes for employees and organisations. But we do need to put the work in to get us there.
The ideas I present here draw on some of my own research as well as work undertaken for clients, comprising in total of over 12,000 individual open ended survey comments reviewed and analysed over three years.
The four-day week is subject to increasing interest all over the world. Trials are taking place, political parties are including it in their manifestos, and organised labour organisations are arguing for it. The four-day week however is nothing new. It has been around for decades, in various forms and undertaken to varying levels of success.
The four-day week is, in my view, sometimes presented as something of a silver bullet. A potential solution to all sorts of challenges from employee wellbeing to productivity and economic and social challenges. Like any form of flexible work however, it has both benefits and challenges on an individual and organisational level. My own research, along with other studies has identified the potential for work intensification, which can have a negative impact on employee wellbeing. Positive outcomes from four-day weeks are often established, but are not always long lasting, fading away over months or years.
Understanding previous research into the four-day week is made difficult by the different forms studied (such as reduced hours working and compressed four-day weeks) and the various outcomes assessed. It is impossible to say, with certainty, that the four-day week is either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ because it depends on what it is we are actually trying to measure. Like many forms of flexible work, it can have both positive and negative outcomes in the same organisation and for the same people. Also like other forms of flexible work, there are often trade-offs to be made and balance to be struck. Whether adopting a four-day week is the right decision for an organisation will be highly contextual and success will depend much on implementation.
What would be helpful, is more research. Robust, longitudinal, peer reviewed evidence, that goes beyond case study organisations. We need to know how it influences a whole range of outcomes such as productivity, wellbeing, creativity, absence and organisational performance – to name just a few. We need to see this kind of research done across a whole range of different industries, roles and organisations.
Outright rejection of new ways of working is unhelpful. It is perhaps, however unsurprising. New ways of working have often prompted anger, denial and robust argument, from the Luddites to the more recent polarised debate about remote work. What we need to move the four-day week discussion forward is inquiry, open minds and experimentation. What we don’t need, is ‘computer says no’ attitudes.
Three days a week is rapidly becoming the new default for office attendance in hybrid models, replacing the pre-pandemic all in, all the time approach.
Here’s the thing. There is no evidence at all that three days is best. The academic research on hybrid work effectiveness remains scant. There’s been one study that found that intermediate levels of WFH (23-40% of the time spent in the office and the rest remote) correlates with some positive outcomes. There’s another that has found that, in terms of remote work intensity, there’s a point at which benefits start to reduce and problems can increase. These studies however are set in a specific context and may or may not be replicable to other organisations.
Three days is a finger in the air. It’s got a good beat and we can dance to it. Even Amazon, who have recently doubled down hard on three days in the office have reportedly acknowledged it’s a judgement call. There is however no clear evidence that three days is better than two or four, or one or five.
Too often, when organisations argue for three days, their stance is explained by vague statements about how important it is to come together in-person for culture and the like – but this position lacks a robust evidence base. There’s no doubt that there is value in people coming together for some forms of work. The critical question is – how much time and for what activities?
A three day mandate is a blunt tool. For some roles in some organisations this might be more attendance than is really necessary. For others, too little. Requiring people to attend the office when they don’t need to may well lead to frustration and disengagement and in turn, poor organisational outcomes.
A three day mandate also reduces employee choice and autonomy, key drivers of wellbeing, engagement and motivation.
Three day mandates are easy to manage. They let managers simply implement a policy and say ‘HR says’. Mandates can also help with scheduling work and certainty. However, they lack nuance and are extremely unpopular with employees, often resulting in unintended consequences in term of retention and recruitment.
Whilst good practice and new evidence will emerge in the future, it is highly like that there will never be an idea number of days that works for everyone in every situation and for all desired outcomes, only what works best for the specific context. ‘Optimal’ might only be possible at a team and individual role level. Of course, this involves high levels of trust and more management work. And it so much easier to demand three days in the office.
