Is the future of work remote?

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this morning is a wonderful opportunity for us to look at what's happening for the future and help prepare us for that strange
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word that we're going to face with essential workers and remote workers actually having choice about how they
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might work so yes interesting times and that we're facing so let me um
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i was reflecting on the question that we're asking today which is is the future of work remote which is a really good question
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now interestingly for us in cipd we asked that question and back at the end of 2019 in our hr
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practices survey and we asked people um if there was an increase in demand for remote working
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and how they were responding what was really interesting was over 70 percent said they had seen an increase
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in demand for remote working in the previous year so throughout 2019 and when we asked about the
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um response there were very few people actually being allowed work remotely or flexibly it was a small
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low level happening and then move forward three months and half the country has
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now moved into remote working and now 12 months later we are seeing
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that big demand for some form of blended hybrid
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remote working coming true but it's really interesting because we've got the data of the fact that the ask was there
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by employees before the pandemic but the response wasn't there within organizations
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and even now we know organizations are looking at how do they actually and get their heads around creating a
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blended workforce and with options around where when and how people work
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in general in cipd we have tended to talk more about flexible working than remote working because we see that
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as being core to good work is giving people options around the times they work where
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they work when they work so even though the government is now on this and looking at the right to request remote working
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we continually say actually they should be looking at it through the lens of flexible working not just focusing on where people work
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and i think today's session is going to give us a very good feel around that i think we have two excellent people
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with us today we have alma mccarthy from nuig and we have barry winklas of the future
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of work institute who are going to talk us through that and i must say i'm delighted to be
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introducing this next event in our regional series the regional series has been really good
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at bringing so many people across the country together to actually catch up on critical thinking and
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leadership of our profession around what our central topics that we have to actually put into
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practice on a day-to-day basis and and my job is just to open it up and say hello to everybody
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and i'm going to hand over to john garrity who is chair of the western committee and
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him and his committee are responsible for putting today together so um well done to all of you and and so
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i'll hand over to john who's going to introduce our speakers and get the show on the road hello john hello mary thank you very
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very much and thank you to the staff at cipd ireland for making this uh regional series possible and
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i'm with great pleasure i'd like to welcome each of our speakers and all of you to this
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cipd ireland's region series webinar is the future of work remote and the question is in
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the title and expands into looking at the challenges the opportunities and the future directions
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and sharing with us uh one of our first speakers will be alma mccarthy who is the head of the
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je karen school of business and economics and professor of public sector management at national
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university of ireland galway joining horm for the questions and answers our spoken speaker will be barry winklas
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who is the head of the future of work institute and the chief strategy strategy
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officer at cpl and that's quite a mouthful but barry is taking very much um true to
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his title a strategic look at the whole area of the future of work
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and that ties in very nicely with the what the research is telling us in
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relation to the future directions uh based on remote working and i'd
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encourage people to submit questions as we go along and certainly one of the the things that
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um barry is using in his title is the idea of together a part uh remote
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working has brought us all together through the web here today to be together and just to think about you know the
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future of work how is that going to help us maybe uh be deal with the remoteness of remote
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work and maybe your own questions as well as we go so without further ado i hand you over now to uh alma mccarthy
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thank you thanks john and thanks mary and and cipd
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for for the opportunity to speak this morning and present a little bit on our findings from the nui galway and western
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development commission national remote working and studies we've been doing since
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the over the last year um so i will i have a set of slides that'll
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take us through some of the key findings and then i look forward to some questions and answers um after barry has presented
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as john and mary have said there so i might just commence by sharing the screen here
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and i assume if i get a nod there that we are yeah great good to go so
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the question i suppose this posed is is is the future of work remote and uh anyone that would dare to say
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that they can predict the future of course would probably be uh in in in hot water so i i'm not
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saying i could predict the answer to this question however um it's very useful for us to step back and maybe look at some
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of the data that we have gathered um listening to um in particular our studies at nui galway
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with the western development commission focusing on employee preferences and experiences but i'm also going to refer a little bit
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in the presentation today to what we're seeing from what employers are planning and the employer responses
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and that we're starting to see i just want to take a note of the time so that i don't
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run over um so there are lots of challenges and opportunities i suppose when we ask this
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question we think about the possible answers that lie um in any assessment of an answer to
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that question um so what i'm going to present on in the next few minutes are some of the top-line findings from
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empirical research that we've undertaken at the whitaker institute here in nui galway
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and we have sort of three fairly comprehensive reports that are available
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on the whitaker institute dot ie website um if you want to read any more on our our
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survey findings or dip into more details there's only i'm only going to sort of pick out highlights obviously here in
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a 15-minute presentation um but the the first report is on the left of your screen there and it's
