Should we be licensed to work from home?

Ever imagined a world where trust, openness, and virtuality are the norm in the workplace? Buckle up as we dig deep into the seismic shift from an office-centric model to the hybrid work norm, all thanks to an unprecedented global pandemic. We have as our guests Andrew Mawson, Founder and Managing Director of AWA, and Brad Taylor, AWA's Director of Consulting, to provide a bird's eye view on this transitional phase and the friction it's sparking between senior leadership and employees.

Now, let's consider the paradox of remote work - it isn't just about being able to work in your pajamas, it's about maintaining a balance between the duty of care and performance expectations. This episode unfolds the role of leaders and HR teams in this context, and we also explore the idea of licensing for remote work. It's a lot to unpack, but if you're trying to navigate the complexities of hybrid work or are simply interested in the future of work, we promise you valuable insights and takeaways!


Get your copy of the new AWA report - "Should we be licensed to work from home?".

Mentions:

• Andrew's Forbes article: Uneasy Ground: The Shifting Tectonic Plates Of Hybrid Working (forbes.com)

AWA Host: Karen Plum

Guests: 

• Andrew Mawson, Founder and Managing Director, AWA
• Brad Taylor, Director of Consulting, AWA

AWA Guest details: https://www.advanced-workplace.com/our-team/ 

CONTACTS & WEBSITE details:

AWA contact: Andrew Mawson 

AWA Institute contact: Natalia Savitcaia 

Music: Licensed by Soundstripe – Lone Canyon

Want to know more about AWA?

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Thanks for listening to the DNA of work podcast

Transcript

Karen Plum: 0:00

Hello there. Does your organisation have any framework in place to ensure the health, safety and performance of its people wherever they're working? So many of us went home to work when the pandemic hit and we don't want to go back to the office full time, but the shift to hybrid working needs to be a bit more carefully managed and monitored than many organisations might be thinking about. So in this episode we're asking - do we need to licence people to work from home? Welcome to AWA's podcast, which is all about the changing world of work and trying to figure out what's right for each organisation, because we know that every one is unique. We talk to people who have walked the walk, who've got the t-shirt and who've learned lessons that they're happy to share with us. I'm your host, Karen Plum, and this is the DNA of Work.

Karen Plum: 0:58

We talk about hybrid working a lot on this podcast. It's the biggest change in the world of work for decades, but as people who work with organisations every day, to help them change the way they work, we at AWA are very conscious that it can be easy for people to think that they've made the shift to hybrid working. It happened during the pandemic and it's all sorted. But is it really? The things we did in a crisis to simply get through such a testing time aren't necessarily fit for purpose over the long term. Lots of things are different, and we're more than a little worried that some organisations may sleepwalk into big issues, particularly associated with wellbeing, but also with performance. To explore these issues, I talked to Andrew Mawson, founder and managing director of AWA, and AWA's Director of Consulting, Brad Taylor. For many people, the pandemic is firmly in the rearview mirror, so I started by asking Brad to remind us how things were before the pandemic, when home working really wasn't that common.

Brad Taylor: 2:03

Back in the day before the pandemic, typically, if you wanted to work from home, then you would have been offered a home working contract. So that would have been a conversation you have with your employer, most likely because you want to work from home the majority of the week or perhaps come in occasionally, but you could do most of your work remotely. You were probably more distant from the workplace as well, hence why you wanted to work from home, and organisations would have had policies specifically aimed at people who work from home so that they would have been clear about how they evaluate whether someone's a home worker or not.

Brad Taylor: 2:34

And then if you wanted to work from home occasionally, then that was normally a conversation with your manager about could I possibly work from home on Friday or on a specific day to get a specific piece of work done, which was great if you wanted to get your head down and focus. But I guess the downside of that tended to be that people might think, well, if they're working from home, we can't really disturb them. So it was very much seen as a way of just being uncontactable so you could get your head down and get things done. So it kind of worked, but it was nowhere near as prevalent as it is today.

Brad Taylor: 3:05

And it really wasn't encouraged was it? A lot of suspicion often attached to it that if you're working from home, are you working from home? Perhaps managers doing surprise calls just checking up on you - oh are you there? Just wanted to ask you a few questions, that sort of thing, just to make sure. Can I hear anything in the background? Are they really working from home?

