Remote working: maintaining productivity

hi everybody i'm going to kick us off my name is katie jacobs from cipd and
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i'm the host of our coronavirus series of webinars and this afternoon we're going to be
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talking about a topic that is only going to become more important as we continue to work from home and
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those long nights start drawing in how we maintain productivity while remote working now as i said it's
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certainly a hot topic as some of those rather troubling headlines that i've seen and some of you probably have as well about
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employers considering increasing the monitoring of their working from home staff show so what are the more positive ways
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of ensuring productivity remains high and that home working staff remain motivated and engaged and able to
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collaborate effectively joining me to share their thoughts on this topic i'm lucky to have a really
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fantastic panel of experts i'm joined by heifer manzani senior research advisor on data tech and ai at
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the cipd i've got professor allen felstead research professor at cardiff university
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who's been carrying out research on homeworking and its impact on productivity and finally tim ringo an experienced hr
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and management consultant and author of a new and very timely book called solving the productivity puzzle
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thank you very much everyone for joining today uh as ever let me run through the
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housekeeping which if you've seen a lot of these you probably know off by heart by now but uh i'm gonna have to do it anyway
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the session is being recorded it will be available uh afterwards um either this afternoon or tomorrow and
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the slides will also be available so you'll be able to download those later today and my colleague will put the link where
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you can access those in the chat to submit your questions and please do because the things are only as good as
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the interaction we get please can i ask you to use the q a tab which you can see at the bottom of your screen
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so use the q a tab for any questions that you want me to put to the panel but i would encourage you to use the
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chat function for out to speak to and connect with each other and to share your ideas
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it's really really great to see that that going on and i'll keep an eye on it and perhaps i can feed in any themes i see into the
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conversation and a reminder that the cibd coronavirus hub is there for you as a resource
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and we're adding things to it all the time and a reminder that for legal advice cipd
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members can call our hr inform helpline which is available 24 7 and enables you to get an individual
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response on some more complex legal queries and the final thing i want to flag is our wellbeing helpline for our members
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in the uk and ireland with award-winning workplace wellbeing provider health assured we're now able to provide cipd members with free help
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and support via sessions with qualified therapists either online or over the phone so please do remember to look after
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yourselves at such a challenging time so on to our topic at hand i monitor my
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staff with software that takes screenshots that was the headline of a recent bbc news article that caused some
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consternation and heated debate on hr twitter and it's not the only article in recent weeks that have
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suggested that some bosses are concerned about the impact of ongoing home working on productivity
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with many of us looking likely to be at home until at least spring 2021 how will that impact productivity for
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the long term now cipd research has found that two-thirds of employers think home
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workers are more or equally productive as they were in the workplace can we maintain that
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but for those employers that have noticed a reduction in productivity there are issues around lack of engagement and motivation difficulties
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in ensuring staff cooperation and a perceived lack of ability to monitor performance so what to do about it and how can we
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ensure productivity and keep staff motivated and engaged and how can we collaborate most effectively
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when working from home i'll just quickly take you for a running order first up hyphen is going to provide some
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context and copd research and she'll dig more into what i've what i've just spoken about and then alan is going to take us
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through some of his most recent research on this topic and then tim will round off with some more kind of practical advice for hr
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professionals and taking a longer term view of how productivity has shifted and then we'll go into discussion and q a
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but please do get your questions in throughout don't just leave them till the last five minutes so that is it from me for now i'm going
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to hand over to haifa to kick us off over to you heither
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thanks katie um i'm going to start with uh sharing some findings from a new cipd
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report written by my colleagues in the policy team it's from the embedding new ways of working
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implications for the post-pandemic workplace um so the stats that katie just quoted
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um that was referring to the question on the employer perceptions
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employee perceptions of homework and productivity and what we found in the survey was that
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actually people who used to work in the office and had moved to remote working they have been more or
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less um you know the same working at the same level productivity according to employers
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37 said it had no impact either way and if you looked at people who said um
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improved to a large extent a small extent about 29 percent and those who said that they they were
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less employees were less productive that was 28 so in terms of shifts either way it was
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roughly balanced so you can say in conclusion that productivity levels have pretty much
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been maintained um during the pandemic when people have to work from home um
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so next slide so the employers who said that um you know where productivity
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had been hampered they said that the issue was to do with um lack of staff motivation and
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engagement difficulties uh with ensuring that staff can interact and cooperate
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and and the lack of ability to monitor staff performance and other um challenges that were
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quoted in the survey was that um that that actually was also the line
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management capability uh in terms of being able to monitor their uh employees remotely and that actually they thought that some
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jobs were probably not that well suited to remote working um in the interviews in the report there was um
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for example one one example was um uh the person's job is to find new business and they found it a
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lot easier to sit down have a chat coffee or beer with someone to to um you know explain what the
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product is and to try to sell them the product and to do that from home is a bit more challenging so just to
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provide them some context and and why it might be a problem uh working from home for some employee before
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for some employers um but interestingly uh though those employers that have
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reported that productivity has increased um reported the opposite uh kind of
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problems to the employers who said that productivity has fallen for the employees so instead of saying the la you know
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they found that um those who found that um productivity has increased they said actually their
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staff were more motivated and engaged not not not less motivated or engaged and actually that their staff
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collaborated better and not you know they didn't have issues with um collaboration
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and and what has helped us actually the having the virtual collaboration tools um like the microsoft teams for example is very
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popular you know that the platform allows you to um chat with your colleagues uh or and have
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different rooms of the chat and also video conferencing which is very important because you know
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having the visual cues is very important to know whether you know someone's engaged or interested in what you're saying
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um and and other tools um like um other apps like a planner for example
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microsoft teams planner allows you to um have like post-it notes and and basically share you know what what
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work that you're doing and um you know what's coming next so it allows communication between teams
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um so what i'm trying to say is that actually it's not so much the technology
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that's that's the uh in the way when it comes to working for coming it's actually sorting out the people related maths factors um we need to sort out the
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people we take related practice in order to ensure that we can continue to be productive working from
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home so what do we do about you know what can employers do
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um those who are citing that you know they that they would like to be able to
