On 19th January the UK government signalled ‘the beginning of the end’ for pandemic restrictions. Compulsory face-mask wearing in indoor public spaces ended on 27th January and the requirement to self-isolate if you test positive is likely to end in March. Most immediately, and significantly for legal businesses, the work from home guidance that has been in place for most of the last two years has been retracted. How do firms need to react, particularly to ensure that long-range thinking isn’t swept aside in a rush to be seen to be ‘returning to the office?’
First, of course, there are short-term imperatives that all leadership teams will be addressing right now:
- Clear communication is critical – as we have learned during the pandemic, your people have been assessing the quality of leadership at their firm partly on the basis of how clear your messaging is in the wake of each government announcement. Staff expect the firm to track and anticipate those policy switches, have contingency plans prepared and provide teams with prompt guidance on what it means for them
- Individual consultation – while there’s a sense of fatigue about lengthy internal attitude surveys, firms need to listen to staff before triggering a big shift from home to office working, especially in the middle of winter and as personal finances, particularly for some support roles, come under acute pressure from inflation (including rising travel and subsistence costs)
- Office readiness – some form of office modification and, probably, capacity cap is still going to be required before any full-scale return to the office whilst the highly contagious Omicron variant is still around. For many firms, offices have been pretty much mothballed for a very long period and getting that infrastructure ready for a much bigger daily footfall needs planning and time
- Support readiness – just focusing on the hard office and facilities component of supporting your teams would be a big mistake. At Intelligent Office, we are already busy ramping up on-site business support where scaled-back pandemic-era resources will not be enough for 2022’s demands. But we are also enhancing off-site remote support from our Intelligent Shared Service Centres, to help firms who want to ensure that the flexibility and coverage that hybrid, agile support teams have delivered during the pandemic isn’t suddenly lost by switching back to conventional, all office-based support teams.
It is longer-term evolution that is most at risk of being side-lined as working from home advice ends and we get a buzz from being out and about again. In survey after survey over the pandemic period at least 90% of responding firms stated that hybrid working would be a permanent feature of the way they work going forward. It would be easy in the immediate rush that accompanies an end to working from home guidance and other restrictions to lose sight of this and easy to derail efforts to evolve and enhance a new hybrid working model that still has multiple imperfections. Our experienced team at Intelligent Office are assisting firms with the detailed planning for long-term, seamless hybrid operations, starting with some basic principles:
- Hybrid is a wide spectrum of options which mix office and remote working, not a one-size-fits-all solution. Hybrid is not a euphemism for working from home and we should avoid a 2022 backlash which stigmatises or side-lines hybrid working. Enforced home working is, we hope, in the pandemic past, genuine hybrid working is the future
- The shift of professional and knowledge businesses towards hybrid pre-dates the pandemic and leading firms, led by the Big Four, had dramatically overhauled their workspaces in the years before 2020. As the digitisation of the legal sector continues apace, so new hybrid-friendly tools will make working from anywhere (WFA) even more effective
- Nearly two years of enforced remote working is long enough to create substantial and permanent change in business and personal habits and in the preferences and attitudes of staff. Our collective task now is to retain and reflect the best of these changes whilst also seeking to rapidly restore the best aspects of communal, in-person activity
- The damaging wellbeing and psychological impact of lockdown and enforced home working on many individuals has been highlighted and is a top priority to address as we build new ways of working in 2022. But we also need to address the likely negative impacts for others who will now struggle to adjust to a less flexible work/family balance and a long commute. The negative wellbeing and retention impacts of inflexibly pushing those people back to office working could haunt organisations for at least as long as the impact of the lockdowns
- Building a hybrid working model with more face-to-face interaction than we’ve become used to will rely on clearly communicating the business and personal benefits of time spent in the office: as Sarah-Jane Osborne, Head of Workscape at design consultancy Arcadis, asks ‘are you going to magnetise or mandate people back to the office?’
Finally, we encourage firms to think about the practical operational issues of their long-term hybrid working model for business support services by examining both how seamless business services can support fee earners who are working in a more flexible, hybrid way (notably how excellent services can deal with a constantly shifting and unpredictable fee earner working location) and also where support staff themselves can be most efficiently and effectively located, blending employed and outsourced, office and remote resources.
To find out more about how Intelligent Office can help with this transition, contact Jo Styles – jo.styles@intelligentofficeuk.com or on +44 (0) 7753 497 940.