Our senior associate Sarah Jackson OBE summarises her in-depth research with Scottish employers on the lasting legacy of Covid lockdown on current ways of working.

The pandemic put paid to presenteeism by demonstrating workers don’t need to be in an office to be effective.  In a series of interviews with a diverse group of employers about how adjusting to the pandemic has changed the way we work now, I was reminded once more of what a profound upending of normality we all experienced in 2020.  Their language vividly reflected the shock of the new: the pandemic forced our hands, accelerated plans, leapfrogged us, bounced us ten years ahead.

Shifting expectations

I have been a campaigner for flexible working for over 25 years.  I see what is happening as a very positive step away from pre-pandemic presenteeism. But the shift in expectations has, in some cases particularly relating to hybrid working, resulted in a sense of ‘me-ism’ where workers put themselves first and think less about their broader contribution to their team and organisation.

The challenge for employers now is to ensure that hybrid workers understand their value to their wider team, and that hybrid arrangements are managed collectively, because staff now expect more choice and control in when and where they work.

The parallel challenge, expressed by most of the employers I spoke to for this study, was in making flexible working ‘fair’ across the whole workforce.  What is encouraging is that several had successfully introduced new shift patterns and working hours to create more choice for frontline and other workers who cannot work from home.

Overall, all employers in the study were thinking differently about how best to organise work across the board, and about the impact of greater flexibility on culture and performance.

Hybrid benefits and challenges

There’s no doubt that hybrid working is positive for most workers who can use it, and employers in the study generally reported that they see organisational benefits from happier more productive workers too. But I came across whispers of concern about some negative impacts on team or organisational performance.

This is understandable.  Hybrid is adding complexity to managing teams.  Before the pandemic, office workers were generally in the office all or most of the time. Even flexible workers, such as people working part time hours, tended to work their hours to accommodate the majority in the team. It wasn’t always good for the individual, with some negative impacts on their work life balance and family responsibilities. But for the organisation, it worked well.

Now hybrid working can mean the majority of office workers may be working flexibly off-site at any one time. It works well if you need to juggle work and home responsibilities, but in order to work well for organisations it has to be carefully managed by the team, or collective. It works less well when it’s driven by individual preferences, which can result in team fragmentation and significant reduction of shared time together.

Employers don’t need to reduce workers’ choice and control by demanding everyone returns to the office full time or on set days. But they do need to ensure that remote and hybrid arrangements are discussed and agreed with collective as well as individual needs and preferences in mind.

Trust needed to bed in positive lasting change

None of the employers I interviewed expected more significant change to affect how their people work in future, but they did expect to learn from and build on recent experiences and organically develop flexible ways of working that suit the organisation and its people, both on the frontline and in the office.

For me, one word summed up the positives and also the risks they face now – trust, which I have always identified as the necessary underpinning ingredient of any flexible team or organisation.  And it reminded me that trust is not a simple thing, to be summoned up at will as part of the culture.  It has to be earned, by leaders, managers and workers; and respected, and renewed.

Lockdown taught many cautious managers that their people could be trusted to deliver while working flexibly.  Some organisations are staying true to that learning, others are reverting to old patterns of presenteeism.

The new ways of working that we are experiencing now will require continuing investment in trust, if they are to be sustained and if they are to deliver longer term benefit to organisations, their staff and their customers.

For more information including advice and recommendations for managers to deal with current challenges, download Sarah Jackson’s report How we work now: The enduring impact of Covid lockdown on how we work now.