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monitor their staff better is the solution to introduce um employee software monitoring um you know
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with working from home there's not really a way for managers to casually drop by you
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know the employer's desk for a chat and just casually glance at what their team member is doing
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so in that sense we can see i can see why that they might want to think about it but the cipd's position is that
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employers should think twice before introducing any kind of monitoring software to management to
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measure and in individual's productivity the reason because of this is that if staff do not see the
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monitoring measures as relevant and necessary it can damage
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employee trust and morale um so we had we did a workplace technology report
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which was published in uh july uh and and that that's uh one of the questions was that um you
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know what do you think uh if workplace monitoring was increased and actually very few employees only 12 said
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that increasing workplace monitoring has more benefits than downsides so with any type of monitoring i mean
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employers do have a right to monitor and as with any type of monitoring um you know if you're thinking of installing an
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employee monitoring software you need to explain clearly what you're monitoring
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and you know why and define what behaviors you consider as acceptable and unacceptable and if you are going to
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go down this route it's really really important to consult your employees whether the measures are relevant
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and necessary cipd research on workplace technology found that employers are more likely to
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see the introduction of new technology more positively if they've been consulted and their views taken on board
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because you know by going down the consultation route you might actually realize actually um you know this measure is not
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appropriate maybe i should be looking at other aspects of it um or maybe actually
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you don't need to monitor software you might just need more you know daily catch-ups because you know employees are missing the
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casual chat with the boss you know two minutes here two minutes there may be a daily catch-up would be more
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a better way of doing it actually maybe cheaper because you're not spending money on software um so and of course you know there are
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situations where it might be acceptable to have employee monitoring for example in cost
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customer service centers as we know it's the norm to monitor call quality and you know there are there are
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actually software out there that can assist line managers to monitor quality um i've read in an article that uh this is
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a software with that um will flash the heart-shaped to the representative if they're not um
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sounding very uh uh optimistic so flash them to remind them okay you need to be optimistic in this call
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so that that kind of tool could potentially help employees perform better in their work and
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without the manager having to intervene real time but you know you do need to talk to employees and find out how they might
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react to it whether they think this is the right the right way to to do it next slide please
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um so as we spoke earlier so the issues
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with homeworking and maintaining productivity is about dealing with lack of motivation and
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cooperation and difficulty monitoring stuff so what what can we do to to to try and
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mitigate this um i i would say as
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one thing that that would really help and it certainly cipd position is that employers will get
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much better results by developing line management capability and supporting staff to get the results
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so that means um scaling up your line managers to manage virtual teams um we have a cpd
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report on developing effective virtual teams um and it talks about the importance of
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video conference using video conferencing to have visual cues um you know providing tools for to
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enable you know collaboration so yes obviously as a given the broadband needs to be dead
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technology needs to be there and i talked earlier about you know some um software tools like uh kanban
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boards you have your sticky notes to share with colleagues you know what what you've got coming up um that that's
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actually available through microsoft teams if you look under the app planner you can you can do that if you've got microsoft teams in your in your company
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um so so that the technology side of things and also you know the soft skill side of
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things as well um line managers should be working on building team relationships so not only just making sure that they're
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checking in regularly regularly with staff but also making time to um uh invest in team building you know
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making i just have a time where you can get together and to discuss non-non-work related items
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just to build team creation and also the line manager is really important is plays a key role in making
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sure that they minimize negative behavior making sure that you know staff are not undermining each other and staff
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are you know uh collaborating um as a team um there is also another fourth factor i
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want to raise before i finish um is that um we are in the middle of a pandemic and
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unless you're in the few industries that have you know not really been impacted and i'm talking about you know
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retail and wholesale specifically groceries um or postal services um you're probably
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you know you probably need to be more careful with you know in your investments um the ons report uh on the
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corona rise impacts on the uk output in the uk economy recently said you know
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the economy did shrink when the pandemic happened and it has sort of jumps back up as social
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distancing measures um relaxed but growth levels are nowhere near
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the the levels before the pandemic in february so obviously what that means for
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employers is that you do need to be um you know more more careful with your
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investments but certainly what we can do from a people's perspective is to make sure that we continue to keep staff motivated
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and engaged through the theory so they can ride out the recession together thank you thank you very much hyper i'm
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just gonna um share a comment that somebody's put in there in the chat um michelle says an employee can be sat at their desk in the
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office and still not be productive monitoring is quite dangerous to engagement and trust i'm sure that's something that we can pick up further in
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discussion um i'm going to hand over now to alan to take us through his recent research over to you alan
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uh thank you very much katie uh good afternoon everybody uh my name is alan felsted and i'm a
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research professor at cardiff university i've been studying homeworking long before it became fashionable
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in the mid-1990s in fact when i did a study for the department for education and employment
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and published a report called homework is in britain then the term homeworking referred to
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out workers in the clothing industry boot and shoe workers and assemblers and packers of various
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kinds many of whom were low paid and sometimes off the books
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these types of examples have largely disappeared and the 21st century version of homeworking
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now refers to office workers or what was called back then new home workers
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what i'm going to do in my 10 minutes is to run through some data which paints a picture of
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one the growth of homeworking since the uk was put into national lockdown in march and two its consequences for
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productivity obviously the focus of this webinar i'll be using
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up-to-date data collected from workers and employers gathered from a series of surveys next
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slide please so the first question is how is home working grown in recent times
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before during and after the lockdown what's the survey evidence next slide please one of the longest
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running data series on the location of work is the labour force survey the lfs
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this is a large survey which is regularly carried out it contains data from forty five
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thousand workers or thereabouts it paints a picture of a long-term shift
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towards home working before the outbreak of covid19 but the change was great sorry could you
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put the slide back you're on the wrong slide but the slay the the trend was gradual
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rather than dramatic as you can see in the graph so the year immediately before the lockdown
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one in 20 4.7 of those employed worked mainly at home that was double
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the proportion in 2003 and triple the proportion in 1981.