Ultimately, ‘how many days’ is the wrong question, the wrong place for our focus. Instead, we should be asking this: how do we, with regard to our own unique context, enable people do their best work?’
The COVID-19 pandemic changed a whole heck of a lot about the way we work. BC (Before Covid) flexible forms of work were creeping towards acceptance at not much more than a snail’s pace. Remote work guru Nick Bloom believes that, based on previous rates of advancement, we have experienced 40 years of remote work progression as a result of the so-called ‘great working from home experiment’.
Remote work became our new normal – not just during the pandemic but after it too. Companies responded to that overwhelming employee demand for remote work. Many of them implemented hybrid working policies and arrangements, often on an informal or non-contractual basis. Many of those polices and arrangements were drafted when we were all still working around restrictions, and they were only tested in anger when we returned (kind of) to the office.
It is now time to review those ways of working, those policies. It is important to assess how hybrid is going for every stakeholder in the game. This is how we learn and evolve, and ensure that hybrid is delivering on its potential.
There are a number of areas to consider. For example:
Is the particular form of hybrid (such as the amount of time spent in the office v home, or the amount of structure contained within the approach) optimal? Is it delivering against the organisation’s overall goals for hybrid work implementation?
How satisfied are employees with hybrid work? Is it helping them to feel engaged, motivated and well? What challenges and difficulties are they experiencing, and how can this be overcome?
What are the costs or cost savings of hybrid work and how it has been implemented? If there are any inefficiencies, how can these be addressed?
How is hybrid work influencing key organisational concerns such as performance and productivity, communication and collaboration? Is there room for improvement – and if so, what does this look like?
How is hybrid work influencing each aspect of the employment lifecycle?
For those organisations who are yet to undertake a review, here is my advice on what it should entail.
An employee survey. Ask people what is good and less good about hybrid work and the way that it is being implemented in your organisation. Give them space for some open questions, not just Likert scales and yes / no answers. Ensure that you can differentiate between managers and non-manager in the answers. What themes and insights emerge? Most important of all – seek out suggestions for improvement.
Focus groups. Go deeper than the employee survey to gain rich insight and nuance. Consider talking to specific groups to understand their experience, such as working parents, disabled employees or carers. Ask for ideas about improvement here, too.
Talk to trade unions if you recognise them. What are their perspectives about your implementation? What are their members saying to them? If you don’t recognise a trade union or don’t have any formal employee representation, do you have internal support or networking groups that might also have a useful input into a review?
Senior leaders and people managers. In particular, explore how they find leading and managing a hybrid team in practice. What do they find easy and difficult, and what would help them to improve? How do they perceive hybrid work to be influencing communication and collaboration in their teams, as well as productivity and performance?
Look at your people data and processes, where available. How is hybrid work influencing your employment lifecycle, including recruitment, induction, training and performance management. Is hybrid helping you recruit? Is it influencing absence levels, employee engagement scores, wellbeing measures, or performance management appraisal scores? Have any employee relations issues arisen, and if so, why might this be?
Again, if you have it, look at the data around your space utilisation. When are people coming into the office? What are they doing there? If you don’t have easy to access data, these are questions you can include in your employee survey.
Hybrid work is still new at scale, and good practice is only just beginning to emerge. It will take time for research to provide us with more information about making hybrid optimal. Taking a continuous improvement approach is key – this is what will allow each organisation to find their own optimal version of hybrid, stay agile and make informed decisions. These steps can help you to answer the question ‘how is hybrid work, working for us?’.
I’ve been writing for a while now about the fragility of flexible working progress, and the potential for a ‘great reversal’ of hybrid work. It’s been clear for some time that many organisations were only tolerating remote work while it was a crisis driven necessity. The return to office voice is loud and proud.
