Whether it's hybrid, agile or the "new normal", employers need to take a wider view than just the legal formalities. Equally important to your success will be clarity in communication, expectation setting, avoiding presenteeism, sub-conscious bias, FOMO, access, equipment and much more. All of these issues are discussed in this on-demand webinar to help you plan for the future.
Transcript
Jane Fielding: Good morning everybody. I'm Jane Fielding, I'm head of the Employment Labour and Equalities team here at Gowling WLG in the UK and I'm delighted to welcome you to this the third in our series of annual update webinars that we've been running last week and this week. The topic for today is hybrid working, the legal and also the organisational issues that hybrid working presents for employers across the UK. We've all been grappling with this, as we come out of the pandemic and it raises fundamental questions about the nature of the sort of work wage bargain, what are you actually providing as an employer? But it also raises some very practical questions for organisations and we're going to do our best to deal with as many of those as we can in the next 40 minutes. Judging by the fact that we've got nearly 600 of you registered this morning we're clearly striking a chord with this topic.
So our speaker today is Martin Chitty, one of my fellow partners in the team. Like all of us, he's been advising a number of clients in different sectors on the different challenges that hybrid working poses for them. So Martin is going to speak for about 25 minutes. We will leave time at the end for questions before we finish at 11:40. If we don't get time to answer your question then don't worry, we will follow up with those afterwards so you will get an answer one way or another. If you want to ask a question, please can you use the Q&A function – it's in the bottom middle of your screen on Zoom – so if you put your question in there, I'll be keeping an eye on those as Martin talks and we will pick them up at the end.
If you have any tech issues, hopefully that won't happen but if it does, please can you also use the Q&A function to ask for help. Lucy Strong, who is our technical support this morning, will do her best to sort that out for you. And I will say this again at the end but we will be sending round feedback forms by email to those of you that have attended today. If you could fill those in, it only takes a couple of minutes and we do read them and take them into account, but I'll flag that when we close. But for now I will turn myself off and I will hand over to Martin.
Martin Chitty: Right, good morning everybody. Hopefully… well, it will become apparent in a moment but I'm having a few technical problems which, is that I can't make the slides move forward. But in the background, Lucy I think has miraculously and rather pleasingly just fixed that for which I'm extraordinarily grateful. So I'll move on to the first of my slides… I think Lucy may have to do that for me – there we are – thanks very much, Lucy, as ever.
So I'm going to split this into two parts if I may. I'm going to talk about the legal issues because that's the area in which I feel most comfortable, it's the area in which I've got some expertise as you might hope, and I'm going to talk about that in the context of some fundamentals like: contractual variation, statutory rights, monitoring health and safety, etc. One thing I would mention at this stage is that we're faced with a whole raft of issues when talking about hybrid working, not just obviously legal ones, but something to bear in mind going forward, and this is relevant I think to some of the issues you face organisationally within business, is that there is a consultation exercise on the way at this point in relation to disability gap reporting to follow on from gender pay gap and discrimination. And that is something which in this context I think you'd need to be particularly careful and mindful of. Simply because, there are issues which will impact disproportionately on those with disabilities when we're talking about hybrid working and I'll come back to that later in the context of more generalised comments on discrimination.
Now the second part of this talk is about organisational issues. Now I don't as a lawyer profess to have the understanding that all of you have got about those organisational issues. Yeah, Jane and I are involved in running our team and we're partners in our business, so I can talk about what we see here, and we've been in a form of hybrid working now for four or five months I suppose. In fact today is my first day back in the office having had another two months of homeworking and, so we're going very hybrid at the moment.
But I want to talk about organisational issues based as I say on what we've seen and what we've picked up from our clients and what we hear in the market, and around all of this there are some other complications. There's a lot of talk, isn't there, about the Great Resignation, about how we continue to engage different generations within our workforces. I think the last two years homeworking, now hybrid working, has seen a massive acceleration towards an acceptance that homeworking is more acceptable, workable, deliverable than was ever the case before. It's not a technological change. The tech was there before, it's just that people wouldn't allow people to use it because they didn't want to and then they had no choice and now the cat's out of the bag rather and the genie's out of the bottle.