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the april june 2020 quarterly data and that's the latest available data we have suggests that the
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proportion working mainly at home rose rapidly in the national lockdown the proportion has almost
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doubled to reach around nine percent of workers as you can see on the graph however this growth rate is
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poultry compared to other estimates the next uh slide please now one such survey is the
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kovid 19 study which suggests a similar but more dramatic and sharp upward movement in
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homework this study consists of a monthly survey of around seven thousand workers
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carried out during the lockdown and in the months since its results shown in
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the graph suggests that the proportion working reporting that they worked exclusively
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at home rosed eight-fold from six percent of workers in january february to 43
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in april as you can see with the the red bar there and even though it's fallen it
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fell by june it has remained high throughout the lockdown months and beyond
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hence i've added my lines of rapid growth and a slow decline since april uh 2020. it's important to
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say here that the lfs and the covid19 study questions are not comparable hence the different
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estimates but the trajectory is clear a significant rise in homework
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prompted by the national lockdown next slide please furthermore the prevalence of homework
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has remained high in the months and weeks after the national lockdown the data shown in this graph are taken
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from an office for national statistics survey of around 2 500 adults which has been
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carried out every other week since the national lock bound began the survey suggests that throughout the
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national lockdown between 40 and 50 percent of workers would carry out some of their work at home
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however the proportions fell to around one in four workers in late august 2020
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hence my arrow there as restrictions were lifted but since then the proportion has risen
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by seven percentage points as restrictions as we all know have been reintroduced
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and workers have once again been told to work at home if they can next slide please
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employer surveys also reveal a similar pattern this figure shows the results of a recent survey of 5
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500 employers in the uk again from ons over a quarter were using home
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working as a direct consequence as covid 19 which is the red bar just over a fifth
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of employees reported that they would like to continue to use homework after the homework after the pandemic
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has passed next slide please what then are the productivity consequences of this
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enormous rise in homework well employers often have fears that productivity will fall
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why well a concern that out of sight home workers will shirk a concern that
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employees will not be able to learn from one another given that a lot of learning takes place on the job in sight
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and within earshot of others a concern that innovation will suffer as employees
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become less engaged with work and their work colleagues concern that effective team working will
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become more difficult what's the evidence next slide please
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one source of evidence comes from the covid19 study and its june survey those who had worked
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at home in the previous month were asked to compare how much they were able to get done per hour compared to what they're able
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to do before the pandemic this provides a then and now comparison
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as you can see from this graph on the whole home working did not appear to have affected productivity positively
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or negatively negatively it appears to have made little difference either way
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next slide please those who were working at home were also asked whether they would like to
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continue to work at home when social distancing restrictions are fully lifted
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nine out of ten said that they would like to do so around half wanted to work at home
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always or often furthermore and this is the important thing the most productive are the keenest to
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work at home in the posts in a post covered 19 world i'm looking here at the charts towards
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the bottom hand at the bottom of the screen around 30 of those wanting to work exclusively at home in
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the future reported that they were able to get much more done when they worked at home
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this compares to around five percent of those who did not want to work at home in the future
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so see the left hand side of the bottom figure compare the red and blue columns the right hand side of
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of that chart shows the reverse with those what not wanting to work at home again reporting that their productivity
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had taken a major hit that's compare the blue bar with the uh the red bar
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so going forward letting those who want to work at home the ability to do so makes good business sense and may
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actually even increase future productivity next slide please evidence from employer
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surveys also corroborates this findings and echoes what haifa was talking about earlier from the cipd
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namely that homework itself is having little effect on productivity most say that productivity did not
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change that's the black column that this pattern is remarkably similar to the employee result shirley as shown
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earlier next slide please a fifth of employers surveyed by ons
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said that they intended to continue to use enhanced levels of homework in the future
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increased levels increased productivity was the third most popular reason reported from doing so look at the red
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bar however reduced productivity was not a strong reason for not using homework in the future the
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red bar on the on the at the bottom the more likely cause was the inappropriateness
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of homework for the business that is some jobs simply can't be done at home
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think for example lorry drivers firefighters paramedics cleaners and so on this is shown in the