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remote working during covert 19 and it was published about a year ago now we gathered the
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data exactly a year ago april 2020 um and we were interested to see how
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employees were getting on six weeks on from from first lockdown so that famous or
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infamous perhaps day that stood on the steps in the u.s
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and said they were going into a national lockdown around the 12th of march um and i suppose back in may 2020 when
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we published the report you know it was a particular time and point in our journey um in terms of if we
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it's important to reflect on where we were at then we were in the national lockdown schools we're out we were all
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dealing with a very new experience and i'll pull up some of the key findings from that time which were quite
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surprising actually about how employees were responding to the sort of mammoth change over to
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remote working we took the pulse again in october 2026
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months on the second report there in your screen and it was phase two and this was a
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different point time again i mean we the schools were back we had child care supports in place
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we were six months into a regime and routine so we'll see what were the findings at that point in time
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right now we have literally just launched yesterday at the third national survey and i'll
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talk to that at the very end and show you where you can complete the responses on that and i'll give you
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uh hot off the press as we go some of the findings that are coming up um as we are just one day into that
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launch we've had a huge response to it against very um there's a huge response to these surveys great interest
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the third report there on the right hand side of your screen is a remote working opportunities challenges and policy
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implications document which is the work of the western development commission on nui galway um
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following the work of an expert group in on remote working and over one year it
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includes company examples it's a very interesting report to dip into what organizations are doing
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and that expert group was established before covet um took hold and but of course koval
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made it um extremely pertinent and relevant so again you can look there there are recommendations etc
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that report that we published in december 2020 um has been extensively referenced in
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the of the department of enterprise trade and employment and unpunished uh leo of ryker's report on the national
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remote working strategy for ireland and they they reference our studies and
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very substantially they're in so it's useful to look into any of those reports if you want more information they're all
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up there and available you can see by sector there's lots of different things you can dip into and those infographics
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and giving more details i'm just going to turn off um a fan that's on here a heater behind you
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for a second in case it's interfering with sound [Music]
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these are the joys of working remotely you never know what might come on uh you disappeared into the background i
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disappeared yeah i was just turning off the fan that came on there i didn't want to interfere with the sound so
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what are some of the kind of headline findings from our our studies um the back in april 2020 we had as i
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said a huge response huge interest in in the area of remote working focused on employees
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april 2020 7200 respondents um and at that stage 87
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so the vast majority were working and fully remotely eleven percent were working a mix of remote and on-site
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depending on their role and two percent were fully uh on site or not working so i suppose when we talk here about our
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surveys we are focused on those who can work remotely in those roles that lend themselves to remote work so it is a
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particular sector of of the workforce so that is important to note
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um and on the right hand side six months on again we had a very big response to that um
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survey again 5 600 respondents and we had more of a mix at this stage because restrictions had lifted a little bit
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but nearly 70 percent were working remotely and 24 were a mix at that stage this was one of
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the questions that i'm pulling out here of particular interest to our conversation today is around the question uh asking
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employees so this was an employee survey um asking employees what are their preferences if they have the
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choice post pandemic or when the crisis is over um as to how they might work so in
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uh in april we were very surprised by the responses here to to this um in that people were only six
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weeks into the survey are into the experience of working remotely but our survey reports that
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even at that stage there's a significant majority and wanted to continue to work remotely for
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summer all of the time post crisis that was only we're looking here at the left-hand side the purple um image
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that was only six weeks into the crisis and at that time 51 of of the respondents had never
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worked remotely before so over three and a half or 3600 respondents were answering and
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there was no difference between those who had experiences were working remotely and those who didn't so at that stage in april uh 12
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were expressed that they'd like to work fully remotely every day but the majority were saying a couple of
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days a week or several times a week 42 percent and then 29 back in april 2020 a year
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ago we're saying uh 30 percent early that they'd like to work remotely several times um a month and then 16 were saying they
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did not want to work remotely at all so jump forward six months um as organizations are starting to get
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a bit more used to it as employees are getting more used to the routine what were they saying to the exact same
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question and we see that the those who want to work remotely for summer all the time
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post crisis the has increased to 94 so a big jump in those who would like to work
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fully remotely um all of the time from 12 to 27 so i'm looking at the statistics
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now on the right hand side and the more green oriented image and
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over half want to retain uh work working remotely for several times a
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week and because the first two have increased so significantly the last two fall and so 13 several
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times a month and those who do not want to continue working remotely at all drops to six percent so i went into our
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survey that we launched just yesterday we have a huge response already we already have over 3000 responses to our
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april 2021 survey um and literally i just ran the analysis
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before i came on and the the those who want to continue to work remotely fully
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at the moment in our responses to date for the april 2021 um it's gone up to 32 um
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and the those want to work several times a week is exactly 54 and yet 75
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of those who are responding to our survey um right now didn't complete either of the two surveys before because