The impact it's had is about how we work together and co-operate and how we as organisations need to ensure that our workforce engage with us on a day-to-day basis. There's a lot of talk, both in the legal and the HR community, about wellbeing and its importance where people are working in different and more isolated ways. If you work at home all the time, as many of us will have seen in the past two years, things can become isolated, detached, the walls start to close in a little bit. And employers generally talk a good game about wellbeing – 92% of employers said that it's vital. The question I suppose is whether they do anything about it. Something like 83% of employers provide employee support programmes, counselling, those sorts of things which are intended to address wellbeing but only 23% of those who have access to those services actually use them.
So what I'm going to talk about in all of that context is expectation as against need, some key factors for success which, we've seen and which we see our clients working towards, how do we incentivise and optimise people's approach, conduct and work, how do we value and measure their outcomes?
But first, and this is because we don't have the opportunity just to chat in the normal way, we wanted to ask you some questions. So what we're going to do is run five short polls. The questions will pop up on the screen miraculously because Lucy's dealing with it and you'll get an opportunity to read them. Some of them have two, three or even four choices and then we'll go through to the answer. It'll all be done quite quickly, it probably takes about a minute per question, and it's just to see for the benefit of me principally because I'm being selfish about this but also for everybody else, it gives everybody an opportunity to see what the experience is if you like in the room. So we're going to move onto some speed polling and if Lucy can put up the first of those questions, that would be really helpful.
So question 1 – I will read this out because it gives you time to think: "How well did your business cope with homeworking version 1?" That was mass lockdown, everybody at home. "Extremely well and it was pretty seamless"? Did we do it "quite well, we pulled together and made the best of it"? "Just about made it out alive" or "It was a complete disaster"? And so if you'd like to tick the box or tick the bubble and hopefully we'll get some answers to the questions and I'll let you do that now.
So hopefully it's all working. I can't see what all of you are doing at this point, so the results will become miraculously available… here we go. So 47% of people thought it went extremely well and was pretty seamless and 51% thought it went quite well. Nobody, and this is interesting, isn't it, thought it was a complete disaster, and very few of you thought you just about made it out alive, which is reassuring. And that I think reflects our experiences of business and the experience we've seen and heard reported elsewhere. Most people managed to make the switch pretty quickly, pretty effectively, obviously it suits professional services and white collar type businesses, much less so for manufacturing. It's difficult, as one of my clients reminds me, to make earth-moving equipment remotely.
So we'll close that one down and we'll go on to question 2. So question 2 is more straightforward: "How many of you have started hybrid working already?" And it's a yes/no answer, so I'll let you think about that one, I'm sure you will know whether you're doing hybrid working. Once you've had an opportunity to do that Lucy is going to put the answer up on the screen. Here we go – yeah, so 84% of you are doing some form of hybrid working and 15% of you are not. Now at the moment I don't have in front of me a full list of all the people who are sitting in on this session, that would make things a lot easier, but I suspect for some of you that will simply be because it's not practical in your environment. Things need to be done on site, you know, in the factory, on the shop floor, out on site, wherever it may be, you simply can't do that on a remote basis, so hybrid working doesn't really work, but 84% of you are working on some sort of hybrid basis. Now there are bound to be lots of different variations of that. I don't pretend to understand what they all are at the moment, some will be more or less permissive and some may involve actually almost entirely homeworking as against any sort of mixed model.
Let's go on to question 3 if we might. Question 3 – "Is hybrid working easier or more difficult to manage than everybody being at home or in the office?" So like what some refer to as pre-lockdown or pure lockdown, and the choices I've given you here are "Yes, it's more difficult", "It's about the same" or actually "It's a lot easier." So if you'd like to think about those and vote accordingly and once you've had a chance to do that, which won't take very long I'm sure, we'll move on to the answers and see what we get to. I think in some ways this is the most interesting. Now, right, so at this point… yeah, actually 40% of you saying it's more difficult and I think our experience is that that's true. That does reflect our experience. We're trying to manage a variable model, we have people not all in on the same day and we have some people more or less keen on being in the office, and obviously hybrid working can entitle people to come in every day if they want to. "It's about the same" – 43%.