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black bar which is uh very high next slide please
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it would appear then that increased levels of homework are here to stay hence the newspaper headlines on this
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slide and i could have chosen many the shift of course has serious implications for future office space
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and its organization and the nature of the city given that city centers given that many
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bars restaurants and retailers are dependent on the spending power of office workers
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next slide please on this the financial times on the daily star
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two unlikely bedfellows agree but the survey evidence suggests that a
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shift to homework is not at the cost of falling levels of productivity
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next slide please for those of you interested much more detail can be found
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in the home working in the uk report details shown on this slide more broadly
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those on the core might be interested in checking out the propellerhub.org website for more
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webinars and other events on the issue of productivity and employee engagement thank you for
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listening thank you very much alan and i confirm that i wear deodorant every single day but i'm not a waistband
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so that definitely has kind of gone off has gone off the agenda can i also add
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there very interesting of the daily star not not my chosen i don't read it every day but i do look
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at the headlines on the bbc and it's predicting an increase in the sale of jogging buttons
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oh yeah well definitely i have been which is what i'm wearing today i admit thank you so much um we've got
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some questions coming in please do keep those um coming in and i'm gonna hand over to tim tim's going to kind of take us outside
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of this covid world uh and into a kind of more general viewpoint of what's been happening to productivity so
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over to you tim thanks very much katie um my name is tim ringo
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as you can see here i've got a 30-year career as an hr practitioner i've been implementing hr and business change for
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a very long time which is why i have gray hair as you guys can all appreciate it's not easy to do
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uh these days i'm an author a board advisor and conference speaker i retired uh during the pandemic in fact it was
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planned last year to do that so i chose the right time to as we say in america get out of dodge um
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i was a senior executive at sap success factors most recently before that i was at ibm i was the
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managing director at accenture um fellow of the fc ipd
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um and my latest book solving the productivity puzzle is just came out in august and
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i'd already been looking at the challenges around productivity from about 2018 because many of you
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probably know that productivity has been on a downward trend people productive he's been on a downward trend
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since 2010 um and in fact it's the longest period of sustained um decrease
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in productivity in economic history and economists are pretty stumped by and
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i came across a paper in 2018 by the oecd that said this trend is going to continue
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for the next 40 to 50 years which i i found astonishing and and really didn't agree with it i thought was way too pessimistic so
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i went and researched some of the things that have been going on and i take more of an optimist view i think we're actually doing things that can solve
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the productivity puzzle so i'll walk you through a little bit of that today so um this is kind of a broader view on
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productivity before the pandemic but the book was really good timing because it's obviously a very um important
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subject so next slide please so the first when i sat down to sort of
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write about this subject i ran into an immediate problem which is that i went and looked up
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the definition of productivity as you can see here um it's it's really quite boring it says
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various measures deficiency of production our productivity measure is expressed as a ratio of output
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et cetera et cetera it's very 20th century early 20th century actually and i just thought well i can't really
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you know create a framework around this with with that with that sort of definition because in the 21st century i think productivity is
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very different and you know part of the problem i found in terms of why productivity is going down is we're not measuring it properly
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now even if we did start measuring it properly that wouldn't fix it but nonetheless that's the first problem i ran into so
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i thought right i need to redefine i need to make it more three-dimensional more sort of um you know 21st century so
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i came up with with this on the right which essentially says getting stuff done that measurably improves the economic and human
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interests of organizations in society at large i think productivity today is much more
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much less about widgets and producing widgets and it's much more about a broader socioeconomic situation so when i
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expanded the definition i was able to start to create a framework that i think would would help solve uh
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the productivity puzzle so this was one of the challenges that that i ran into which is well how do we how do we even define it so
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hopefully you might think that's a little bit more interesting definition but it certainly helps next slide please
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now at the core when i started to look at this and i look back at my career in 30 years
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you know people's motivation is so core to to what we do and um i just love this quote i've got
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it on my website as well everyone has been made for some particular work and the desire for that work has been put in every heart
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and you know i look back at my career and and things i did it you know one things i really used to focus on was what motivates the individual
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what motivates the team and tried to get to understand people and kind of what their aspirations were and i think that was one of the things i
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found in challenges around productivity is we just kind of treat work as transactional
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it's i'm i'm the manager i give you something to do uh and therefore you do it and then i reward you at the end but very