Karen Plum: 3:24

Yeah, not a lot of overt or evident trust being expressed by the organisation or by your manager. So, of course, then came along the pandemic in 2020 and upended all of that. Andrew, can you cast your mind back a few years - remind us what happened?

Andrew Mawson: 3:45

What's been interesting to me is to reflect on what happened before and what happened during the pandemic, because before I think Brad's articulation is spot on the world was very office centric. It was presence centric, and, if we're really honest about it, the command and control models that most organisations have lived with for donkey's years start with the notion of mistrust. And so that was the kind of start point. That's where we were pre-pandemic in my mind, and if you weren't working in the office, you were the oddball that needed somehow to go through some process that would then enable the organisation to give you permission to work away, and as long as you behaved yourselves properly.

Andrew Mawson: 4:31

You were allowed to continue with that. Of course, during the pandemic, everybody was thrown into working at home. Organisations had to trust people. They had to let them get on and do things. Leaders became a little bit more visible, and some were very good, some were highly empathetic, others were not so good and their teams suffered. I think teams themselves behaved well and got on, and a lot of them did really good work as well as they probably would have done if they'd been in the office. In a sense, we've gone from presence, low trust to virtuality and high trust. So that was kind of, I think, where we ended up with in the pandemic - because we're all in the same boat that was the other thing. Most people were operating the same way and of course as we've moved back into what we might call business as usual post pandemic, we've now got this interesting cocktail of views and opinions and different ways of doing stuff and personal impressions of things. Yeah, it's an interesting challenge.

Karen Plum: 5:38

It is, but I suppose it's also important to remember that the previous way of working you know everybody pitching up into the office every day and working together, wasn't perfect either. There were lots of shortcomings. B ut anyway, just to bring us up to date, where do you think we are now, Brad?

Brad Taylor: 5:59

I think, Karen, there's kind of two ways of looking at it really. There's the how are things right now and in the short term, and then there's what are the longer term implications of what's going on? So I think, coming from the pandemic, a lot of organisations are thinking, actually, this is not too bad really, is it? And there was a real sense of you know, all hands to the pump when the pandemic happened and people just had to work from home, no matter what the circumstances, and organisations were frankly trying to ship out chairs and desks or whatever they might need to get out to people and monitors and such like, but those things may not be suitable for long term sustained remote working. And therefore there's a tendency to think that everything might be okay now. But are there issues that are lurking that are not probably being paid attention to? Have we really thought about the types of environments that people are sat in?

Brad Taylor: 6:50

And then there's the longer term implications on organisations as well, which is that prior to the pandemic, we would have made connections, naturally as we moved around the buildings, and not just people that we worked with and we collaborated with, but people we saw in the coffee queue or in the lifts, for example. And organisations taking a look at and thinking this doesn't feel absolutely correct. Is there something we're missing here in terms of how the organisation is knitting together and working? So there's this whole context going on is are people actually safe working from home and in the right sort of environments? And have we done enough not just what we did during the pandemic, have we taken proper hard, long look at those circumstances, and are we also nurturing the general health of the organisation in terms of how people are being able to collaborate, get things done, make the sort of connections that they need to have over the long term as well?

Karen Plum: 7:38

So I guess there's a combination of physical and procedural and policy type issues. So, have we got the right equipment? Are people working in suitable environments at home? Are they okay in terms of their sort of mental health, their physical health, all of those sorts of things? But also as an organisation, are we making the right connections? Is the work being done as productively as possible? But, Andrew, in terms of fixing the ills of the past and the current, perhaps shortcomings or problems, I guess there must be opportunities as well.

Andrew Mawson: 8:21

Well, I think there are opportunities, because isn't this the time we should be taking a blank sheet of paper, organisationally and at a team level, community level, and say right, how do we want the world to be as we go forward?

Andrew Mawson: 8:36

Because I think we hear so many different opinions about whether working from home is a good idea or whether it's not, and they're based upon your own personal prejudices, your own history, your own role, your own experience of the world, your own personality.