From other surveys I've seen, this is a more balanced view than I would have expected in many respects. Lots of organisations are saying actually hybrid working, whatever the benefits it brings, actually creates more of a management challenge. There are more variables involved and it's more difficult. So, you're obviously an extremely astute group and it's going really well, and in fact 17% of you are saying that it's easier than everybody working at home. Now that's interesting and if we were in the room I'd be saying, well, let's open the conversation up. I can't do that but if you'd like to put comments into the chat, Jane's going to moderate those and then we'll try and see what's making that easier, that would be very interesting and very useful for all of us I think.
Let's move on to question 4. Question 4 is this: "How far along the journey are you in embedding hybrid working to balance business, customer and employee needs?" This is the super-complex issue if you like and the last of the difficult questions. So "We're doing it very well and have achieved a great balance actually." "Some progress but more to do." "Progress has been and will continue to be slow and gradual but we do not want to rush this." I think there's a sensible element of caution in that. "We're actually… we've stalled and we've given up, it's just not going to work in our organisation." And again there's no right answer here, it's really to see what people are doing and what their experience is, so I'm sure all of you will have plumped for the one that best suits or best reflects your experience at the moment.
So Lucy if you could put the answers up… okay, so 20% of you or thereabouts think "It's going pretty well and we've achieved a good proportion of what we're trying to." "Some progress", 49% - I think that's where the… well, evidently the largest group if not an absolute majority are in that position at the moment. "Progress has been quite slow." But actually the most interesting is perhaps the bottom one, only one per cent of you have gone "It's not going to work." And again if we were all together and we had all morning or all afternoon we could talk about that. Some of that will be down to organisational need and preference and the nature of your business. As I say there is no right or wrong answer.
And the fifth question which is intended to be a bit lighter hearted is this one which is: "How many of you would really prefer to go back to office only working as the model and put the genie back in the bottle?" And it's perfectly legitimate to go "Oh yes please!" or to say "Yeah, but the tide's against us, so we don't have a choice, this is a change we have to accept." "No, actually we're not going to do that, we're going to embrace the change and the shift in our staff's expectations and we are going hybrid."
So I think you've probably had a chance to look at that one. Again there are no names attributed to any of these answers, we can't see who voted which way. Okay, so 85% of you, "This is the new normal, we're going to embrace the change and shift to proper hybrid working." A very small percentage have been brave enough to say "Actually, no, we want to go back to the way it was." And 13%, perhaps the pragmatists amongst us, say "Well, the tide's against us but we don't have a choice so we're going to give it a go." So Lucy, thank you for that and if you could move us on to the next slide please.
So let's talk a little bit about some of the legal issues involved here. Now in lots of ways there's been lots of talk, hasn't there, ever since lockdown first started, that this was going to be a very new and very different working arrangement. But I would say actually is it's not… the legal principles are very, very well established and they come back down to contract and some statutory provisions as well. So the starting point is this: moving from an office-based system where your contract says you will work in the office to one where it says you may work at home some of the time, all of the time, however it's to be set up, is nothing short of a variation. But, you do need to ensure of course that you get consent to that variation. Simply telling people that they're going onto a hybrid working plan and that they're going to be compelled to work at home where they can – obviously some environments won't permit that – is not going to give you a binding variation.
So one of the questions here is: are you making this permissive, that they can work from home some or all of the time, or are you making it mandatory? And one of the issues we keep coming across talking to clients about this is the need for absolute clarity in terms of what the new arrangement is going to be. And then are we talking about a temporary or a permanent arrangement? So from the responses you've given to our questions, it looks like most of you have decided you are going for this in a quite serious and permanent way. For those of you who are still edging down that path, are you going to put in some sort of temporary arrangements to see how it goes for six, nine or 12 months, which gives you as an employer a right then to say, well, actually we're not going to continue with this because it's creating problems which are simply insurmountable or the benefit isn't worth the downside that we're also seeing. Because if you make a one-off binding and permanent variation there is no way back without a further negotiation.