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transactional very one-dimensional but i think again back to the productivity definition i think we need to broaden
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the kind of definition about work which is you know we should know we want to we should try to figure out what we want to do and try our best
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to get there and then organizations should help get those people uh in those positions where they flourish right and guess what
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their productivity goes up quite dramatically next slide please
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so i came up with this quote unquote equation and it's something i saw over and over and over again in my career that i heard ceos and top
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executives say you know if i could just get the right people with the right skills the right place right time and equally the right
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motivation you know that would be fantastic in terms of execution that'd be fantastic in terms of engagement
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i know by the way i think my company would perform better and so really i've just kind of you know when i looked
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at the problem i said that's exactly right and in hr i think this is what we're trying to do every day and i think the oecd misses this right so the oecd says
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that productivity is going down because organizations aren't aligning people to new technology they're not changing
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their processes to adapt to the new technologies and lastly they're not changing their organization structures to adapt to
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the digital world and and i think to a certain extent that's true but i think we're doing a lot better on that at the
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moment and i'm sure many of you um perhaps are out there looking at this and nodding and saying yeah this is kind
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of what we're all trying to do now the good news is what i found is when organizations implement the mindset
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first of all of what i call peip then they implement the processes and then the technology
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to do this you get this thing that i call peip people engagement innovation and performance and over and over again
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companies that i worked with that had this in place as their kind of core operating model
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people flourish in those organizations their productivity goes up dramatically and guess what you get more
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innovation you get more performance in the organization and it doesn't stop there i look out into the future and say
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i think we're going to see historic people productivity because i think if you take peip
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and you multiply it times these emerging ai and machine learning technologies i think what we'll see and we've seen
32:09
this throughout history people will harness that technology and almost augment themselves and their productivity
32:15
and i think you know from for me i see organizations and i see practitioners like yourselves you know putting right people right
32:21
skills right place right time right motivation and i think in the future we're going to multiply that times the the technology
32:28
so i i'm in this optimist camp that says we're moving in the right direction and in fact i think and what i've seen
32:34
anecdotally and also in in some of the data and and some of the things that alan presented i think we've
32:39
been knocked on to a different path by this pandemic and this new path is a good one right i think it is going to be
32:45
finally we're going to focus on productivity not just of workers at home but those who who who can't work from home right i
32:51
think we're going to start focusing on the whole picture and so i'm quite optimistic about the future
32:57
next time and and really if we want to bring it right down into the kind of
33:02
practitioners realm this is a a model i've used for over 20 years in fact i used it for the
33:08
first time with the ceo of british telecom in 1999 because he was trying to describe this
33:13
this idea if i could just you know attract the right people if i could you know give them performance objectives and and learning
33:19
to develop them if i could then connect enable them using this new wacky internet technology remember 1999
33:25
it was it was all new um and then if i could deploy them to the right place and and essentially you know what he
33:31
was describing is you know recruiting and onboarding that's integrated then with performance and goals that's
33:36
integrated then with learning and then it's integrated with workforce management succession right so i'm bringing it down to the kind of
33:42
practical level and this is the thing that that you know i think a lot of organizations are doing they're creating this kind of
33:47
integrated employee experience where this is something that is um you know completely in the processes in
33:54
the mindset and the technology and guess what you know ceos love this because they can take their strategy
34:00
which is kind of their baby they can throw it into the organization and they have more confidence that people can execute on it because you can
34:06
give them goals to do it you can give them development to help them do it you can connect and enable them
34:11
and lastly get them in the right place at the right time to do that so i'm very optimistic about the future and
34:17
i think you know i talk in a lot more detail in the book obviously about this but i mean there's a lot underneath all of it right i'm
34:23
just touching the very uh the very top of it but you know these are practical solutions that i've seen work
34:29
right in the companies i've worked in in ibm sap extension and the companies that i've worked for as a consultant um and so
34:36
yeah the oecd is missing this i'm very positive about what's coming and i think having been knocked on to
34:42
this different path by the pandemic you know it's all kind of grim at the moment but i do think
34:47
hopefully next year things are going to be a lot better than they are today so thank you very much
34:53
thank you tim and thank you for ending on a on an optimistic note i'm just going to be cheeky and ask you a question from myself before i get to
35:00
some audience questions is what do you think about what we choose to measure not even as organizations but as
35:05
kind of whole countries and economies and kind of gdp as a as a measure rather do you think we should focus on things um more like well-being i know
35:12
there's not talk going on about kind of thing right now absolutely and i talk about this in the
35:17
book a lot i sort of list out the kind of ten things which i don't have time to go here but but but some of the the key things that i found in terms of
35:23
improving productivity one is wellness and well-being and guess what that's really uh important at the moment and i think we have to
35:29
measure that kind of thing which is you know what what people call corporate happiness or people happiness think that's part of it
35:34
but when we get really focused on shareholder um you know profits and and share price um and we
35:41
get focused on gdp it's only a third of the picture there's these other things which are you know the human interests right so
35:47
what are what motivates people you know getting them in the right place helping them to to flourishing those are more the things
35:52
we have to add to those physical measurements those physical measurements are not going to go away right because even you know the chinese communists are
35:59
capitalists these days right so so we're still going to have those fiscal sides but i say reduce that down to about a third
36:05
and let's start measuring these these broader things around you know the human interest society and
36:10
the organization thank you very much i'm going to take some questions from oh sorry alan did
36:15
you want to come in on that yes sorry i did wanted to comment that yeah i totally agree with tim there
36:21
