While the restrictions slowly lift in the UK to allow the high street to open up again, finding answers to the questions hanging over hybrid working is becoming more important.
Although businesses have implemented and made a success of working from home solutions, the call of the office for structure and a social aspect that has been missing for a year, will be stronger than ever as life gets back to normal.
“We have an interesting split within our workforce” explained Iain Sinnott, Sales and Marketing Director at VanillaIP, “the more mature staff want to continue to work from home, swerve the commute every day and get on with what they want to do after work. Whereas predominantly the younger staff miss the social aspect of working in an office, going out for lunch and a couple of drinks when they are done for the day.”
These splits may not be surprising to a lot of employers but Sinnott added that it points to a wider question about who goes back to the office and how often.
“If I took the VanillaIP UK team as an example, salespeople often worked from home before the pandemic and had been split between visiting the office, visiting clients and working from home. So, they were set up with a homework scenario and their eventual pattern is likely to be going back to field work and working home.
“Team managers and senior people in the company will also be in a tricky position as the team that are in the office may need to see their senior colleagues, network with them and gain that insight and advice.
“But I’d expect half the meetings they do with the partners will be virtual and the rest will be face to face. It could be even less face to face as senior management may well want to keep the fuel and expenses bill down, so there will be a different blend there between virtual and in-person meetings and meeting in person could become a differentiator for companies after the pandemic.”
Knee Jerk Reaction
All the talk in the industry at the moment is of how often employees will be working from home, in theory leaving empty office spaces. “I think there might be a knee jerk reaction from the commercial side of businesses who will argue that the office spaces aren’t needed and they should get rid of them,” said Sinnott.
“What we might find is that the energy in the company and the growth that comes with that won’t be sustained in a full remote working and more people need to come back into the office.
“At VanillaIP, we’ve taken the speculative decision to downsize our office space so that half the company can come to the office at a time, based on feedback we’ve had from employees”
“Businesses will be asking themselves whether they need to make a similar decision or take some time to let the market settle before signing a new lease.”
The office lease is not the only contract businesses may need to sign. With the uncertainty over where the office is, Sinnott says that businesses need UC and CX solutions that do not require a long commitment to be productive until they know where their future address is likely to be.
He added that a lot of businesses are still working out their working from home strategies. “I think companies in general need to work out what the net savings of getting rid of an office or getting rid of business travel and all that sort of thing is going to be. If you merely work on the theory that you can chuck somebody a laptop and a pair of headphones and they will get on with it, you will probably bank up a few HR issues down the line with repetitive strain injury from leaning over a laptop for starters.
“If someone is in a meeting, checking email and making a presentation, they might need more than one screen. Employees need to have two cameras so that, if one stops working, the other one is there, the same goes for microphones. I think we are going to be less forgiving in future if employees run into technical issues as well. I have two broadband connections in my house because it’s just not acceptable for me not to be available, that’s the message businesses will set out to be.
Flexible solutions
“At the end of the day, if employees aren’t comfortable working from home they might start looking for a new job, and if they can find something more local or with less travelling, they might leave you because of that.”
“At VanillaIP, we are telling our partners to strike the right balance between being able to offer flexible short-term contracts, multiple choice products and different tools for different types of people and how different types of people need to work, and giving our resellers the opportunity to listen first”
“One of the messages we’re putting out to the channel is the first meeting is not to tell anybody about clever kit. The first meeting is to listen to people about what their experiences have been, what their staff have been able to achieve, what they haven’t been able to achieve, where they’re considering making long term changes, and really just open the ears about what’s happening in every individual company.
“From there we can share with them the breadth of tools that are now in play in the marketplace and think about overcoming challenges in a different way. I think it falls down to reinforcing this mantra of Listen, Educate, Advise and Design, in that order, with the importance being on listening first and educating second before getting into the deal structures.”