Now I know from talking to one or two clients who've historically been very loath to go for any sort of flexibility, they're having to change because everybody else around them either has changed, or had changed more than they had, and they're losing people all the time. Clarity, as with all contracts, comes back to working times, hours, days, place, method of delivery, and those sort of in some ways mundane points but they're very important. There's an increasing convergence between home and work if you work from home. So are you expecting people to keep to specific and rather strict working times and hours in the way that they would in the office or is there going to be some greater flexibility? I'm sure we all get emails from colleagues saying "I now work on a hybrid and flexible model. The fact that I'm sending you an email at 11 o'clock does not mean I expect you to reply to me straight away."
So think about these issues. If we're having people working people working from home, do we need to be mindful, and I would say we do, about issues regarding discrimination? Although it's very early days it is likely, based on past experience on flexible working patterns, that particularly women are likely to see greater flexible working than men and that's an historic pattern. There are also issues about those who have movement issues, mobility issues, wanting to work from home simply because it's easier and more effective from their point of view. But does that then lead to those people being out of sight and out of mind? Are we going to face issues around conscious and indeed subconscious bias and those are things that I think all organisations need to be aware of. And of course the background to all of this is that even if we go to a hybrid model as a standard, individuals still have a statutory right to request flexible working which is, in my terms, a further variation from the hybrid model. So if you go to a 50 50 hybrid model but somebody says "Actually I want to make a flexible working request to go 100% homeworking" you've still got to give due proper and careful consideration that you have to do under any other circumstances.
Now monitoring - this is a vexed issue. I'm not going to pretend to cover it in any detail this morning but do think about it. Monitoring does seem to be something about which people do obsess from time to time and there are legitimate steps you can take to monitor people's activities but the question I would ask is why are you doing it? Is it because you don't trust people to work from home? And by now if you've had a homeworking position in place during lockdown, haven't you got sufficient evidence of distrust or is it, to quote the social psychologist Taylor Swift, is it just that the doubters of homeworking are going to continue to doubt as they go along? Are we actually monitoring their effectiveness and delivery and output? The question is how do you do that? I would say you need to do it overtly and make sure that people are well aware of what you're doing.
Now health and safety – not something I personally deal with, my colleagues elsewhere do that – but you do still have an obligation if people are working from home to carry out workplace assessments. That obligation does not go away. I was doing my own assessment of my own workplace last week from home with the assistance of some guidance we'd been given and it's about making sure my screen's in the right place and all those things. So they are different considerations but the considerations and obligation still arise, and I would come back again to this question about employee wellbeing: are you putting the right measures, checks and balances in place to ensure that people are in contact, that people's wellbeing is being checked out from time to time?
Now a couple of other issues to think about. One is this issue of remuneration against location. If you historically have everybody working in the city of London and they're paying London weighting and you've now got people working remotely and they've moved back home to somewhere far less expensive, are you going to continue to pay them London rates? And if you're not, are you going to be able to retain them? So there's a growing challenge here. We've seen this with some of our clients and ourselves where organisations are offering effectively homeworking at near London rates rather than having people commuting day to day and that does make, going back to this question, retention a very, very difficult issue.
And lastly location, this is more of a tax issue than anything else, if you allow people to work super-remotely as in abroad, are you going to create problems about their tax, your social security obligations as an employer and also the inadvertent creation of a permanent establishment, so a place of business abroad which might render your business liable to tax in a foreign jurisdiction?
So that's quite enough of the legal issues I think. Let's have a look at one or two organisational issues. So I think it's way too early to reach any decision as to whether this is a temporary phenomenon, it's a thing of its time, or whether this is a permanent shift. I'm less convinced of it being a permanent shift now than I was 12 months ago and that was before we came out of lockdown simply because I think some of the challenges of managing the hybrid working model are actually only now coming to the fore and it's more difficult than we all thought. I think some people, and we see this with some of our colleagues here, actually although they can work from home, they find it preferable for lots of reasons which I'll come onto to come in and work in the office every day other than when we tell them they shouldn't. So a temporary or a permanent shift? My honest answer to that is I don't know.
The second question I think is, is either side obliged to do it? And one of the reasons for doing the poll at the beginning was to see how you've approached it and the vast majority of you have engaged in and adopted some form of hybrid working. Now that doesn't suit every organisation, but where it's possible doesn't mean you've got to do it. There's no legislation on this point at the moment, so if as a business you can explain and rationalise out why hybrid working doesn't work then it's perfectly legitimate to say "We're not going to do it" or "We're going to abandon it because it doesn't work." But that then goes back to the question of quite what did you put in place about hybrid working when you did do it?