i think the other thing is we should be looking at and i know cipd are very keen on this is job quality uh and that's very very
36:28
important now in the world in which we live and the connection between job quality and productivity uh there are you know there's a strong
36:36
connection between job quality and productivity and things like employee engagement and just in the chat i i put up a link
36:43
to an article that makes that connection between employee involvement and enhanced productivity and innovation at
36:49
work because productivity is going to come from individuals it's going to come from employees
36:54
and it's enhanced uh harnessing those others ideas that's very important and job quality is is a way of doing so
37:03
thank you and uh yes copd has lots of work on on job quality specifically for our good work index which maybe one of my colleagues
37:09
can share in the um in the chat um we're gonna come to some audience um questions um and heifer i'll put this to
37:16
you first question about performance should managers be resetting redefining or
37:21
scrapping their pre-pandemic performance appraisals um set for employees that apply a
37:27
complex group of challenges that are less achievable and possible now so should we basically should we be rethinking performance and how can you
37:34
check on performance and activities when people are working remotely i agree i think we definitely need to
37:41
look back at the performance objectives that were set before the pandemic and question whether it's still
37:47
achievable and relevant in these times definitely agree on that um and that obviously has to be some
37:53
personal conversations to back and forth between employee and manager to degree in that
37:58
um what was the second part sorry um how can you check up on performance
38:04
okay checking up on performance this this is where the you know line manager skills of managing virtual teams
38:09
comes in we could possibly borrow um common practice from the it industry like
38:14
agile project management where it's quite common to have uh you know 10-minute daily stand-up
38:20
meetings within within groups and then keep in touch through chats and then having um post-it note boards
38:27
um you know we've got tools like trello and planner microsoft planner where you can communicate between
38:32
colleagues what's what's coming what's you know pending and what's finished and so on
38:38
thank you um tim can i ask you if you've got any thoughts on the the checking up aspect when we can't see
38:43
people and is that something that hr practitioners should be concerned about or should they be
38:48
talking to people managers and helping them to see that perhaps there's a different way to manage yeah definitely i think hr has a huge
38:55
role in this it just drives me bonkers this idea that we need to track daily what people are doing look
39:01
we're we're in the workforce we're adults right and um where i've seen you know the best teams
39:06
and the best working is when the the manager is there more as a coach than someone who's checking up on what
39:12
you do you know give people very clear objectives give them clear outputs and and let them get on with it right
39:18
and it should be measured on what they you know what their output was not you know how they went about doing how many hours they spent doing it
39:25
people really need to be kind of left to get on with this this whole idea of autonomy um in the workforce i think i think
39:31
we're going to see a a major leap in in managers comfort with giving people autonomy just
39:37
to get on with it right because they're saying that wow they weren't in the office and hey we still had good productivity as you saw in alan's data
39:43
so i'm just hoping that this this this new path that we're on um is going to get away from this kind
39:48
of daily management you know checking up on youtube just let people get on with it and measure them on
39:54
the outputs and the quality versus versus the day-to-day i'm following up on that allen have you got any advice on how to kind of help
40:01
managers with that because it's a different skill really well i think probably not so much uh i don't come
40:07
with necessarily my skill set isn't giving advice to to managers as such but what i can say
40:12
is before the pandemic what was very noticeable uh i did work on who had the opportunity
40:18
to work at home and i'm emphasizing the opportunity uh and it was very obvious that the the
40:23
opportunity for working at home was given to the most trusted usually the higher paid
40:29
uh those in more skilled jobs uh and there was a mistrust
40:34
uh of giving the opportunity to work at home from those who were not in those groups the pandemic has changed that i mean and
40:41
that's that's a major thing it's changed that it's spread homework into much a wider
40:47
group it's still the case however that most of the people working at home are kind of
40:52
relatively well healed but it has spread to some extent uh that opportunity and it has proved
40:59
that you can trust people i mean tim's point let give them trust they need to be trusted so i'm
41:05
very much against the idea of using monitoring software devices to actually monitor
41:10
productivity i think that's the one way to go and a more effective way is to monitor people
41:15
by their output and you might well find that actually what they're doing is they're putting more in
41:21
they're working longer hours not shorter hours to get those outputs now from an employer's point of view
41:27
that's no bad thing necessarily um and that's what the evidence suggests before the pandemic those who working at
41:33
home before the pandemic were spending longer working at home now that has obviously negative consequences for
41:40
work-life balance and so forth but from a pound shilling and pence point of view from an employer
41:46
it it's an effective way of of using people's skills and allowing them to
41:51
flexibly organize their lives both work and and and and their their other lives
41:57
thank you i'm just gonna um read out a point that steve's put in the chat which um he says
42:02
i feel that using the words using terms like checkup and monitoring instantly pushes people to be defensive and feel
42:09
micromanaged and you need to position anything like that very carefully to get a positive result
42:14
thanks for that comment um steve allen i'm just going to start with you again because i think this is probably directly related to the uh your point
42:20
you made the headlines you flashed off about sales of deodorant going down has anybody started to look at the
42:26
self-confidence benefits and less emphasis on how people look from working virtually
42:31
um paula says i noticed my students were wearing careful makeup when our workshops were face to face but when we
42:37
went online their first freedom was not wearing makeup and they felt happier um so i don't know if you've got any
42:42
thoughts it's quite a kind of anecdotal fun question that's really interesting point i mean as you can see i've got a tie on
42:48
i i i although as i said earlier uh my bottom half is a bit different but um
42:53
there we go i mean i think that's a very interesting point i i think this whole uh shift and it's a radical shift as my
43:01
figures suggest a huge shift in the change in where we work has has massive implications so i really
43:08
i can't answer that question i think that's a research question that needs to be answered
43:14
going forward as i would also say another research question that i touched on towards the
43:19
end of my talk was the nature of the office i think that's another big change we're
43:24
going to have to think about the office in a different way offices tended before the pandemic
43:30
tended to be high density places where things like hot desking was
43:35
frequently used desk sharing hot rooms all those kinds of things that's that's a different world seems to
43:42
me uh you know so we're moving into a very different world more people are going to be
43:48
working at home that's going to be a less need for office space a reconfiguration of how we operate
43:54
within offices uh and and these are questions to come i think so i'm sure in the future webinar
44:01
uh katie will be on this theme going forward the the changing nature
44:06
of the office and and the other things that uh you raise about uh has been raised about
44:12
uh uh dress sense dress codes uh and so forth um i mean these are all kind of to be to
44:19
be discussed to be explored later i think jesse you're the first person i've seen in a tie in quite a long time they're
44:25
like we're gonna tie tim in a tim in sportswear you know we're covering the whole covering all the paces um question from
