HR urged to tailor hybrid & flexible working to individual preferences

Tailored working arrangements are the key to high productivity and staff retention according to the latest study on working preferences. HR has a key role in supporting managers to have conversations with employees about the most productive and effective working arrangements both individually and collectively. We’ll consider the data and why it matters that HR understands the difference between flexible and hybrid working.

This is Research by RingCentral, based on a survey of 1,002 UK full-time workers aged 21 to 65 conducted between September and October looking at the productivity benefits of a hybrid working model over jobs that are based in an office full-time.
People Management reports on this. Half of workers surveyed, 51%, said they feel more productive when working from home. 10% said they feel unproductive in their current role. 

The results show that flexibility is so important to employees that 58% would change jobs or industries to ensure they can work in a hybrid or remote environment. 60% said they would rather work remotely or in a hybrid environment for an extra three years over working in the office full-time for the rest of their career.

However, hybrid working is not for everyone. Research published earlier this month by the University of Nottingham found that engagement within a hybrid working environment is lower among young employees, with under-20s reporting significantly less engagement than older workers. 

Carolyn Hobdey, chief people consultant at Brilliant, says HR could “play a role” in supporting managers leading a split workforce by “helping them to facilitate conversations with their team about what’s working and what is not for that team, both individually and collectively”. 

Gemma Dale, lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, cautions against blanket approaches or policies. She says: “wherever possible, including for wellbeing and engagement reasons, the more tailored someone’s working arrangement is to their personal style and preferences, the more effective they will be”.

So, the message is, as far as possible, steer towards tailored working arrangements to keep staff happy and improve productivity which are focused on the individual’s particular circumstances and job role, using hybrid and flexible working policies as the tools to achieve that. But there is an important difference between hybrid and flexible working and it’s a difference managers need to understand when they are having these conversations with employees in their team. Earlier I caught up with Anne Sammon to discuss the difference and why it matters:

Anne Sammon: “So I think, first of all, it's really important to say that the two concepts are conceptually very different. Hybrid working is all about employers having flexibility and saying to employees we want you to work perhaps a minimum of this number of days in the office, or we're happy for you to work this number of days at home, and allowing a lot of flexibility whereas a flexible working request is a statutory right, although some employers will have extended the statutory right beyond just what the limits of the statute says, but a flexible working request is something that is almost set in stone, doesn't change, is forevermore and tends to be written very particularly from a legal perspective. So it tends to be things like, you have the right to work from home on a Wednesday, or a Thursday, whatever day it is. Contrast that to a flexible working policy, or a right to work from a hybrid perspective, and that will say something like you can work two days a week from home, so that they're very different and they have very different consequences.”

Joe Glavina: “So will it mean that contracts of employment will need changing to reflect the new working arrangements?”  

Anne Sammon: “So I think it all depends on what your employment contract wording already says. Many employment contracts that we've been looking at have got almost a built in flexibility in terms of location of work. So they will say things like your place of work is the company's offices, or such other locations as the company made determine as appropriate from time to time and with that type of flexibility the company can say, well, you can work from home. If you've got a very definite instruction that you must work from the company's offices that’s where you need to start thinking about whether there's a requirement to make a contractual change. Now, one of the things with hybrid working, what we've seen from a lot of clients, is that they want to have a kind of let's try it and see approach rather than embedding this forevermore so many organisations are thinking, well, at the moment we're happy for people to work maybe two days a week from home, but we don't know what the situation might be in a year, in five years, nobody can really predict where we're going with the pandemic and therefore they want that flexibility to be able to change it on a more ad hoc basis and if you build that into the contract, and say, you can work from home two days a week, in order to then change that, that's a contractual change with all the implications that come alongside that. So what we've tended to see is many employers wanting to stay away from hybrid working being a contractual policy so that they can at least argue that if in the future they need to change it and say, actually, this isn't working, we don't think there's the kind of levels of collaboration, for example, that we're expecting, and therefore we want you all to be in the office four days a week, instead of the three days a week, there's that ability to do that.”

Joe Glavina: “Does it make sense for employers to offer a trial period with, perhaps, a review at the end, as we often see with flexible working requests ”

Anne Sammon: “I think the difference with hybrid working is because there's that flexibility is difficult to see what a trial might look like. So what you tend to see with a hybrid working policy is that very kind of high level you can, with the agreement of your manager, decide which days you're going to work from home. I think if somebody is doing fixed particular days at home then a manager might say, well, let's see how this goes and essentially build in a trial period whereas actually where there's flexibility on both sides, you might decide that it's not actually appropriate because if both sides are willing to be flexible then that means that you probably will be able to tweak around the edges and see what works and what doesn't.”

Joe Glavina: “So what’s your key message to HR, Anne?”

Anne Sammon: “I think the key thing that I see as being the difference is that hybrid working is all about giving the organisation and the individual flexibility whereas flexible working, rather conversely, tends to be about giving the individuals and the organisation certainty. So if you think about them in those two different ways, hybrid working will allow you to give direction as to working in a particular pattern, for example the two days a week from the office, whereas flexible working requests tend to be more around I want to do this particular thing forevermore and these are the particular hours and days that I want to be set out in stone. I think what we are seeing at the moment is a lot of clients where they've implemented hybrid working policies and employees, because of childcare reasons for example, want certainty. So if you're an employer and you've said everyone can work from home two days a week, and you're an employee and you need to work from home on, say, a Monday and a Friday, that hybrid working policy doesn't necessarily get you what you want and so then you might put in a flexible working request and say, yes, I'm happy to work two days a week from home but I want those days to be Monday and Friday and I don't want them to ever change.”

There is some useful guidance for HR professionals on this. It’s called ‘Hybrid Working Practical Guidance’ and was commissioned by the 
CIPD on behalf of the Flexible Working Taskforce. We have put a link to it in the transcript of this programme.

LINKS
- Link to Flexible Working Taskforce guidance on hybrid working