This question of whether it works for all stakeholders, by which I mean the employees, the business and its customers, will vary vastly from organisation to organisation. I think what we're seeing is in some environments it works perfectly well, there's great tolerance and support from our client stakeholders if you like because many of them are in the same position that we have been in, so they accept people working remotely or hybrid working or however you want to describe it. I think the much bigger issue actually is internal within your organisation. So if I take a hypothetical manufacturing business where they've got 60% of the workforce making things on the shop floor, that cannot be done remotely. You might have a hybrid model where people work on the shop floor some of the time but they can't work from home at all. So that's… that doesn't really work in any sort of context. But for the admin staff, the white collar role if you like, it would be perfectly possible to do that and many organisations did during the height of the pandemic when they were on lockdown. So are you going to continue to do that going forward or is there going to be pressure and if you do go down that line, do you create a sort of class structure going back to the sort of sixties and seventies labour market model of a difference between blue and white collar jobs and does that create internal division and discontent? Is that the way you want your business to be perceived or, do you just have to front it out and say "Well, we can't do it for everybody, it's just not possible." What I want to go onto next are some key issues in what we've seen and what others have seen as to how to make this work.
So what really has made hybrid working successful? And these are general principles, they're not my original work. So the question, the first one is focus. What do you need to be done in the office and what can be best done working from home? And it might be that this requires some sort of group exercise to see how people think they can best organise their working day and many of these ideas and comments come from a practitioner called Henry Rose Leeson who you will have heard of.
The big thing here I think is good communication, good, regular – and by "good" I mean brief, regular, concise, clear. What is it that people need to understand? One of the interesting impacts of the use of tech in remote working is that it's very easy for very senior management to talk to large proportions of the workforce all at the same time because you can do it on a format like this or Zoom or whatever else you want to do. The challenge I think for management in this situation are the joint issues about emotional intelligence. You've got to be much more aware dealing with people remotely than you do when you're dealing with a person across the desk. So you've got to pick up on people's cues, the nuances of their behaviour, and that's where I think the wellbeing piece comes into play most particularly. I think we've seen that different forms of delegation and management, planning and prioritising work have come to the fore. The way we do things in the office is not the way necessarily that best works. We've got to be much more flexible, we've got to solve problems as we go along simply because this is a different world.
Jane: I think we may have lost Martin there. Can you hear us, Martin? I think because he's dialled out, so we'll just give him a moment or two to come back. While he does that I will share a couple of other comments that you've made on the Q&A function actually about those polls. So somebody was talking about homeworking during lockdown was only feasible for them because they had so many people furloughed which was an angle that we've not seen before. Oh, Martin, you're back.
Martin: I am, yes, I wasn't entirely aware that I'd ever gone away, but there we go.
Jane: You had, yeah.
Martin: Oh, right, okay, so I was just talking about the need for greater trust and trust in technology is a great thing of course. But much of the success or failure of hybrid working is going to revolve around whether actually people trust their colleagues to do things when they can't see them. I would have hoped personally that we'd got past that at this stage.
If we move onto the next slide, this is a piece of independent research done by Dr Peggy Roth who's a behavioural psychologist working with Leesman. This is… actually she's based in the UK, some of the research I think was done in the US, and this was really to see what it is about what people value in terms of working, in terms of coming into the office, because there is an issue here about why would you want to go into the office unless it's worthwhile? If you can work at home and avoid commuting, why come into the office at all? And these are the things that people value. Most of all they value socialisation, socialising with their colleagues, seeing people, being able to talk to them rather than simply working remotely and being on their own. The next is interesting which is about learning and that's both formalised learning and informal learning, learning by seeing what other people do. So those are the two biggest things, but the gradation here isn't all that huge actually.