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we asked that information to see so we're have a lot of new respondents and they're saying
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kind of very similar things um so what does that tell us well i guess that's telling us that the employee voice
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is very clear um in what it is that the ex the hope and ex not hope is for a remote
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working context so i suppose our findings are being corroborated by by research elsewhere
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um there's 30 pages of findings and reports that you can access on the west the whittaker website so i won't go
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into it in in huge detail here but some of the kind of top things we pulled out were where the top three
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advantages of remote working there is no surprise but these are presented in rank order no traffic and
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no commute greater flexibility as to how i manage the working day and reduce costs of going to work and commuting and
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of course um there are uh challenges or are problems with remote working that need
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to be overcome and again these are in rank order um in the october 2020 findings isolation
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loneliness number one staying motivated number two and the physical work workspace number three and there's
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a lot of discourse around that element of the work in terms of homework having the correct workspace workplace
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the correct ergonomic workstation and people have different experiences depending on what
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resources they have um at home so that is something that organizations are having to deal with
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so the first couple of slides there are talking about the employee voice and i think it is coming it's fairly
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kind of resounding i suppose in that there is a huge demand and mary started out the session there speaking about the
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notion of flexibility and that there was uh an appetite for it and well now that people have got the experience of it
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they certainly at the vast majority want to retain some element of remote working
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so that's one side of the coin and one element of course it's um what employees preferences are and the
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extent to which they're achieved depends on what employers and organizations are doing and willing to do on the other
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side so what insights are we gaining to what employers are planning a year on as they're starting to kind of
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think about the return to work or what they're going to do in a new scenario um and i was pleased to see the research
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that the cipd had commissioned with the kinney business school in ul where they had just recently in last month uh published
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some findings from an employer survey and some of the top line findings there
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from the cipd ul research of employers is that 51 percent of businesses plan to
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maintain a model that involves working from home post pandemic um over three quarters say they intend to
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adopt a blend of remote and onsite in the long term um and uh nearly three quarters reported
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that productivity either increased or remained steady once remote working became the norm so
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we have stats and and figures for employees perceptions of their own productivity
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and during remote working and again the majority feel it's the same or better and it's very interesting to see that
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the employer perspective there from the cipd ul research is uh similar in terms of what it's
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saying around productivity um i suppose we're starting to if you're tuned into it or if you get a
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feed around remote working or working from home you're starting to see a lot of organizations making statements
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about their direction what what choices they're making so in the news um
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in ireland very recently with the bank of ireland who has come out to say say that it will be a hybrid model and
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they're talking about having hopes in some of their locations around the country uh ford in the us
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um was one of the first automakers that has made us come out and said that 86 000 of its employees are to work from
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home permanently which is a huge uh statement um goldman sachs interestingly um
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are have a different view so the a lot of organizations are coming out talking about keeping a blended model
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goldman sachs is is one of the dissenting voices david solomon and has said that homeworking is an
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aberration that we're going to correct as quickly as possible and so he goes on to say i don't want
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another class of young people arriving remotely that aren't getting more direct contact direct apprenticeship and direct
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mentorship so goldman sachs is one of the organizations come out saying that they're they're not enamored by this remote working and set up
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pwc has told us accountants and consultants in the uk that they'll spend an average of two to three days a week
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in the office um after the pandemic ends and has promised a half day on fridays for the
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summer and hsbc has just come out last week in financial uh times reported that they are removing
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the c-suite offices from their headquarters and putting in new meeting rooms and hot desk
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facilities etc so i only pick out there a few sort of top line examples if you like of what we're
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hearing from what employers are doing and it is interesting to see that there is definitely a move
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um towards employers responding to to remote um being a key feature of the future
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um so what does the future hold um i you know i think that i would put
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money on it being a hybrid or blended or flex approach and that seems to be what a lot
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of organizations are preparing for and there's different terms being used um you know flex distributed anywhere
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workforce um and of course then we go back to some of the older connotations there are terms that were always there
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teleworking uh flexible working homework locationless work co-working homework um
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etc so i think um we can probably assume that for a lot of organizations hybrid
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is going to be the way um one of the things that's coming out in our research very clearly is that one size does not fit all so
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we have 12 and a half thousand responses from 2020 we're gonna have another three four five thousand and
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twenty twenty one response from employees and in some of the qualitative comments it's very clear that people
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are along a broad continuum of experiences so depending on their own personal circumstances
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um you know different things work in terms of the balance and the blend so it that's a real challenge if you look at
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it from the employee pers at the employee level how organizations can manage that because there isn't a one size that's
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going to fit all employees and i think that we really need to focus
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in organizations around you know the fourth bullet point there talks about a mindset change which is
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related to the third one um focusing on what activities are based on remote and not solely what roles so a
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lot of the discourse initially was around what roles uh would be suited to working remotely
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and that is valuable to a point but it's more about what work is best done remotely within