Andrew Mawson: 8:54

But I think now is the time we could be going through a sensible process to agree what the rules of the game are organisationally, what we want people to do, how we want people to behave, be quite explicit about it, and then to transition that down to teams and communities. Because, in the end, what I think we're trying to get is the best balance between what makes a team effective, linked to what makes the organisation effective, but also trying to take on more of the aspirations and the desires, from a work standpoint, of the individuals in the team. And if we can align all those things together, then it seems to me we've got the best of all worlds. We've got happy people doing things in a way which is appropriate. Teams are firing on all cylinders and those teams are all contributing to a bigger story. So that's kind of how I see this thing. But in order to get to that point, I think you have to cross the bridge into the world of trust. And I think, as I've reflected more on what's been going on, in the world.

Andrew Mawson: 9:57

What I think we've seen, with some of the very large organisations insisting that people return to a pre-pandemic model of the world, is that to get from a world where things are set in a model of distrust and command and control and presence, particularly if you're a senior leadership community, moving that to trust, openness and a more virtualised model is not easy.

Karen Plum: 10:27

It's very tempting for them to want to go back to that way of operating, way of thinking, way of acting and behaving that they are comfortable with, because, at the end of the day, they are the ones who bear the responsibility for ultimate outcomes and, therefore, if they want to feel a bit more certain about what's going to happen, they want things the way they want them.

Andrew Mawson: 10:52

Well, I wrote an article for Forbes a few weeks ago. It was all about the tectonic plates, the friction between senior leadership communities and the rest of the organisation, how that had come to pass. And I started to write another article which was written through the eyes of a Fortune 500 chief exec, and I started to do quite a lot of research into what a Fortune 500 chief exec looks like. Well, first of all, they're male, 50, went to an elite business school - Princeton or Harvard or something like that. They earn about $15 million a year and the buck stops here with them. They're responsible for delivering on today's business performance.

Andrew Mawson: 11:37

They're a long way away from the operational roots of the organisation, necessarily. They're flying around the world in private airplanes and doing all this kind of stuff. And of course they've got shareholders who are probably from a world of some conservatism, asking them why performance is going off and of course, the world is a challenging place at the moment and of course, their people are telling them.

Andrew Mawson: 12:01

Well, it's partly because all these people are working from home and people are hiding behind all sorts of excuses. And you can see, if you sort of think through that little scenario, I believe I'm in charge and I've got the right to demand what I want of people in order to, you know, achieve the corporation's objectives.

Andrew Mawson: 12:23

That's a world, I think, that is gradually giving way to you know, the employee as a consumer. Employees are working out where they want to go and spend their time, based upon the organisations and conditions they find within those organisations. So this kind of demand from the powerful boardroom, you know, being transmitted down through an organisation of people who have kind of got used to the idea of trust, it's not sitting well. And so I think you kind of have to take a view that if you want to take full advantage of all the things that you could take advantage of at this point and rethink the way your organisation works, it's a big journey, and so in order to do it, you know you're gonna have to have senior leaders who have kind of comfortable with this more transitional shift. And, of course, many of the senior leaders that are in position and you know seats of serious power aren't comfortable with it. They want the world to return to the one that made them successful, and you can see why.

Karen Plum: 13:32

So what do you do if you're in an organisation that has one of these types of CEOs who really isn't looking for anything new, but who is very happy to go back to the world that they feel comfortable in?

Andrew Mawson: 13:46

It comes back to HR, I think, and possibly infrastructure leaders. HR leaders are getting pulled in two directions at the moment. Senior leaders are wanting them to go in one direction and in order to be able to recruit the right talent the organisation needs and to retain the right talent, they're having to offer flexibility, so they're having to go against the grain of the senior leadership community simply to keep the organisation with the right talent. And I think, over time what's going to happen here is that organisations are going to work its way through because employees are going to make their choices. So if you want to get the right, you know the best talent in your organisation, you're going to have to start looking at the employees more as consumers and start thinking about how do you create the conditions that are going to make those people more interested in being with you as opposed to being with somebody else, and over time I think that will ultimately lead to a softening.

Andrew Mawson: 14:46

I think there is a battle and there's a bit of enlightenment needs to be brought into play, probably through HR leaders around the boardroom, but there's also an enlightenment in the workforce as well. I think there has to be a little bit of understanding that this isn't all about what you want. There's a balance to be had.

Karen Plum: 15:08

OK, so for organisations, for people in HR particularly Brad, can you identify a couple of the big things that they really need to be looking at at the moment?