The third is by hosting, by actually being able to meet with people generally, clients and customers. Collaboration which in many ways is one of those things which organisations, well, there's been a lot of comment about, people saying "Well, you can't do complex things working remotely." There's much less evidence for that and all of you I'm sure will have seen some of the more, let's use the word "hysterical" comments from some sectors of the market about the absolute need to be in the same room to work. Now some would say that's a somewhat recidivist or old-fashioned view and not borne out actually by what people value. Now you could represent a lot of this data by saying what is it that's necessary and appropriate? And you'd probably get some very different results. I think it would be useful for all organisations, and we've certainly started to do this, is to take information from people about what they value and how they want to approach this so that we can then look about matching the two up.
I mean, there is a big question here I think for employers about how far do you go in trying to reconfigure all of your working relationships and obligations so that everybody gets exactly what they want and that sort of outcome seems pretty unlikely, it's a Nirvana situation, I don't think it's ever going to work. So it might be a question of what works best and what is least distracting for people or best meets their needs going forward.
So the key points to take away from all of this, and this you'll be pleased to know is the final slide, is clarity of expectation and this covers both the legal formalities if you like about office hours, where you work, all those sorts of things, what's expected from you, and also clarity from management in terms of their expectation. The worst of all possible worlds is for management to think they've explained it one way and everybody else to have heard something completely different. You all know that, I don't need to spell that out.
But next is about contribution and delivery and this will depend very much on your organisation and what you do and how you do it. People can be as effective by working at night if that's what they prefer and that's a super-hybrid form of working, isn't it? They don't need to be in contact with anybody else and the question of how and when they deliver that work. For other organisations we all need to be working more or less the same hours. This is not new. I suppose that's the point I keep coming back to. This is just a variation on challenges, legal, social, organisational, that we've all seen before.
The next one, if – and I come back to this again – if you're going to have people and you want them in the office, make it worth the trip. That doesn't mean you've got to provide coffee and doughnuts every day – that wouldn't be a good thing for all sorts of reasons! – but make it an event, make it beneficial to them to come into the office, make it have them doing something that they can't do working remotely and that gives them the upside, the incentive to come in. Because I think the one thing that's come out with hybrid working is that people value being in the office and actually everything works better, quicker. It's good to see your colleagues, it's congenial, and it's beneficial for all sorts of reasons. What people actually hate is commuting because that's dead time. All sorts of organisations will have seen that production hours may have gone up, particularly during the first phase of lockdown, people didn't have much choice, that's all they got to do, but actually coming into the office, actually the getting in there is still a bit of a bore.
And the last and most challenging thing in lots of ways is hybrid working requires leadership and management to change and in lots or organisations that's something that people aren't very good at. They expect all of you to implement change but they're not prepared to change the way in which they lead and manage themselves. So it's not perfect, and like either the Crimean War or Communism, I can't remember which one, it's probably too early to tell yet whether hybrid working is permanent and whether it's going to work at all in the long term.
Now Jane, back to you so we can look at some of the questions that people have asked.
Jane: Thanks, Martin. Just before we go onto the questions and I can see already we're not going to get through all of them because we've had quite a few, I just wanted to pick up on a couple of comments that people have put in in response to the polls, just to share that with everyone. So one person is saying that the reason hybrid arrangements are easier for their organisation is because the challenge they faced really was supporting people who were working at home but without, you know, who were struggling at home basically. So having that option for some people to be in, as you said, Martin, if that suits them better or in fact they need it because they don't have a room to work in or they're trying to juggle family members who are also at home then it gives you that flexibility, doesn't it? And, that conversely having the ability to have everybody set up to do homeworking when it suits them is a cost but if you can do that then it makes that hybrid option easier as well.
And somebody else is saying that they've got a sort of proof of concept trial in place on a voluntary basis and then it will be reviewed before any permanent contractual changes are broached with staff. So I think that kind of all tallies with our experience probably, doesn't it?
Martin: I'd absolutely agree and I know from talking to people, some organisations went very quickly to abandoning office-based working at all and some are now backing away from that decision. Unfortunately it means they sublet lots of office space which they're going to have to try and get back and it's proving difficult and other organisations are going further and further away from office working and there was a prediction about masses of office space being left empty. I think people are taking a more cautious, rather slower approach to that at the moment.
