Analysis and news
Letting go of the way we worked pre-pandemic As offices have started to open up, Antonia Seymour talks about how not being bound by location means we need to rethink how we work
Hybrid working has been hailed as the future of work, with lots of organisations moving towards a part-home, part-office mix in the hope it will give their workforce the best of both worlds. At IOP Publishing, we don’t see hybrid as being a binary choice between home and office. We just don’t believe it’s quite that simple. When we started to see the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel (which, in hindsight, turned out to be a little premature due to subsequent lockdowns), we decided to take our time to really think about how we could combine virtual and in-person work successfully. It was clear our future would be less office-centric, but how could we keep hold of the positives of home working and not lose sight of the importance of face-to-face time, which helps to build culture and community?
Open to options – colleague consultation Success hinged on us finding a balance that would work for employer and employee. Our approach couldn’t be dictated
by the leadership team – we needed to build it around what colleagues wanted. With the help of strategic workplace experts Interaction and Workwell PCS, we consulted with our colleagues across the globe through focus groups, one-to-one interviews and an online survey. We asked the obvious question about
how often they would want to work from the office, but we also went deeper to understand what the best and worst elements of working in the office or from home were and the difficulties they had experienced.
Flexibility driven by purpose The main message that came from the
20 Research Information Summer 2022
consultation was that colleagues want to work where they can be most productive. There’s no point insisting everyone come into the office for two days a week, if the work they are focussed on at the time could be better done at home. Pre-pandemic, employers would often ask colleagues to explain why they wanted to work from home. Now we need to justify the need to come into the office. Of course, we also found that not
everyone wanted the same thing. Some people indicated they would prefer to work from the office every day, while others found it much easier to work from home most of the time. Being too prescriptive wouldn’t work for us and flexibility needed to come in different forms.
Questioning our norms Our first step was to re-evaluate the norms that had previously been so central to the way we work. Our ways of being and behaviours have always provided the basis of how we work together, but they were based on working in a physical location. Everything has changed – the way we
collaborate, how we raise issues, how we give and receive feedback. Introducing a new set of ways of being and behaviours designed around this change means colleagues take responsibility, make decisions and communicate in this unique, new environment. We then introduced guidelines to show
how the day-to-day could work in practice. Workwell PCS suggested we base these around four elements: • Anchor – coming together in the office • Focus – in a quiet space from any location • Collaborate – regular working in a collaborative space from any location
“Colleagues want to work where they can be most productive”
• Learn – training and development either in the office or online
It’s a big change which is arguably more
complicated than the way we worked pre-pandemic. So, these elements help to provide clarity, which in turn supports autonomy. With some guidelines in place, we left it to individual departments to decide on the where, when and how for their own area. Each department created what Workwell PCS calls ‘Team Charters’, a team level agreement on the ways they will work together and how often they will meet in-person. We have shared these on our intranet so colleagues across the business know how to contact each other. We continued to think about what else we
could change as we move to a less office- centric environment. We’ve introduced a benefit whereby colleagues can work from another country for up to four weeks of the year. After so many months of being unable to travel, this has been well received. We already had initiatives such as ‘no meeting Fridays’ and ‘screen-free days’ to combat online fatigue, and we’ll keep these going.
Better physical and digital locations Having established that the right work would happen in the right place, our focus turned to ensuring we could provide fully supported digital working
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