There are very good reasons to go to a physical workplace and to work in-person, with other people. As we discovered during the pandemic however, we don’t need to do this every day. We know that work does not need to be an 8-hour day, a 5 day week, or as fixed and inflexible as it had been for decades. Patterns that were set in the factory system, hanging over to the present day. There is overwhelming evidence of the potential benefits of flexible work; unfortunately WFH/WFO has become a binary debate that is impervious to evidence. There are some organisations and some business leaders who just want people back in the office regardless. And here’s why.
They personally prefer it
Some leaders like to be in the office. Some leaders have personally benefited from this system. They lack the empathy to consider that other people might want or need something different. Or they don’t care to do so. It’s their way, or the P45 way.
They don’t trust you
It’s not personal. They don’t trust full stop. These are the micro-managers, taking a Theory X approach, assuming that given the opportunity any employee will do as little as possible. This is a long tradition dating back to the beginning of work itself; it is the foundation for Scientific Management. For them, management is seeing and everything else is a risk.
It is easier
Doing what we have always done and what we know well, is much easier than doing something new and difficult. Change requires thought, effort, attention. It makes demands of us. Something that some people do not wish to be bothered by.
They don’t have the skills
That new stuff mentioned above also demands new skills and a new approach for leadership. It is fundamentally different to managing exclusively in-person. How to communicate, collaborate, performance manage, build relationships and set objectives are all things that need to be done differently with a flexible or hybrid team. It won’t come naturally to everyone. Also, see above point.
They have biases
There are a whole load of cognitive biases at play. Confirmation bias – the tendency to prefer information that supports our existing views (the office is brilliant!!). Experience bias – the one that tells us our experience and our perception is the objective truth. Status quo bias – our tendency to prefer things to stay the same even if it’s not the best option. Proximity bias – preferring those with whom we are in closest proximity. We all have biases – when managing a remote or flexible team it falls to managers to be aware of the potential for bias and take steps to prevent them arising. This is difficult work. See above points.
They need to justify their position
When you have got the corner office, someone needs to witness it.
They believe the rhetoric
There is a strong set of pervading beliefs about flexible and remote work. From what I like to call the Homes Under the Hammer Fallacy (everyone will sit around watching daytime tv) to the ideas that people need to be an office for ‘the culture’, some managers simply believe that in-person work is essential. Or it’s convenient for them to believe so. See above points.
Here’s the thing. People who are opposed to remote and flexible work probably aren’t going to change their minds. It does not matter what evidence is found, what persuasive arguments are made. Those that have the loudest ‘return to office’ voice are often in the positions of most power. The progress on flexibility is far from guaranteed.
Oh. There’s also the possibility that they have property interests. Don’t forget that.
Recent weeks have seen several large (mostly US) companies reverse some of their post pandemic hybrid and remote policies, mandating a return to office or requiring a certain level of in-person attendance. Such moves have been largely unpopular and have resulted in push back from employees.
We have by now heard every reason in the book to support the ‘office is best’ narrative. We need it, so they say, for creativity, for innovation, for team building. For ‘the culture’.
These reasons are rarely, if ever, backed up with actual hard evidence, even of the anecdotal kind. We don’t hear ‘we have tried it and it didn’t work, our productivity dipped by X%’. Instead we hear beliefs, attitudes and opinions – often those of a small number of (mostly male, mostly white) leaders at the top of the tree. People for whom the (office) system has worked well. Only yesterday I saw one of these so-called justifications from a CEO containing the words ‘I believe [transformational work] can only be done effectively when we are physically together’. One person’s belief, creating strategy.
We are all now aware of the employee preference for hybrid work. The surveys have been telling us this for nearly three years. But here’s the thing that some organisations and some managers do not understand: it is more than a mere preference.
When people say that they want flex, hybrid or remote, this is the surface stuff. Underneath is a strong driver for choice, autonomy, personalisation, freedom. It is the desire to craft a work situation that allows for life, balance, family. THAT is the fundamental and powerful need that organisations must address. I have written about repeatedly during the pandemic. Organisations that don’t understand this cannot craft policies, practices and approaches that will truly engage, retain and motivate their people.