44:32
angela um she said she's recently read an article that says tapping on our keyboards at home and sitting on calls
44:37
and webinars all day might have sucked the productive life out of us is continued working at home
44:43
going to lead to long-term productivity problems is it that it's a comfortable and popular option rather
44:49
than actually being the best one for the economy uh in the long run and haifa if you've got any any thoughts on
44:55
how it might be decreasing productivity in a way we're just sitting on screens all day
45:02
would i like to answer first or should i go first you go for it and then i'll go to tim and then i'll
45:07
oh okay um i would certainly echo what um alan said earlier about you know let the people who want to work from
45:13
home continue to work from home and then those who want to return return because then you'll get the best of
45:19
productivity from both groups of staff um so you have to run me the question
45:25
again before i go after you i've just lost it i'll just put it somewhere else um that actually working from home might
45:33
lead to productivity problems if some people feel that being on a screen all day is making them less productive basically yes so on
45:39
being on a screen all day then there's the issue of making sure that people don't burn out um you know from from too many
45:45
back-to-back uh zoom calls um so that that's you know something i guess from hr perspective we need to remind
45:52
employees to to make sure that they take screen times you know they have very great scheduled regular
45:57
breaks and it's you know i i think all we can do is just remind people and get my alignment managers to remind their um
46:03
their employees as well their team team um team members and then tim can i put
46:08
put to you same same question but um maybe to pull out the point andrew makes the end that working from home might be a comfortable
46:15
and popular option but does it actually is it is it good for the economy at large
46:21
yeah i think it's good for the economy at large let me go back to the person though first because my main concern and
46:27
from talking to loads of people who suddenly were working from home we've tried to take the analog world and put it into the digital
46:33
so we've tried to cram those one-hour meetings that we've always had into into zoom and that really worries me
46:38
because that is wearing people out and i think we need to and i think hr should start pushing back on this to say
46:44
look can't we do these in 15 minutes or 30 minutes and create space in between um so
46:50
i think without a doubt um what i've seen the homework has increased people's productivity but it's increased their um stress and
46:57
fatigue because they're cramming so much into a short period of time and so i think you're trying to shorten
47:03
up these calls a bit and do a little less zoom would be a good thing and it would it would increase productivity
47:09
even more naland did you have anything to add on this kind of long longer term impact
47:14
well i think it's a very again another good point uh i mean my re my evidence was as i
47:19
said there it's still kind of real time it's june june of this year so that's pretty pretty recent but it's still june uh and the question
47:27
would be how how long is that going is that going to be is that sustainable is that picture sustainable i think again the question
47:33
here the my response really here is we'll have to wait and see i know for example i'm involved in some research
47:39
that's actually looking at the same question repeating it uh in subsequent later on this year so
47:46
we'll have to see and i would probably say to the cipd the same the cipd also needs to monitor this to
47:52
see whether there's a fall-off uh you know is the kind of honeymoon period when a honeymoon period and now we might fall off
47:58
and get burnt out this is something to to watch for i think the evidence though at the moment
48:05
suggests that it's it's not that detrimental to productivity clearly there are some for whom it is
48:10
detrimental the graphs show that but on the whole the fears of employers don't seem to be
48:17
played out in a multitude of surveys this is why i include a multitude of surveys just not
48:22
one source it's a multitude from employees employers and employers so from both perspectives
48:29
we're getting the same kind of message um so at the moment i think it's a positive
48:35
picture uh that we've got um and obviously we just hope it continues
48:41
thank you and i loved on that point that you made tim about we kind of dragged and dropped old ways of working into this new way and it's no wonder
48:48
that everybody's probably feeling a little bit burnt out and tired by now a question from steve um more companies
48:54
i engage are moving towards an agile way of working using regular standups and retrospectives seems to be helping with
48:59
morale and keeping everyone engaged which in turn is supporting productivity what are the thoughts of the panel on
49:04
this way of working at haifa can i ask you first you did mention agile earlier
49:10
um sorry um can you repeat the question katie sorry uh what are your thoughts on kind of this agile methodology for ways
49:16
of working can that help moral and productivity i i think it can use the right way um
49:22
seems to be um very well it's it's been around for a while and you know
49:28
it's popular within it industry and my husband he's been working from home for the last 10 years he works he's a developer and he software
49:34
developer and he works for rit uh it it firm and that firm has grown from
49:39
just like 15 employees to you know 300 and then he left another firm which actually
49:45
also was a startup startup around the same time and then it actually you know to grew to a thousand employees
49:50
so it is possible to have mostly employees who are working from home their their model of uh employees is actually
49:59
um remote the developers are mostly working from home so it is actually the norm and and they practice agile
50:05
not so religiously but they do aspects of it like you know daily catch-ups having you know regular
50:11
team um sort of team chats and having like um uh private uh sort of um
50:16
social rooms so they have those sort of work channels so we talk about work and then you also have like the social
50:21
rooms they have a channel um talk about you know your kids to child to talk about your pets you know so you have
50:28
um so i think definitely we can borrow ideas from from agile to to to uh other other industries
50:35
i mean and tim you've worked you worked in the it industry in tech for a long time is it something that you've seen help with productivity
50:43
yeah i i did i mean when it it's been around quite a long time in the i.t industry as haifa said
50:48
um and i'm really glad to see that now other organ you know other industries are starting to adopt it because of this
50:53
new path that we're on and i think that's going to be very very positive for product for productivity um and i
50:59
think also as you as you said um katie i think in terms of people's engagement with their work i think it creates a
51:05
kind of new way of working for those that haven't had it in their industry and in fact i've been really surprised to see that kind of trend of agile
51:12
working mostly sitting in it for years now and why i've been wondering why other industries hadn't picked it up but
51:17
i think we're going to see that now crisis is an opportunity right to change the way we do things
51:23
um alan a question here about um pre are pre-pandemic targets and even
51:28
kind of office designed processes still relevant or should we be redesigning
51:33
how we do things i think that's a redesign i i've kind of intimated that before i
51:39
think we're in redesign i think one of the biggest changes i would say in the world of work
51:44
has been the growth of homeworking i mean i've been studying this phenomenon since the mid-1990s as i
51:50
said in the beginning it was not fashionable then and it meant something entirely different to what it means now
51:57
it's a world away we've changed hugely uh but the the change has been so
52:03
dramatic and so sudden uh that i think it's gonna have lasting effects
52:09
and as the evidence suggests many people will remain working at home to some extent and i
52:14
think this will have major effects on the nature of the office going forward i i don't think there's any way of turning this
52:20
back there will be a a fall-off uh there won't be as many working at home
52:26
as the as the figures are showing i mean uh but we've got used to it many people
52:31
have got used to it of course there are those who don't enjoy it and i will return i mean uh clearly uh but there are many