Brad Taylor: 15:20

I think Andrew was right when he used the phrase 'create the conditions'. So the sort of things that organisations need to be thinking about is, first of all, what are the right sort of optimal environments for humans to operate in? They're working more remotely. How are we ensuring that they're creating environments whereby they're looking after their health, their well-being, they're getting the right levels of rest, that the place where they choose to work from is physically safe and good for them to be able to sustain for long periods of time working or focusing on things? Is it interruption free? Have they got access to the right sort of technology that enables them to get things done?

Brad Taylor: 15:57

And then, have we helped create a framework for the organisation to know how to collaborate with one another so that, yes, we might not be in the office at the same time, but is it clear how we get things done around here so that people aren't sat at home wondering whether they should be sending emails or phoning someone up or booking a team meeting or whatever it might be as well? Those are the things that need paying attention to rather than just think, well, we'll leave it all to chance or its common sense and everyone would just do the right thing. T hat rarely works out well. And those are the sort of things that can start causing frustration when there's deadlines looming or pressures rising because there's a situation that needs attending to. If we have the right sort of frameworks in place and we know how we deal with these sort of crises or intense moments, then things tend to work a lot better.

Karen Plum: 16:45

An overarching description for all of that is probably the duty of care, isn't it, that organisations have a duty to ensure that all of these things are being looked at?

Brad Taylor: 16:56

It is. It shouldn't just be sort of out of sight and out of mind when it comes to people working from home or thinking that just because it was okay during the pandemic that it's okay today. You know, organisations do have a duty of care towards people and that means ensuring that they are, their health isn't being jeopardized whether it's their physical health or their mental health. That there's not things going on within that environment that's making them feel bullied or threatened or psychologically unsafe in the work environment. That they're getting access to development and career growth and mentoring and all those sort of things that they would have got in the office. You know we just can't leave people just to get on them and fend for themselves, you know, if they're working from home. There's things that we would have done in the office that we need to make sure that we are still doing, even though they're working at home. That ensures that you know, we are looking after them and we're being responsible for their, for their well-being.

Karen Plum: 17:50

But also recognizing that you know all of these things weren't a given if you were in the office or are in the office. To some extent it's easier, but you've still got to do it.

Andrew Mawson: 18:00

I think we should rename this whole thing. I mean, you know, we should be talking about duty of care and performance, not just duty of care. I mean, duty of care feels like it's a, it's a baseline against which, you know, we want to make sure somebody isn't gonna get damaged or or ill, or sick or whatever. I'd like us, for us, to go beyond that. Of course, we want to make sure all those things are right, but don't we want to create the conditions under which every human being and every team is operating at their best? And if we are going to do that, you know, and we're doing that in a virtual world where, you know, there is a little bit of an on-cost to ensuring that everybody's connected. Then it seems to me there are some management disciplines and personal disciplines that need to be put in place and have them become part of your, your culture and the way you operate your business.

Andrew Mawson: 18:51

You know that need to be institutionalised, and I think that's what we're talking about here. You know, I don't think we're just talking about health and safety. I think we're talking about health, safety and superior performance. I think that's when people are working in a virtual model. That's what I'd like to encourage organisations to think about more.

Brad Taylor: 19:09

Yeah, particularly for you know team leaders and you know line managers, who in some ways it was a bit easier to do it in the office environment because people are around you all the time and you can see when there's issues or you know underperformance or someone's not looking you know, in terms of their performance and their well-being, that perhaps you see them on other days, you could tell if something was wrong. And I think there is a risk that line managers who are just getting more and more workload placed on them all time, they've been so much more thinly stretched that having a team that some are working from home and some are working in the office is putting extra pressure on them. A nd what we need to do as employers is ensure that we're not being unrealistic about what they can do and help the line manager out.

Andrew Mawson: 19:49

Yeah, I go a bit further than that, Brad, and I'd say, yes, of course, there is an enhanced role that the Leader needs to play, but I think there's also this thing that we've talked about over the years, that I've described as worker- ship. Having the individual take some responsibility for the connection they have with their leader. Having them responsible for the connection they have with colleagues, building relationships, maintaining relationships, you know, ensuring that they are in their best place to do the best job they can for the organisation. I think people, workers in exchange for this freedom and trust, have to give something back to the organisation as well, and I think that's also a part of this new agreement, really, that we need to strike between the organisation, the leadership and the individual.

Karen Plum: 20:40

Given that there are lots of things that could potentially change or could be better expressed and documented. What do you think the answer is, Andrew?