Deep down, there are many organisations (and their leaders) who aren’t that keen on this hybrid stuff anyway. They never really wanted it, but were persuaded (kind of) by the huge employee demand for hybrid that emerged post pandemic and fears about the talent implications of not responding. Given the chance they will revert back. This is what I believe we are seeing right now. The labour market has shifted a little, employee power has diminished by large lay-offs and cost of living fears, and leaders are taking the opportunity to re-establish the old normal.
Flexible forms of work have the opportunity to radically improve our lives – when we embrace them at their fullest (and this includes the so-called deskless workforce who might not be able to do remote but can certainly have flex). But they won’t deliver if we continue to work like we did before the pandemic, before technology to work remotely existed, like we have for decades.
There ARE some things worth bringing people together for. There are very clear benefits for certain activities and processes in working together, in a room, connecting and engaging. Hell, there is probably even a benefit to bringing people together around a watercooler. But not for everything. Not for the default. Not at the expense of giving people choice and autonomy in how they work.
Autonomy is a fundamental need. It is a motivator, and an enabling of wellbeing.
When it comes to remote (and hybrid work), the impact on productivity is very often a key concern of organisations and their leaders.
One of the biggest challenges with productivity, is measuring it. There are some jobs where this isn’t too difficult. Number of calls answered, customers served, widgets produced. This never tells the whole productivity story, but typically provides enough data to satisfy those that need to be satisfied. Such assessments often look only at short term metrics – but we can still determine whether productivity is up, down, or as expected.
The second way that we measure productivity is to ask people to self-assess it.
Both of these forms of productivity measurement bring particular challenges when it comes to remote work. Much remote work, is knowledge work. It does not lend itself to short term assessment. It is thinking, writing, reflecting, connecting, understanding, analysing, managing. The outcomes of such work can be long term, intangible, hard to quantify. It is difficult to even define productivity in this context. Does it mean meetings attended, emails sent, messages responded to? Or does it mean the quality of work, personal effectiveness, the outputs that arise from the thinking? Productivity suffers from a lack of consistent definition.
The second way we measure productivity, self-assessment, is also problematic. This isn’t just because we don’t define it consistently, but because people (by which I mean a lot of managers and leaders) don’t believe it.
Trust lies at the heart of all forms of flexible work, including remote and hybrid working. Microsoft recently coined the term ‘productivity paranoia’ to describe the fact that a significant percentage (85% in their survey data) of people managers say that remote and hybrid work makes it difficult to trust that employees are productive. This is in direct contrast to Microsoft’s own data that shows a steady rise of their collaboration tools, and employee’s perceptions that they are as productive (if not more so) than ever.
If we are to understand and manage productivity in flexible, remote and hybrid work, we need to redefine what we mean by it. We need to focus less on short term faux metrics, but instead focus on the outcomes of work undertaken, the value of that work (and the values demonstrated whilst undertaking it), and the contribution to team, department, and the wider organisation. Presence is not productivity. Churning out stuff is not productivity. Availability is not productivity – and neither is responsiveness.
We achieve this through focused, well written, aligned, up to date, detailed and stretching goals which are subject to constant conversation. Goals need to be discussed on a very regular basis. These individual goals need to align with those of the team and organisation, providing clear line of sight from individual contribution to the bigger picture. Employees and managers need to commit to work together to agree what productivity means for their particular context. Every single employee needs to understand exactly how their performance and productivity will be measured and assessed. We need to support our managers in just how to undertake each of these elements to the very best of their abilities.
Too many of our approaches to measuring productivity date back to the factory system. They are not fit for today or tomorrow. We are long overdue an update to our thinking and methods.
This week we have see the tumultuous events taking place over on Twitter following the Musk takeover. One of his first actions was to end remote work, telling employees that they were now expected to be in the office full time if they were physical able to do so, and those that did not turn up in person would be deemed to have resigned. He also stated that only he would approve requests for homeworking.