52:38
who've got used to it i mean it's six months plus since i've been in my office and i'm sure everybody on this call has been
52:44
in the same we've got used to it um we're having to reinvent how we
52:50
organize ourselves work wise at home uh we're all having to reinvent our timetables
52:56
um we don't have the kind of daily commute which actually was useful certainly i'm
53:02
talking personally actually in kind of downloading oneself before you get back uh to your to your other world uh so i
53:09
think there's major rethinks going on here i i you know i before the pandemic uh certainly
53:16
mid-1990s people predicting that we're all going to be in electronic cottages uh those predictions never came to pass
53:24
uh they were wild and i said so at the time but they're here now uh and it and it's
53:31
with us uh and i think it it's that's going to be the long-term effect one of the long-term effects on the
53:37
nature of work is going to be this shift and how we cope with it how we redesign
53:43
offices how we present ourselves uh the thai and so forth in different fora
53:49
uh these are kind of uh are going to persist for for many years and maybe decades to
53:55
come and a follow-up question someone's just put in for you alan um um from your research how much has
54:02
improvements in technology driven uh changing working from home how big has that impact been
54:08
huge uh absolutely huge uh we wouldn't have been able to do this 10
54:14
years ago certainly 20 years ago it's nowhere on earth uh but even 10 years ago might have
54:19
struggled but we're all got used to it so it's it's made it easier so absolutely huge huge facilitator uh of this so in
54:27
the mid 1990s the predictions were wild uh we didn't have the technology to
54:32
do that but we do now um and we can do it
54:38
we're all doing it uh so absolutely the technology is has been uh you know as as
54:46
saved as in some sense and has been able to to do uh working at home much more
54:51
effectively and i'm sure it will improve it will have to where we were talking earlier
54:57
uh off offline about how uh technology will need to improve will
55:02
need to catch up to providers of the facilities that we we want to try and provide us with the kind of networking
55:09
that we miss because there's things we do miss there's no doubt about that so again going forward i think we're going to
55:15
move to a hybrid form of working i think people will spend some time in the office
55:20
uh for that networking uh but they'll speak i think they'll spend much more of their time as well at home
55:27
than they're used to so i think we're moving to a hybrid uh form of working thank you and hyper did i
55:34
i just wanted to add on the point that um alan said about um you know if this happened 10 years
55:39
ago it would have struggled i mean we didn't have we didn't have video conferencing 10 years ago but the
55:44
subscription models were nowhere as cheap or easy as it is now you know the rise of software as a service where you
55:51
can just you know subscribe to something for a month or even try something for free like zoom you have you know
55:56
free calls for 40 minutes you can try things don't like it try something else it's you know the investment to try
56:03
of time to try is very small so you know if you don't like it just try something else it's not such a big deal if you
56:08
don't like it any you know these days oh yeah and so alan mentioned
56:13
that hybrid approach and i think that's definitely where we're going but how do we create and prevent
56:18
feelings of inequality for employees and organizations where there's a mix of people who work from home and those who can't
56:24
and it's usually those lower paid jobs and tim do you have any thoughts on how you get a hybrid model to work effectively
56:30
and to make sure that everybody feels kind of included and part of it
56:36
yeah you know um i don't have any sort of ready solutions at the at my fingertips but um i think this is
56:42
going to really be a challenge um once we get past this pandemic situation and
56:48
as as alan haifa said we've moved into you know this is business as usual i think that's something that's going to
56:53
be looked at really carefully about how we make sure that those that work from home are not discriminated against those who
56:59
work in in the office and um yeah i think that'll be a really interesting area i'll admit perhaps for you to do
57:05
some research on um but i don't have any already i think the thing that that i worry about though in this is that this
57:11
and allah mentions the densification of the office and it's going to be really important because offices were just way too
57:17
crowded and really almost impossible to get anything done in and i think this is going to help that a
57:22
lot and so therefore you know maybe that'll be part of the solution in terms of making sure that we don't discriminate
57:28
against those that that work but but you know getting back to the point i i think that a lot of people are still going to go into the office you know
57:34
maybe a day a week so maybe it won't be such a big big issue and that people will be showing themselves in the office
57:40
um as well as working from home so well we'll see i'm i'm not really sure where this will go
57:45
and i think it's about the kind of purpose of the office isn't it and uh it's less about sitting on tapping away at screen and more about that
57:51
collaborative and those social interactions uh hyper yeah i think the the office field will
57:57
certainly feel different with fewer people isn't it people expecting to find lots of colleagues to speak to are going to find half the colleagues at
58:03
home the field's going to be definitely different and certainly when you think about redesigning the office
58:08
for this to work to have hybrid uh hybrid arrangement you do need more rooms set up with good video conferencing
58:16
facilities with big screens they can have big nice you know pictures of all the colleagues on on the
58:22
screen not tiny laptops and very good um microphones to pick up everyone's voices in the room because
58:28
it's so easy to forget people on the other side and equally forget people in the room wanting to listen to people at home
58:37
advanced approach and fred i'm going to have to bring it to a close where i'm alan because you haven't spoken for a little bit i'll just ask you if you've
58:42
got any final points oh no i haven't at all i mean i just i say this is a research agenda i think so
58:49
i would say i'm a research professor so it's chris to my mill i suppose i would say but i mean it really is uh
58:56
and everyone on this every one of this calls got a stake in this uh and as i say i think it's gonna be it's
59:01
gonna be with us for decades to come um you know we're going to have to work this out at the moment we're working
59:08
through the pandemic we're not really thinking beyond the pandemic yet are we because we're not beyond it
59:14
uh but when we do get beyond it aside from all the fiscal issues that the government will have i think business will have an issue in
59:22
terms of how it's going to cope and obviously the cipd will be very important in
59:27
in that process so you know i think you know it's a world to come we don't
59:32
quite know what it might be but i think it will be majorly different to to what it was
59:37
before you know before march so watch this space and i'm sure alan and
59:43
haifa and rudy will be doing much more research to come uh on this um i'd like to also flag uh
59:50
before we finish that um we've run a number of webinars on um topics that people are putting questions about i didn't have time to ask so we
59:56
had a few questions that were more about the the tactical side of home working so we ran a webinar on long-term home working
1:00:02
a couple of weeks ago you'll be able to find that on our website uh we also ran a webinar on hybrid working inclusivity
1:00:08
um about a month ago so that is also available on the copd website so do check those out because
1:00:14
they might answer some of your questions um i'm afraid i'm going to bring it to a close there because we're out of time thank you so much to haifa alan and tim
1:00:21
for your insights thank you everybody for your brilliant questions and for engaging in the chat um we don't have a webinar next week
1:00:27
we're having a week off but then we'll be back on the 5th of november where we'll be doing a kind of policy update looking at all the
1:00:33
recent interventions from government and talking about what hr needs to know but that is it from us for
1:00:38
now thank you so much for watching and have a brilliant afternoon and we will see you soon
1:00:44
goodbye