Flexible Working in a Post-Covid World - Guest Article
Since the UK-wide lockdown on 23 March 2020, thousands of businesses that have remained open have been forced into home-working, many for the very first time. Organisations that didn’t even know whether working from home could work have been suddenly thrown in at the deep end and expected to navigate the complex world of flexible working as a result of the pandemic. But once everything goes back to ‘normal’, whatever our new normal is, what will flexible working look like?
Several of the UK’s biggest business leaders have announced that they expect traditional workplaces will be a thing of the past, with big city offices being ditched in favour of smaller spaces for client entertaining, collaborative working and hot-desking. The overheads of running an office can have a considerable impact on a business, and there are clearly benefits to minimising or getting rid of this expense altogether. Add in the issues with commuting, sickness absence and work-life balance and home working does begin to appear to be a favourable choice.
In the tech world, it can safely be assumed that remote working is going to be commonplace moving forward, with Facebook, Google and Spotify extending home working until the end of 2020. Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey has offered employees the option of working from home indefinitely if they choose. In a blog post, the social media giant stated, “We were uniquely positioned to respond quickly and allow folks to work from home given our emphasis on decentralisation and supporting a distributed workforce capable of working from anywhere. The past few months have proven we can make that work. So if our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen.”
In Banking, Barclays, Mastercard and RBS are all going to be homeworking for the next few months, with Mastercard allowing employees to return when they’re ready to come back to the office. Barclays’ Jes Stanley has also said that a big city office “may be a thing of the past” going forward.
However, not everyone is of the same mindset. In October 2019, Laura Jones of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London published a report workplace progression for women in flexible working arrangements. Jones stated that she noticed a clear and distinct marginalisation of flexible and part-time workers, citing this as “a phenomenon produced by a mismatch between these ways of working and organisational cultures which equate commitment with the ability to work long hours; and which assume that those who make use of these schemes do not want to develop their careers.”
There appears to be a stigma attached to those who work in part-time and flexible working arrangements that they are less motivated by career progression, and evidence suggests that they are passed over for promotion and progression opportunities due to their working status. Jones also referenced a 2018 study, which found that 32% of UK employees believed that having a flexible working arrangement decreased their chances of promotion.
What are your views on flexible working? Do you plan to return to the office, move to a home working model, or have the best of both worlds?