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roles even um the fourth point there is as we move to a hybrid or blended model
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it's going to be challenging so one of the things that came out very clearly in our expert task force report and work that we did
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when we were working on on that with the western development commission and the whisker institute at ui galway
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was that at the moment it's nearly easier because everyone is remote and everyone has the same
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experience whereas if we go to the when we go i think to the blended and hybrid model
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and dual mode you know there's a lot of to be considered how you manage that effectively so that the experiences are
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positive regardless of how you're connecting how you're attending meetings and so on and so forth
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um there's a sort of a mindset change needed in terms of how we manage
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i suppose good leadership was kind of bringing up these questions anyway but it has probably even brought
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these issues more to the fore around how you how we trust employees and how we actually manage work and how we evaluate
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and manage performance one of the debates that i've heard in the whole remote working thing uh um is
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around you know there's a sometimes a conflation between performance management issues which are one
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dimension of hr and then remote work so you know the it's always good to get the pulse of the
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nation by coming down for to lunch and listening to joe duffy for a few minutes and one of the days that i
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was making coffee i there was a hot and heavy conversation going on and joe about how you manage people when you
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can't see them and you know all sorts of interesting views there but you know it was a typical issue of
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conflation if you've performance management issues and someone isn't performing well hey it's not news to anyone that those
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issues were there even if everyone was in the office and you could see them uh doesn't mean that people were applying themselves fully necessarily so
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that's always been there the fact that you can't see someone doesn't necessarily mean performance is going to be correlated negatively with that so i
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think that some of these things we just need to to consider better as hr managers and hr policy makers
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um the impact on well-being is really coming out in the research so that i suppose the whole general well-being
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and i think it's also a challenge to look at remote working at the moment because we're in a very
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particular and challenging context where we have a national lockdown so life isn't that the normal experience of
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remote working isn't as it is now so the impact on well-being you know some of the welding issues are
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kind of more general societal issues perhaps because of the impact of national lockdowns
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but there is a big debate on the impact on well-being from remote working the engagement that engagement levels
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are up but you know that ratio to exhaustion needs to be carefully managed and how are people going to switch off
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again interesting developments here nationally on on the um right to disconnect so there's a lot happening actually a policy level
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that's really interesting at the moment that's going to impact on remote working um i am watching time now so i'll keep
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going um one of the another thing that's really coming out clearly uh from research is the impact on equality
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so and there's a lot of concern that some of the advances we've made made in the past especially around
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gender equality could be adversely impacted because a lot of the research is saying that that women are more
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adversely impacted by the remote working and the lockdown and pandemic than our men
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and again i suppose even more broadly the experience the quality of experiences across established
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career people in their careers who are established versus those who are starting out and how do
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you mentor how do they learn how do they learn about culture and all of that so that they are issues that definitely are
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coming up in terms of how we're going to manage this future um scenario um managing
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connectivity and collaboration and the impact on innovation that's you know another big issue that
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needs to be grappled with and i'm interested to hear from barry now in a few moments around how we can ensure that if people
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are working remotely they're not actually remote and disengaged etc because that's that's a huge challenge
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and it's one of the issues that employers speak about a lot so remote work
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and the future of hybrid it does provide great flexibility opportunities for employees and also for
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for organizations um but you know it is much more challenging to manage and to manage it effectively and to
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manage it well so this is the new era i think for for hr and looking at how do we manage across
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all the different areas of human resource management talent management in what looks like will be quite a
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different landscape thank you very much i look forward to questions and comments
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after barry has spoken thanks alma so i'll just without further ado over to
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barry um i know barry has a model for the future of work that you'd like to share
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with us and then we'll take the questions after that so i'd encourage people to maybe be posting in questions as we go as they
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occur to you thanks right thanks very much uh and uh thank you cipd for inviting me
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along today it's a great pleasure and uh thank you very much for sharing those uh fantastic insights and always taking
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lots of notes as well so very much appreciate that i'm gonna subtly switch over to the
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powerpoint presentation here and hopefully you can all see that screen you could give me a yeah
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great thank you mary um yeah look so a couple of things i want to cover off as the future work institute we are what
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i would call practitioners in the future of work so within our organization we work with probably over two and a half thousand
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clients across ireland the uk and europe so some of the things i'm going to share with you here today are a combination of
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ongoing research projects we have in organizations and then other elements around some of the work
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we're kind of currently doing with leaders and actually a lot of what i'm going to talk about is absolutely
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complementary to what alma has spoken about and in many ways kind of you know reinforces some of that great
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research the guys are doing in uig and so look i think the first thing from my perspective
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is actually less about the remote but more about future work but and you know we did a leadership very
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in-depth kind of sort of workshops and studies over the last three years and we talk about look
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you know what do you think about this thing called the future of work you know is it going to be something big that you're going to need to worry about and by and large and
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i think everybody in the call would kind of recognize this you know it's either going to have some kind of significant effect or a very
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significant effect now i think when you ask the next question of leaders and most of these people that i work with