Many Twitter employees have worked remotely for years. During the pandemic they responded to the emerging desire for increased remote work by telling employees that they could work from home ‘forever‘.
Musk has long been a critic of remote work. He’s been quoted as saying those that work from home are just pretending to work – a common flex falsehood. I’ve tweeted my thoughts about why men (and it is almost always men) like Musk rage against remote; it is usually about control, power, and bias. His actions however serve to highlight an important point: the fragility of flexible work.
Those who have access to flexible work may often do so at the discretion of a particular manager or leader. Prior to the pandemic flexible working adoption was progressing at a snail’s pace. In the UK, requests for flexibility were typically made through the statutory process. An agreed flexible working arrangement therefore became a contractual right. Now, with the advent of hybrid working, many arrangements are informal or part of experiments or pilots. When arrangements are informal or situated within a policy framework, they can be changed or removed at will – or on the whim of a manager.
It may look like in the last couple of years we have made progress around the flexible work agenda. In some respects we have – more people are working remotely and this is expected to continue. We are also seeing increasing conversations about time flexibility too. But, as the recent Twitter example tells us, flexible work is fragile. There is certainly the potential of a ‘great reversal’ – what has been done can be undone, and continued flexibility is not certain.
Flexible work needs to be good work. It should go without saying… but it doesn’t.
Flexible work has a history of challenges. Part time work is sometimes referred to as ‘career death’ leading to pay and progression stagnation. It can also lead to exclusion on a practical level. The meetings when you aren’t in (unless of course you join anyway even though it isn’t your working day). The stuff no one remembers to update you on.
Then there is there is the issue of work intensification. Trying to fit in what is really a full time job into part time hours. Or working harder just to prove that you are still as committed and motivated even though you want or need to work flexibly. To overcome the bias and the prejudice. Remote work brings its own challenges. Longer working days are a problem for some, for others, blurred boundaries, reduced work life balance and increased work/home conflict. It’s also been found to have a negative impact on progression and earnings.
Let’s not forget the gender issues too. The fact that women who work flexibly generally end of doing more of the domestic labour and childcare; as Professor Heejung Chung says in her recent book, flexible working all too often results in self-exploitation of the person undertaking it.
The pandemic has moved the dial on flexible work, especially in relation to remote work. Interest in other forms of work flexibility, such as a four day week or non-linear working day, is rising too. But if flexible work is also to be good work, we need to do more than implement them and hope for the best. The four day week for example is an admirable aim (who wouldn’t want to work a little less?), but brings with it real risk of creating a new range of problems. The caveat for implementation is often the requirement to maintain productivity, the burden of which is likely to fall on employees unless organisations make significant change to ways of working or technology. And if they don’t, the only way to compress 5 days’ work into 4 is to work harder and with greater intensity.
We know the demand for flexible work is high. We know employees are prepared to move jobs to secure it. But we need not to just provide flexible work, but ensure that it good work too.
Good flexible work will allow employees to progress their careers just the same as those who work in a traditional way.
Good flexible work will not lead to reduced wellbeing.
Good flexible work will not place excessive pressure on employees or result in burnout.
Good flexible work should not be hard to find, or difficult to gain access to.
Good flexible work will be provided on trust, without the need to prove anything.
Good flexible work does not come with remote supervision built in.
Good flexible work will provide employees with autonomy and choice.
Good flexible work will allow a better work life balance – not a reduced one.
Good flexible work considers time and place.
Good flexible work is something we should all work towards.
The CIPD have released a new report that considers perspectives on the remote monitoring of remote workers. They found that more than half of managers agreed that there was at least one reason to monitor employees, including identifying the risk of burnout, the amount of laptop time per day, employees working outside of the normal working day or to track billable hours.
Image: Pixals.com
On the same day I read this new report, I also read this, taken from a paper on remote work (or telecommuting as the academic folk like to call it): ‘it appears that management apprehensions about loss of control… are currently the pacing factors in the adoption of telecommuting’ (Jack Nilles). This paper was written in 1988.
