Julian Saunders presented our latest GreenJam event ‘The New Hybrid World Of Work’ which discussed the many professional lifestyle changes that will occur once the pandemic has cleared up. The key message of the session was habits are difficult to break, 12 months of enforced behavioural change has happened with us working from home. How will employees react to going in the office again? Is the tech good enough to facilitate work from home in the long term? Is it all just a cost cutting exercise?
Julian went through a poll during our session that highlighted some agreement between attendees that a hybrid working model could become standard. While the attendees had different views on how it would affect company culture.
Most commentators agree we won’t go back to where we were before, flexible working will be the norm. Is it a good thing? Will it last?
The questions that were asked throughout the GreenJam were user centric. Each attendee works for a company that has a different working philosophy to the next. This makes results broad in some areas such as ‘The Impact Of A Flexible Work Schedule On Your Company’ which sees attendees, as a collective, have very different perceptions of how a hybrid working structure will affect their company. Some think it would be a good addition, some think it would be manageable, while some think it would be bad for the work culture of the company. The full results from the live survey can be found here.
The majority of participants felt 2-3 days working from home in the week would be beneficial. We shouldn’t expect employees to be thrown back into a 5 day office week straight away, although we can expect a gradual shift from 5 working days at home to 4 at home, 1 in the office. With it continuing to average out.
Many big named companies such as Coinbase, Atlassian and Quora have adopted a permanent work from home setting. While Microsoft have opted for a 50/50 hybrid model. The talking point will be around how many companies opt for a hybrid working model. Ultimately, the views of the employees will be on a case by case basis. A young working family with two kids may find difficulty going back into the office – professionals who work in client facing roles may be thrilled to ditch the Zoom calls, get back to face to face communication with their clients and make a greater impact.