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would be very much on the leadership teams of businesses and c-suite executives you then say well what is the future of
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work and that's when you kind of get really uh interesting stairs into space and depending on what
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person that organization works for you get a particularly biased view on what the future of work is so what
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we've done really over the last two years create what i would call the strategic freedom works just come back to kind of
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john's point earlier on around this thing called the future work because we recognized very early on that actually
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you know different people are coming in at different ways and our definition of the future of work it's the
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purposeful study an integrated design of workplaces workforces and work tasks across
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multiple time horizons in the context of business and society so there's a couple loads of stuff in
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that in that kind of definition but one of the most important words is design and one of the things we're starting to
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see is an awakening of leadership in an organization beyond hr of the recognition that within the
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future work there's an opportunity for leaders to design very specifically and very purposefully
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the workplace so where work gets done the workforce how they manage and design the workforce is to kind of
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deal with future kind of impacts and work tasks and that's very much around the mindsets the tools and the techniques that can be
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utilized in an organization and i fundamentally believe that the future work is more
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than just conversations around you know what we can do and actually more around
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how it's going to represent a competitive advantage for those organizations that really want to enhance uh so i think the first thing
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for me is when we talk about the future of work uh this is our strategic framework and when we call it that for the future working it covers
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those three w's you know workplace where work takes place either in physical digital or virtual space
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we're seeing lots of really interesting scale-up businesses in that space that are trying to
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bridge the gap between you know a physical space and a virtual space and also try to
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kind of harness the best of those different kind of forms to kind of collaborate in better
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ways i'll talk about that in a moment workforce how the overall workforce is evolving how it's designed managed and
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motivated is something that's really important when we talk about this kind of future workpiece and then work tasks and that's
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very much around the tools the methods the mindsets that actually deliver the work so
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when we talk about this idea of remote i think we need to view it through the lens of these three w's because if we
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think about the workplace that is very much around what i would call the level of localization and distribution
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and the different associated models that organizations are trying to kind of adopt in some shape or
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form and i totally agree with donald's kind of research on our perspectives on this and that we are
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definitely landing towards by and large a kind of a hybrid model i think what's really interesting from
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our perspective with some of the companies that we're working directly with is conversations around what that actually
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means to the design of workplaces both in physical and virtual space so it's one thing to talk about a kind
30:44
of a hub and spoke model then it's another thing to kind of understand what is going to be the role of a hope
30:50
in hudman's folk model you know what happened now with our heavily invested hq in a world of
30:57
much more micro offices and these are big questions that we're we're actively working with organizations on the moment at the
31:03
moment and you know coming back to that design concept different organizations will have different
31:08
uh goals and different requirements in terms of what workplace needs to do for them i think the second one for me then
31:14
that's often forgotten about is this evolving workforce and i would call that around when we talk about
31:20
remoteness that really for me is the degree of separation from what i would call core talent permanent groups and
31:26
subgroups within another organization and then also the other type of employment types that circle a workforce and organizations in
31:33
this day and age that's a really really important point if you really think about it we have had workforce distribution models over the
31:40
last 20 years where a number of people have been working remotely either remote from the brand or
31:45
remote from uh specific uh types of work within the business and then the final bit really
31:51
for me is around the you know i'm gonna kind of refer to this area iran is the tools the techniques but more
31:58
importantly the mindset that are going to try to promote belonging and defeat uh remoteness so i i think
32:04
the first thing you know i'd like to think about and you know give my background and strategy i always like to think about
32:09
things like this strategically is when we think about any type of topic around the future work that we think about it
32:16
through these three w's because we need to start thinking more holistically in terms of how we can create advantages
32:21
from the future of work so i'm going to start with the work task but first and i think by and large with the organizations that
32:27
we're working with and researching with across ireland in the uk and into europe and some into the us
32:33
there is a conscious effort to defeat remoteness or that's the first thing when it comes to the work task piece and there's a general
32:39
drive towards inclusivity participation co-creation about an organizational level and a
32:46
network level and a community level and those three levels are really really important as we start to kind of expand
32:52
our minds to kind of connect the dots a little bit more in terms of how we view this kind of thing called work i like to
32:59
kind of show this through what i would call a dna strand and you know for me this let's be honest this is what business
33:05
has been like if we were to draw a kind of a dna strand of business over the last kind of 30 years very much focused on
33:11
competition shareholder value hierarchy you know and everything else that we've kind of grown used to and we're starting to see
33:19
a major shift in terms of the that kind of dna of organizations we're starting to see creator purposeful focus on things like
33:26
community equality but also things like you know trying to create meaning you know and regeneration within
33:33
businesses as well all the way over you know to things like bringing your whole self to work and you know moving
33:38
into this kind of ecosystem thinking now some of this stuff can feel like fad like uh you know when you have
33:44
these conversations but there is enough evidence and enough real world kind of work that we're doing at the moment
33:50
uh to kind of highlight there is a kind of a burgeoning mindset shift that was happening well in advance of covert
33:56
uh to think about an organization as something fundamentally different to what we've
34:01
been thinking about what it's been for that kind of last period of time i think that's going to throw up all sorts of interesting
34:07
polarities contradictions and challenges and this diagram for me kind of sums up this
34:13
kind of drive for leaders to become you know much more of an engaged co-created type model and i
34:20
always like simple slides i'm relatively simple person so you know like really when we
34:26
talk about you know mindsets around how we manage this to me is the key slide right we're
34:32
either gonna keep being in a situation where we make decisions i think in that situation
34:38
you know people are going to struggle in a remote world where we very much centralize the decision making very much kind of a
34:44
hierarchical piece i think we're going to start to see is because of this focus on you know kind
34:49
of hybrid working let's come back to homeless point we're going to see greater emphasis on you know greater empowerment for
34:56
larger employment groups in businesses where it will be much more about you know moving the decision
35:02
closer uh to the employee the actual employees as opposed to kind of the leader so that's that's the kind of work task
35:08
but so i think the first thing for me is we're genuinely seeing a burgeoning mindset
35:13
shift in terms of how we think about how we deliver work and that has all sorts of implications
35:18
in terms of how connected people feel to organizations i think the second thing we talk about
35:24