As I have said before on this blog, reluctance toward remote and flexible work has always been rooted in attitudes and beliefs rather than practicalities or technologies. We are hard wired to prefer the status quo, as well as to believe that our own experiences and perceptions are the objective truth. For some managers this objective truth is that the office is best and flexible work is a risk.
The desire to monitor employees is rooted in this same reluctance. Too often, leaders want to monitor their remote employees because they don’t trust them not to take advantage, they believe that employees will not be as productive (what Microsoft calls ‘productivity paranoia’, complex fears about loss of status and control – or maybe just a lack of skills. Productivity paranoia is nothing new btw – the father of Scientific Management, FW Taylor, said this in 1911: in the majority of cases [a worker] deliberately plans to do as little as he safely can’.
The problems with monitoring are many. It is a clear signal of distrust. It works directly against one of the main motivators that many employees have – autonomy. Perhaps even more problematically, what we are able to monitor is not a good measure of very much at all. It is a blunt tool, capable only of measuring faux productivity, and faux engagement. Whilst some jobs can indeed be monitored through key performance indicators or easily quantifiable measures, this is not an option for a significant amount of knowledge work. So instead we end up measuring something else instead – just like some of the measures in the CIPD report. Time spent online. Time spent in meetings. Time spent working out of hours. Emails written and sent.
No mention here, of value, contribution, outcome, or of creativity, innovation or learning. Time spent connection, sharing or building relationships. And despite the report suggesting some manages are really only trying to check up on employee wellbeing, employees may well feel, with some justification, that this is not really about their wellbeing at all, but a new form of heavy handed supervision.
Some organisations will make the decision to monitor remote workers regardless of the (few) benefits or risks to engagement and morale. Where monitoring does take place we must ensure that it is transparent, fair, and above all, that it is actually measuring what we want and need to monitor.*
Otherwise, it’s nothing more than micromanagement.
*Yes, you should have a policy that sets out what you will do, how you will do it, who has access to the information and how it will be used. Employee privacy concerns must also be taken into account, and protocols put in place to ensure that monitoring is not overly intrusive or likely to cause harm. This is the minimum standard.
I undertook a highly unscientific piece of ‘research’ recently. I took a look through a big old list of jobs on LinkedIn. Some of these were jobs that LinkedIn thought I might be interested in based on my profile, so there will have been a bias towards work in HR or Higher Education. I also took a look at jobs in my local area on popular job boards.
Something very clear stood out. There were lots of references to hybrid and remote work (good). But there were very few (if any) part time opportunities in professional roles. Not so good.
We have, for the most part, realised over the last couple of years that it is entirely possible for knowledge workers to work from somewhere other than an office. We have seen the myths and misconceptions about work and place exposed for what they are, and a significant amount of organisations have adopted hybrid working approaches as a result.
So why aren’t we similarly recognising that work doesn’t need to be full time?
Although the four day week is making some progress (something which I will confess I have my concerns about) we are still not seeing enough progress around part time work. For years, part time work has been seen as career death, leading to pay and progression stagnation. A particular form of flexibility stigma, if you aren’t putting your nose to the grindstone for 37+ hours a week, you can’t possibly be [insert relevant bias of your choice]. It doesn’t need to be this way.
Where is all the part time work? And why is part time work so often only of the low paid variety? I can find part time work in retail, in hospitality, or in caring professions, but I can barely identify any in my own profession should I be looking for a new gig.
This problem is far from new. But just like we didn’t have to all traipse to the office five days a week like most of us did pre-pandemic, why can’t we recognise that you can do awesome work in two, three, or four days a week?
If we want better working lives and positive change for the future, we cannot focus only on meeting the demand for remote work. We cannot only separate the idea of work and place. We have to also separate the idea of work from 37 hours a week. HR professionals in particular have to challenge every hiring manager who opts for default full time recruitment. Otherwise we are missing out on crucial talent and denying opportunities to those who cannot or do not wish to work on a full time basis.
