Suppositions and predictions about the future of work have been clogging up the airwaves of the business world ever since COVID-19 first fired the starting pistol for mass remote working. In the last week, these discussions have heated up even further in response to the comments of Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, who warned that home working may hurt the careers of young people.
Speaking to LinkedIn News, Sunak said he doubted he would have enjoyed his current success if he had started his working life virtually. He highlighted that he still speaks with his early mentors and that, “I doubt I would have had those strong relationships if I was doing my summer internship or my first bit of my career over Teams and Zoom… That’s why I think, for young people in particular, being able to physically be in an office is valuable.”
Sunak’s comments come at a time when major financial institutions are starting to set out their plans for the future of work - albeit tentatively, given the ongoing uncertainty regarding COVID restrictions. Only earlier this week, Travelers Companies revealed that it is pushing back the date of re-entry to the office due to concerns over the Delta variant of the virus.
An interesting element to the plans slowly being unveiled is the lack of uniformity that underpins them. The call to work from home was a near-universal pronouncement but now that the responsibility to work remotely is being replaced by the opportunity to do so, how companies have really felt about these operational changes is coming to light.
For instance, Crawford & Company has launched an initiative that introduces “a new way of agile working” for its employees in the UK while AIG has set a return-to-office date for its global workforce. Deloitte has been steadily increasing the number of staff allowed to work in its offices, while Aviva has said it anticipates more people returning, though employees are expected to work in a hybrid fashion.
“Hybrid” seems to be the word of the week for most insurance companies, as they look to embrace more flexible working arrangements for their people designed to alleviate the pressure on individuals and on the practical capacity considerations of an office re-purposed for social distancing.
A common theme among all the Press releases detailing their plans for the future is an acknowledgement of the far-reaching implications of any decision on the social, economic and cultural landscape of the UK. It’s not a decision to be taken lightly and that is true not only for the insurance businesses making them, but also for the individuals weighing up the merits of a return to the office.
From where I stand, there is little doubt that Sunak has made a valid point about the limitations of remote working. There is the rightful fear of being ‘Out of sight, out of mind’, particularly if your colleagues are working in person, a concern backed up by research from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, as well as data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which has been tracking UK homeworking hours, rewards and opportunities for over a decade.
Statistics from the ONS in April 2021 revealed that those who mainly work from home are less than half as likely to be promoted than all other workers over a five-year period, and also almost 40% less likely to have received a bonus compared to those who never work from home, over a seven-year period. And I suppose that is somewhat understandable. After all, it is significantly more straightforward to develop strong interpersonal relationships with peers and managers in person, and it’s easier to have the extra work or hours that you put in recognised when you are office-based.
Yet, while the statistics speak for themselves, nothing in life is ever really simple enough to be parsed down to data and soundbites. There are significant benefits to working from home from financial boons, increased productivity and reduced stress levels. All of this is operating in the foreground of an issue that many people have not yet considered – that the upcoming Gen-Z generation is of a different mindset to those who came before. Inevitably, they do not have the same motivations as other generations, and their ambitions may well be rooted in very different considerations from promotions and bonuses.
Employers need to ask themselves what it is that young people genuinely want from their working lives and their working spaces and react to this with flexibility and empathy. It’s a very different world from even a year and a half ago, let alone since most joined the job market, and it seems to me that the only right answer is that there is not yet a right answer – only the opportunity to ask the right questions.
