Employee experience
The fate of flexibility
Years after the pandemic ended, the battle over WFH rumbles on. The latest salvo came last year, as European banks tried to lure employees across the Atlantic, offering fl exible working arrangements that many Wall Street bods couldn’t bring themselves to accept. Liam Murphy talks to Annemarie Matze-Mennes, the future of work and hybrid working programme manager at ABN AMRO, and Claire McCartney, a senior policy adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, to understand how European banks create a progressive but productive working environment, the specifi c advantages of WFH – and whether this new reality is here to stay.
D
uring his two decades designing spacecraft for the US government, Jack Nilles often circled back to two fundamental questions: “Why are we doing things this way – and why can’t we use technology to do things better?” This inquisitive mindset would help him undertake major NASA operations – notably around enabling medical information to travel via satellite from Africa to the US, offering swift support after natural disasters along the way.
Important work indeed. But many will know Nilles from his work on solid ground. While studying a
Future Banking /
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burgeoning idea he called ‘telecommuting’ – initially, a theory involving the creation of terrestrial offices closer to commuters, reducing car pollution – he found himself stuck in traffic. He glanced at a traffic signboard ahead, which read: “MAINTAIN YOUR SPEED”. Nilles sat, completely stationary. The irony of the situation and the inefficiency it represented was not lost on him. Why was the working world doing things this way? Couldn’t the situation be made better? At the time, primitive technology limited the practical applications of Nilles’ revelation. But just under 50 years since that life-changing traffic jam,
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YagudinaTatyana; Darya Palchikova; Nazarkru/
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