the workforce piece there is an absolute disruption of what workforce an employee actually is what it actually means and it really
35:31
due to kind of three things one is platforms second is definitely this kind of democratization
35:36
of tools and models and then other new organizational forms if you really think about it and you know in
35:43
advance of you know this call we're doing a lot of work in this space at the moment when you really look at what a workforce
35:49
is today this is actually what an organization's workforce looked like and actually this
35:55
is a map of our own organization in terms of you know what it means to have a
36:00
workforce and you know we're no longer in a situation where we're just thinking about the core
36:07
talent group we're thinking about all of the different nodes that help us to deliver the work and
36:13
that's why i say when we talk about the future of work with remote it is also about the degrees of separation between all of these
36:19
different partners in our ecosystems and in our networks and how we can harness them properly
36:25
really to mission critical type projects and and actually these are the types of models
36:30
we're hearing about now that we're we're actively working on in a number of businesses we don't you
36:35
know we talk about workforce we're talking now more about things like networks we're talking about organisms
36:40
we're talking about blended models but we're also talking about things like clubs you know if if we have a large number of population
36:47
if you work with us but don't work for us how do we kind of connect them together so we're starting to see a growth in new
36:53
thinking about models how do we create a club for people within our broader workforce to make them feel
36:59
part of the process so we're seeing new models to try and create a sense of belonging
37:05
at a much more broader network level and you know this is a live project that i'm working on at the moment
37:11
uh you know on a very mission-critical part of our business in cpl where not only am i working with the
37:17
core talent group whatever group of consultants i'm working with i've been a number of people under kind of statement of work type
37:23
engagements and then i have a number of kind of partners within that and this is the reality of actually the
37:28
workforce today is that one of the challenges we're going to have is how do we connect people around
37:34
our company you know our meaning and deliver meaningful work for both those
37:39
people in the network and then also make sure we do a really good job within the business but i think that's the second thing for
37:44
me it's the concept of workforce company kind of changed over the last period of time for our own research we
37:51
recognized that this idea of a workforce looking more like a community a network
37:56
or an organism is definitely increasing you know exponentially every time as people try to kind of create new
38:02
types of competitive advantage so now when we move to the kind of the workplace side of things there is
38:07
absolutely a growing recognition the flexibility and distributed working is part of an organization's what i
38:13
would call an employee value proposition competitive advantage and it's for attracting
38:18
uh the best talent and actually this is a really interesting thing that we're starting to see is it's no longer seen
38:24
really as something that'll be nice to have and it's now something seen as expected so if you look at our
38:31
own research very very much in line and aligned uh with almost kind of previous uh
38:36
research uh you know this is a very kind of recent survey across more than about a thousand of our
38:42
own candidates in in the marketplace and you can see there um excuse me if i
38:47
really pour it in but you're talking about kind of over 80 85 that their expectation is that they will
38:54
have some form of remote working i think what's more interesting though is actually this and this is this is a
39:00
kind of our evp or employer value proposition model where we track the relative importance of different
39:08
reasons why people will join an organization over time and what we're starting to see is where
39:14
flexibility and where i totally take your point around the kind of flexible working piece where where flexibility and flexibility
39:21
was part of that overall employee value proposition and was in a top 10 requirement
39:26
we've now seen that move up to a kind of a top two requirement believe it or not in terms of why somebody would or would
39:32
not join an organization so that covers everything from the work environment to the design of that
39:38
organization to work like balance and then seen as a kind of a benefit and perk
39:43
you know within that context and i think just in terms of a number of leadership
39:49
sessions we we had last year really as part of my own kind of uh research and book development over
39:55
the last year and a half uh we asked a number of leaders in organizations you know over the next five years where would you
40:02
place the dial on on the on this w on the on the workplace w and you know by and large there was a
40:08
focus on that you know what work and how we do it and where it's done is definitely going to be more around this
40:14
mix of seamless digital and physical elements secondly they said we're going
40:20
to have to totally reconsider the role of our offices in this world more towards thinking about what experiences
40:26
we're trying to create which again i think i'm a leads back to some of your research which is you know what does this all mean right
40:32
you know once this happens what does it mean to our kind of physical spaces and the kind of meetings that we have there there's a general
40:39
kind of tension here about by having more and more fixed offices it actually prevents us from
40:45
tapping into this broadest possible talent pool so there's real kind of implications for some of these decisions
40:50
here i just want to finish off by kind of saying look you know as a i'm the chief strategy officer in the
40:55
business and you know somebody involved in a number of organizations i just wanted to kind of highlight some of the tensions that i see or let's call
41:01
them kind of polarities across these three interconnected things right one is around the workplace i see four
41:09
big ones right one is around should we have a concentrated model or more of a distributed model and what
41:15
does that where does the need land for different organizations i think the second one for me is you know should
41:21
we have big offices macro offices macro locations or thousands of micro locations and there's loads of debates
41:27
in between and in those kind of three areas if by having it here in a physical location
41:32
does that prevent us from tapping into talent everywhere there's another big debate that's been had at the moment and then i think decide the final one
41:38
for me is really interesting um which is just exclusive versus inclusive what happens in organizations where
41:45
power a portion of that workforce are actually have to be in a physical site in order to deliver the work
41:51
versus you know those other people that can actually have a greater level of flexibility where
41:57
does the exclusive inclusive peaceful there in the manufacturing site what does flexibility mean
42:02
to those people versus people working maybe in supporting office services i think the second group
42:07
of polarities for me around the workforce is really around should do we want to tap into some of the talent or can we
42:13
tap into all of the talent and i always ask leaders what would you prefer you know 100 percent of a mediocre talent's time
42:20
or 10 percent of the best possible talent you could find that's a big discussion and it's really part of this kind of piece around
42:26
connectedness and remoteness ownership versus access is really important you know
42:32
in the future you know are we going to have more permanent employees or are we going to access
42:37
the kind of talent that we need and if you look at most of the research including our own you know we're going to have a third of
42:43
the workforce are going to be in somewhere freelancing over the next period of time and then just finally just to kind of finish up
42:49
um i think the big one for me around workforce are really fundamental questions and this definitely thinks back to some honest comments around
42:55
performance management and you know the kind of impact on leadership in a world where
43:00
we're going to be highly remote in terms of workouts are hybrid it definitely means that we need to empower our people more
43:07
to make more decisions and in that world leadership in a way becomes no leadership right so you know
43:12
everybody becomes a leader so what does that then mean to the leader piece i think this final one really for me is really important
43:19
you know not to have this my own big view but having a holistic view in terms of the future work and how
43:24
these different three w's and they connect together is going to be really key if we if organizations want
43:29
to go beyond following the herd and actually use it as a mechanism for competitive advantage into the future i
43:36
totally agree well when she talks about this is hr hr's moment because for me hr are actually the design partners of the
43:43
leadership group in helping them to design uh this future of work model there's my details guys as any of you
43:50
who know me know please contact me at any time i love sharing ideas it was great to hear from from marion
43:56
and alman and sharing some of their fantastic insights it's a real pleasure to be here with that i shall shut up is
44:02
that the right phrase to use thanks
44:09
thomas and really appreciate that um you've asked or you've spoken to a
44:14
number of things that have come up by way of questions already um one of the areas that people seem to
44:20
be very keen to sort of explore a little bit more is the whole idea around fairness so
44:26
if we create flexibility flexibility opportunities like remote working um there is exactly
44:32
what barry mentioned there just a few minutes ago when he talked about what about if that isn't an option right