Jane: Yeah, but there are actually a couple of questions about that which will probably make sense to pick up now. So someone's said if you go completely hybrid… sorry, completely remote so you don't have market at all, rather than hybrid, would that mean that you've triggered a redundancy situation?
Martin: Well, there's obviously an argument that you have because you are… it's a place of work redundancy in old money, isn't it? There is no longer a job for you at the office but you've been offered suitable alternative employment presumably at the same or a very similar rate of pay, doing exactly the same work with your same status and grading without the inconvenience of coming into work. So yeah, you could trigger a redundancy. There would be a strong argument there that some would be acting wholly unreasonably to reject the proposal and consequently they may lose the right to any statutory redundancy pay. That wouldn't of course apply in relation to contractual redundancy pay but it's a very good point and one worth thinking about. Some people will be opportunistic about this if they can see a significant tax-free payment in the offing.
Jane: Yeah, and a sort of similar question but it applies whether you're totally remote or hybrid, which is what we're focusing on today, can you as an employer reduce that sort of London uplift in particular and/or salary if somebody has moved a long way away in exchange for more homeworking? Could you kind of make it part of the bargain I suppose is the question?
Martin: Well, I think that's a very interesting and actually quite a complex question because on the one hand – it goes back to the previous one actually – is if you're saying to someone, well, you can work on a hybrid basis, there's an argument there about a redundancy. If you're trying to say to them, well, you can work wholly at home but for 25% less pay and you're implementing hybrid working elsewhere, are you imposing a variation to which they don't agree? If you're saying we're abandoning working at home at all but we want you to work… sorry, if they're going for some sort of model in the middle then certainly there is going to be a difficulty there. I think it perhaps comes down to the relative strength of the bargaining positions. Certainly there are rumours in the market of organisations who recruited people saying, yes, yes, yes, you can, you know, live in leafy Lincolnshire and come into London one day a week. They're now saying, well, when we said that what we actually meant was four days a week or we'll just drop your pay by 25%.
Jane: Yeah.
Martin: And for some people there will be that balance to be made and as people get more and more used to working from home, people may say, well, actually I'm still earning more than I could by working conventionally in the local labour market.
Jane: Yep, there's quite a few questions about provision of equipment, so if you are going to a hybrid model, what obligation do you have as an employer to pay for, you know, PC, monitors, printers, headsets, etc, and does that change if you give people the option of working hybrid or if you require them to do that part of the week?
Martin: Right, I'll try and structure this… is there an obligation to pay for people's equipment? Not specifically but you have an obligation to provide them with a safe system of work, so expecting people to do long and complicated spreadsheets on a small laptop sooner or later is going to cause them problems with their eyes, shoulders and necks – there's lots of evidence for that. So I think we should be looking at it the other way which is… a preventative medicine here. We've got in place the right system of work, we give them screens, we provide them with screens in fact to avoid all of those problems and they will be more productive as a result and you've a greater prospect of retaining their services in that situation. Depending on how far you go in terms of whether it is provided or gifted to them… making way for tax liability, I don't have all those answers off the top of my head. But certainly I think I would advise clients strongly to look at giving people the tools they need to perform otherwise they're simply going to either be less productive or they're going to go and work for someone else.
Jane: Yeah, it's not a true choice I suppose, is it, if they can't actually work effectively?
Martin: No, it's not.
Jane: Okay, we are at time, we haven't got to quite all the questions but as I said we will follow up separately with those of you whose questions we didn't get to. So we're also going to be sending round the feedback form afterwards by email. As I said please do take a couple of minutes to fill that in and we will read it to help shape future webinars. We'll be doing our summer mid-year review in June/July and we'll take a look at your feedback and shape those sessions around that.
I hope that you can join us for the fourth and last in this series of webinars on Thursday. We're looking at an update on developments in trade union rights. Appreciating not all of you will be unionised, it still may be of interest because in our experience, in a number of sectors, existing trade unions are becoming more active and in sectors like the gig economy they're beginning to make inroads. So even if you're not unionised now there may still be interest in terms of the developments. So that's at 11 o'clock on Thursday and the last one in this series.
Otherwise I'll just say thank you very much to Martin and to Lucy for operating the polls and to all of you who are listening in. I hope you have a good rest of the day.
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