Andrew Mawson: 20:49

Well, I mean, I think one of the things we might want to do is to think about the idea of licensing people to work in this way, and I don't mean that in a heavy-handed, draconian kind of way, but we, we clearly know that there are a number of factors that need to be in place, and I think some of you may have seen the report we published very recently, which is called 'Should we be licensed to work from home?', and it identifies really eight areas that you know need to be in place in order for people to be safe and highly effective whilst working in a hybrid working model. And on the one side of that, you know some of the things we've already talked about. We've talked about electrical safety, physical safety, but I'm talking also about the reliability of the IT infrastructure, for instance; creating an agreement that the individual will find some distraction free ability at home, and if that changes, it should be reported because, ultimately, we want people to be at their best. Do people have an understanding of the practices they should be adopting in order to make sure that they are in the best shape from a cognitive wellness and cognitive fitness standpoint? Things like breaks, hydration, nutrition, sleep, all of these things which you know are important to, they were important pre pandemic, but they're even more important now.

Andrew Mawson: 22:21

And then team working agreements - have we got agreements within the team with the leader that define how the team is going to work in a harmonious way? We absolutely don't want friction and tension within the organisation and is the individual managed by somebody who's been trained to manage a hybrid team? And is it clear to everybody how to manage mental workload? Because my personal view is that the whole business about supply and demand of cognitive resource, you know, is now going to become a big deal issue, as we no longer can see physically the buildup of work on somebody's desk or how they're feeling or whatever. So there's lots of these different things I think that we we really need to make sure are in place in order to make sure that people are on their A game and you know that they're safe. Of course, you know you could put a lot of these things in place, but how do we keep them in place? How do we keep it like this?

Andrew Mawson: 23:21

And I think licensing maybe one way to think about it. You know, can we have a checklist for all those things for an individual that we can tick off and, and you know, maybe for a six month period or something, w e know that they're, they're right and proper.

Karen Plum: 23:37

So, Brad, final question for you. If an organisation's thinking about this idea of licensing their people to work from home, w here would be a good place to start?

Brad Taylor: 23:49

I think a good place to start, first of all, is take a look at what's already in place. So what do we have in terms of homeworker policies and flexible working arrangements, and what have we done for people so far? So, has everyone at very least completed a DSE assessment when it comes to their homeworking environment? Have we encouraged everyone to reflect on what that's like? Secondly, have a framework that line managers can work to - to start having conversations with their people covering things like health, well being and performance. Are those things being looked after and enabled and build it out from there. And the third thing, then, if you can do three things, is a technology review. What sort of things have we got in place? Are there any shortfalls that we've got when it comes to technology that we can start putting in place to help people be more productive?

Karen Plum: 24:37

And, of course, Andrew, t he very first thing they could do is go to the AWA website, advanced-workplace. com and download the report, right?

Andrew Mawson: 24:46

Absolutely - a fine piece of authorship!

Karen Plum: 24:50

Is it free?

Andrew Mawson: 24:51

It is free, like most of the stuff that we have on our website. We're very generous with all that material. The reason why I think this report is an important report, is because the default position for many people is now no longer the physical office, so we're no longer dealing with a few odds and sods situations where people want to work at home. We're dealing with a whole population that psychologically have shifted and in most cases, because we know from the stats, most people are spending more than two days a week at home, which is the balance of time is no longer in the office. And that's really why I think organisations should be paying more attention to the things that we've brought out in the report.

Karen Plum: 25:38

And there you have it. There are lots of things that organisations should at least review and make sure they're happy with, and these are all set out in Andrew's report - 'Should we be licensed to work from home?'. It's free to download from the AWA website, advanced-workplace. com. Just head to the Research and Insights page and look for the Reports section. Many thanks to Andrew and Brad for walking through the thinking with me. And if you think about it, we need a licence to drive a car to make sure we have the right skills and that we understand what's expected of us when we're out on the roads, to keep ourselves and others safe and to ensure we can be productive wherever we're heading. So is licensing a way for organisations to fulfil their duty of care and to safeguard performance? Take a look at the report and see what you think. If you'd like to hear future episodes of the DNA of work, just follow or like the show. You can contact us on our website, advanced-workplace. com. Thank you so much for listening. See you next time. Goodbye.