44:38
we can break work down we can say okay we can look at a more sophisticated not just the role but the activities if
44:44
the majority of your activities need to be face-to-face physically delivered
44:50
that that creates a challenge around how do we manage this fairly for people um so just with that
44:57
um maybe if um i would like to maybe say what the findings are sort of maybe
45:03
you've already raised that that idea of the framework around breaking it down into
45:09
activities tasks rather than just looking at the role how would that
45:15
maybe is there any research that you can think of any good case studies i know some people have asked well is there any
45:21
good case study very you know an example a very good practice where this is being done um people have had remote work prior to
45:28
covet um so just maybe to both of you actually but just maybe start with alma thanks
45:36
thanks john um there's yeah i mean a number of companies had remote and they kind of set up
45:41
you know to be remote or largely remote before this so for example spotify would be an example of an
45:48
organization that very much is what they call remote first so they they have
45:53
uh set up so that their sort of policy is an expectation that um they are remote primarily and then
46:00
there's some on-site and collaborative element um and spotify are doing exceptionally well so there's there are organizations
46:07
where i think we can start to learn from and some of them are very willing to share um obviously not
46:12
confidential information but they're willing to share their their their learnings and in our expert task force report that's
46:19
available on the whitaker website we had um a multi-stakeholder group and we had um
46:24
cisco involved and we had interviews with some um key organizations like ervia which had
46:30
actually brought about um a they had brought about a remote working
46:35
policy before the pandemic as well so it's interesting as well to look at examples from
46:40
not just the sort of new tech sector or the i.t sector or the ict sector
46:46
because sometimes you know our perceptions of remote working um are aligned with industries and so
46:54
we have learned from this experience that you don't have to working in the tech sector for remote to work well it's
46:59
more about what you do and i think it's about you see i think there's there is a that mindset change that i talked about
47:06
in the last slide i think is the challenge for all of us so notions of the nine to five monday to friday
47:12
work um pattern you know how how useful or valuable is that so does it matter when we work as long as
47:18
we work to a particular standard to achieve a particular set of things so you know work is not about i think work
47:25
you know we have to lose some of this sort of inbuilt or inherent uh assumptions we don't even question so
47:31
work for a lot of people back in the great good old days of 2019 was a place that
47:38
you went to you know it was actually a location but that's probably an incorrect way of thinking
47:44
about work work is it's a verb it's a thing we actually do rather than a place we go so then we
47:51
have to change i don't necessarily have to work from 9 to 12 30 and from 1 30 to 5. maybe i can
47:56
work very effectively from six to whatever and i'm gone in the middle of the day or whatever you know so um we have to change
48:03
like there's a big sort of mindset change needed by organizations but by managers and supervisors as well
48:10
so um you know there's and i suppose this is the opportunity to sort of it's not like everything was working well in
48:16
the past i mean we talk about that for example in the education sector you know the the old big lectures were
48:21
they the best way to teach people well now we've we've tested other models so we will be retaining some of the
48:27
benefits so it is a mindset change i think that's needed uh for sure and and the challenge though and i know one
48:33
of the questions there is is how do you do it um and how do we make sure that it's fair
48:38
but the one thing that i don't think is going to work is a policy that sort of pulls us back into this
48:44
rigid structure because then we're going to lose all the benefits of flexibility so um but then you know we know that
48:51
good management is about sort of that contingency approach of sort of being able to ever flow anyway so um but definitely rules and
48:59
regulations about time and when you know when you do it and all of that is not necessarily working and it's not what employees are going to respond to
49:05
and i think you know barry mentioned it there in terms of talent attraction retention employees you know especially
49:11
those who can work remotely are they're going to see it as sort of a minimum threshold now that they'll have some degree of flexibility and if you
49:17
don't offer it it's going to you're going to lose competitive advantage and attractiveness um i might hand over to
49:23
barry there it was a very comprehensive answer actually i was kind of taking a few notes there subtly you know
49:29
it's very hard to take notes subtly on on these goals yeah i think i was totally right i think there's a big thing for me i mean
49:35
people talk about how you do i'll just give you a case study of my own kind of group within our organization
49:42
and we have a set of explicit assumptions um so we don't talk about values in my own
49:48
team we talk about very defined explicit assumptions and within those eight explicit assumption statements i
49:54
will try to make them available i'll kind of what they call a d d wordify that's if
50:00
that's a word um in terms of you know letting the people on my team
50:05
be very clear in terms of my expectations and their expectations and almost definitely right it's
50:11
definitely not a procedural piece and it's not apologies but it's more of a kind of a set of explicit assumptions that we all live
50:18
by and and how we deliver the work uh i would probably definitely veer more towards the um you know
50:24
what would i call it empowered orchestrator type leader and i do appreciate that in many industries that that's not a possibility
50:30
and but i find both of those things are connected together and so we do work with another
50:36
organization in the gaming industry you are very much focused in like spotify and on this kind of more self-managed
50:43
model of doing things and that kind of model and that mindset very much lends itself to
50:49
this more hybrid remote type working model so i think for me it's a great opportunity
50:54
for leaders to and also organizations to kind of stand back and kind of go well
51:00
what do we want our leadership to be we've rarely got those kind of discussions with leaders you know
51:06
what do we want as an organization to be like what do we want our leadership dna to be in the business
51:12
and i find sometimes that's where organizations are actually letting leaders down because you know we talk about leaders
51:17
you know and all of us on this caller our leaders in fields in our own particular right
51:22
as this kind of you know infallible group that everything is pointed towards but actually he's supporting the leaders you know to
51:28
kind of help define their you know combined organizational model of leadership i think that's a really
51:33
kind of important point to all of those kind of ways of working so the first step for me is if it's
51:38
possible try to agree an explicit set of assumptions that are very transparent with
51:43
people that you work with and that they they recognize that you know what this is real and
51:50
every time you reinforce a particular behavior that enhances the fact that these explicit assumptions are real and that
51:56
kind of makes it a lot easier i i definitely think that empowerment and remote working are kind of two sides at the same time
52:02
and so totally on what's in your commentary there so just to kind of follow on that line
52:08
of thought what if we did have lots of of um i suppose really
52:13
remote working so anyone anywhere and is there a flip side we obviously
52:19
heard goldman sachs say oh that that for us wouldn't work and they're concerned about early
52:25
career people being disadvantaged to other groups so a very clear consensus
52:30
coming across within the room here is where there are you know ones as alma said earlier on one size doesn't
52:36
fit at all when we put on our hr perhaps we're thinking about managing fairness we're thinking about
52:42
equality and i see some of the questions now as well like what about small business what if
52:47
i'm a small organization what if i'm a micro organization and there's kind of an appeal here to
52:53
the speakers well can you give me examples and take for example just maybe start with yourself barry um
52:59
your model have you examples of where that's worked with say a small organization maybe even applying
53:04
it to the institute the future of work institute within your own organization where the relationships are different with
53:10
each of the people and is there a future of work testing of model among that group and any other group that you might be able
53:16
to share and then similarly um if you think of ones as well yeah i know university there's a lot
53:21
yeah it's a brilliant question you know um these are great questions you know these are questions these are the kind of questions to keep you up at night unfortunately but
53:29
so uh yeah i know look i think um i'll talk i'll talk look personally uh first and foremost because
53:34
i think that's that's probably a kind of a kind of a worthwhile piece regardless so when we talk about micro
53:41
businesses right i'm going to go right down to the biggest business sector the biggest
53:46
growing sector in business and that's the business of one okay so we can't not talk about that as
53:52
part of the future of work discussion right so you know those businesses that are not even micro there are one person
53:58
businesses and our huge growth in terms of what we mean by this thing called workforce
54:03
right so that that's really important that we recognize that and and in many instances our workforce