We are experiencing a remote work revolution. The hybrid work era has begun. Maybe it’s now time to fight for the part time work era too.
Microsoft have released a new report in their excellent series in work trends. One of the headlines tells us something that we already know: managers have a trust problem when it comes to working from home. Microsoft refer to it as ‘productivity paranoia’. They found that 85% of leaders believe that shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive. Their research also found that while 87% of employees say that they are productive, only 12% of leaders have full confidence that this is true.
This is, and always has been, one of the most significant barriers to flexible forms of work.
I am currently working on a doctorate in remote work. I’ve got a little obsessed of late in tracking down old thought pieces and articles on remote work. Did you know that the very idea of remote work (then defined as ‘teleworking’) was first identified in the mid-1970s? Before any of the tech that currently supports it even existed? Charles Handy wrote about it too, in his 1984 book about the future of work. He argued then that technology might well mean the end of the ‘gathered’ organisation, replacing it with a dispersed one. There’s been plenty of other predictions along the way too, about just how many of us would be working remotely at certain points in the future. The earliest I can track the conference favourite ‘work is a thing that we do, not a place that we go’, is 1995.
And yet none of these predictions came true until homeworking was forced upon us by global events. Throughout that time we have seen many signals of this lack of trust. From business leaders to politicians, a strong cry that office is best, often with a does of flexshaming thrown in for good measure. We have seen too, organisations manifesting their lack of trust in remote monitoring, leading to digital presenteeism, hybridteeism or ‘performance theatre’.
There is a significant amount of evidence that employees are productive when they work remotely. I know, I have read all the papers. But this isn’t about evidence. It is about belief, and it is about bias. The evidence will never convince those that have a deep seated belief that remote work is problematic, or that do not trust the people that work for them.
Microsoft argue that ‘productivity paranoia risks making hybrid work unsustainable’. I agree with them. A lack of trust seeps into the entire employment relationship. When managers have productivity paranoia, it leaks into the way that they behave with and towards their people. It leads to poor management decision making, employee disengagement, and ultimately, retention issues.
This tension, that has existed for as long as remote working has, is not going away anytime soon. This might be the biggest challenge that hybrid work faces in the months and years to come.
PS: productivity paranoia is nothing new – the father of Scientific Management, FW Taylor, said this in 1911: in the majority of cases [a worker] deliberately plans to do as little as he safely can’.
As we all know that the Covid-19 pandemic forced many knowledge workers to work from home – as many as 700 million people across Europe, many of whom were doing so for the first time. It led to a quick, consistent and very loud employee demand for more flexible forms of work in the future.
But remote and hybrid work isn’t the only things we have been talking about this last couple of years. We have also talked of the ‘great resignation’, or as others call it, ‘the great rethink’. Microsoft research found that employees had a new ‘worth it equation’ when it comes to what they will sacrifice or put up with, in the name of work. More latterly, the idea of ‘quiet quitting’ has made headlines. The idea that employees will do the minimum that they can to keep their roles, refusing to go above or beyond or make discretionary effort.
On the fact of it, they might look like different stories, but they are all different sides of the same coin.
For some time now, I have believed that ‘I want to work from home more’ is surface stuff. Underneath, is ‘I want a different life’. Recent research from Gartner alludes to this too, finding that employees are seeking more purpose and meaning, and in particular rethinking the place that work should have in their lives. ‘I want to work from home’ is part of it but not all of it. As I have said in earlier blog posts, if you are only offering employee’s some location flex, you are not going to be satisfying all their needs. We need to develop new Employee Value Propositions that take into account all of these different elements if we want to attract, engage, and retain in the now of work.
Employees aren’t choosing to quiet quit, resign greatly, start a portfolio career, have a flexcation, work remotely, work flexibly or work abroad.
People Stuff 