54:10
and organizations like cpl and many other organizations are tapping in to multiple individual
54:16
businesses multiple individuals uh in terms of being able to deliver their work you know within a business so
54:22
i think that's really really important so when you when you start looking at that kind of one-person business
54:28
that one-person business right is absolutely kind of right what i would call at the at the
54:33
leading edge of the future worldwide because they need to fully utilize
54:39
technological platforms they have to fully embrace networking and collaborative work
54:45
thirdly and this is a really interesting one that we're starting to see more and more of is the need to form disposable
54:51
organizations right so where one person will come together with five or six other people first statement of work project that
54:57
their unique skill sets um come together to deliver a piece of work for an organization and then
55:03
they'll almost disband right so i think from their perspective so first of all that one person business
55:08
is very much you know right at the leading edge of future work and i'm really interested actually in one person businesses and the network
55:15
effects of the future work and they're they're about their ability to using different tools and techniques to tap
55:20
into these larger organizations and if you think if you remember i don't know you'd really appreciate this when
55:25
you know there used to be large conversations around the elephant or the flea you know big organizations would scale you know
55:31
versus very small agile organizations here's the really exciting thing because when we talk about hybrid
55:37
organizations that have the ability to be both because you can have a large core scale and then you can kind
55:42
of supplement it with these really interesting kind of businesses so i think when we talk about the broader holistic view of the future work
55:48
i think the real opportunity for micro businesses right forgetting that flexible working that we're talking
55:53
more and the workforce but is to really tap in to networks that are of value to them and therefore they can
56:00
have a value exchange both with other similar organizations and then larger organizations i think
56:05
that's a really really important point i think the second thing that's really important for me is when we really stand back from this
56:10
flexibility absolutely is becoming that top five you know reason as to why somebody would join an
56:16
organization i totally come back to almost point which is you know make it work within your context right so for example and
56:23
i'm seeing space time and condition we talk about the different types of flexibility so for example we talk about
56:29
time we always have a tendency to talk about you know one day at home or one day this where we sometimes should talk about
56:35
hours or seasons right so some organizations we're working with will have reduced working hours over the
56:40
summer period you know some will have a month of you know different levels of flexibility uh so i think it comes back to me what
56:46
works for your business and what works between that that kind of perfect combo of
56:52
increasing productivity and maintaining productivity or it's giving a level of flexibility to somebody that works within the context
56:58
of your business so think beyond the obvious stuff and think about maybe hours of the day that can be made flexible
57:04
different seasons that could be made more flexible you know or different types of shifts if it's a manufacturing facility
57:10
and in that case kind of size doesn't matter i do think that just to finish on my point is that the flexibility is still only one of 20
57:17
elements of why people stay and work in an organization so right after flexible working is meaningful work
57:23
and you know and right after meaningful for workers developmental opportunities so you know we have to take those kind
57:29
of things into consideration together alma do you have any little case study
57:34
or any best practice yeah so i've i've i mean it's a good question it's um
57:40
one of the the things we were concerned about when we had in the expert expert task force
57:46
uh review was that we were definitely hearing the voice of micro and smes and i've put up there a link to
57:53
their report and you there are a number of case studies i i think you can access that pdf there
57:58
but i put it to the chat it's the actual report from the task force group that we published just a few months ago in december
58:04
but it does have a sort of case vignettes and and one of them is employee employee flex there's only four
58:09
employees and they talk about how they are managing this they were doing it before the the pandemic and they uh you know a
58:16
micro organization um and they they were they used um hubs
58:21
so hopes are starting to come into the debate now and there's certainly a key a sort of policy initiative
58:27
especially um a focus to the likes of the western development commission where you know you're dealing with how
58:33
do you make sure that people have access to good connectivity especially along west um so you know
58:40
that the sort of offering of hubs is becoming a sort of a key policy lever um but employee flex talked about
58:48
working from home but also having coming into a hub and meeting clients in that hub and meeting each other for that
58:53
collaborative sort of a more energizing element so you can see you can go into that dip into that
58:59
report there and see that there's another really interesting case from ennis so i always have to bring
59:04
claire into any of my conversations because i'm from westlay originally and but there's a solicitor's firm in
59:09
ennis and of course historically the legal um industry you know is very much
59:16
sort of paper based and office based and they had started um michael houlihan and partners and in
59:22
us had started to look at more flexibility before the pandemic and they had started to deal with this in response to um
59:29
employees needs and there's a case vignette there on on them again an sme so have a look at those if you
59:36
want to and very important that you know i mean at the end of the day the micro and sme
59:41
sector is is the engine of our economy and you're right we tend to hear an awful lot about the
59:46
multinationals and maybe the public sector as well being such a big employer um but a lot of the principles are
59:52
similar to be honest it's back to sort of good management practice changing how we think changing how we trust people to work and
59:59
good good leadership and good management isn't necessarily um organizational size
1:00:04
driven i would argue look really thank you we're out of time at the moment i just have one or two
1:00:10
little things to do i'd like to ask our director cipdr mary collington to finish what remind you
1:00:16
of at the 19th the 20th of may two very important dates for your diary
1:00:21
a great opportunity to continue the discussion on designing the future of work and now i'll hand you over to mary
1:00:30
thank you very much john and thank you very much alma and barry i mean that i think that was really interesting we got
1:00:35
some great insights into the issues that we're actually facing and the transformation journey
1:00:40
that we're on i think you've shown us how big that journey is whether you're a small organization or a large
1:00:45
organization i know certainly establishing the principles for working through it but then actually teasing it through so
1:00:51
you're dealing with those individual issues we've heard about personalization the decision making
1:00:57
and the equality issues that were coming through and john mentioned our annual conference which will take this to the next level
1:01:03
because it's actually called designing the future work so thanks for that legion barry in terms of hr being the design partners in terms of
1:01:10
that process where we will be looking at digitalization and we will be looking at blended and future working what those
1:01:17
models look like both from expert speakers and from quite a number of case studies and we've even
1:01:22
pulled in some of our award winners and so we'll hear from the tech company clearstream about what they've done and
1:01:27
we'll hear from fidelity about their plans so lots of really practical and tools in that and it's two half days so we hope
1:01:34
lots of you will join us and you'll find information on our website and but really today has really sort of
1:01:39
shown us the the the nature of the thinking that we need to sit back and reflect on to actually make sure we're making the
1:01:46
right decisions and that we're informing ourselves so some great resources there presented by both people
1:01:51
and we will share the slides and really just to say thank you everybody for coming along today i hope you got a lot out of your investment in
1:01:58
time and very much appreciate the input from alma and from barry and thanks again to the regional
1:02:03
committee and for setting this up such a successful event and we'll be in touch as always with our program of
1:02:09
activity and look forward to engaging with you further okay can i just say that the link to the survey
1:02:15
is available if anyone wants to um wants to complete our national survey and join already the the 3200 responses
1:02:24
we have and voices so if you'd like to complete that and you haven't seen it um the link is there now and it'll take about
1:02:29
seven or eight minutes so thanks very much okay so there's the link for everybody to actually um click on it now and and before you
1:02:37
exit out of the zoom and you'll have it there to complete so okay good call out and i'll know and
1:02:43
you know it's an important survey to get really good information in terms of that and so thanks everybody and um
1:02:50
stay well and follow the rules and follow the guidelines with another bit to go but at least we're getting there
1:02:55
and a bit more brighter weather coming at us take care now bye everyone
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