Clare Kelliher and I submitted a response to the House of Lords Select Committee on Home-based working. You can read it in full here. We focused on hybrid working, because it has such significant implications for how operate – significant challenges, indeed – but also brings great opportunities. With so many more people accessing remote working in a hybrid way, managers need to reconsider both how they manage work and how they manage people. This requires a more in-depth analysis of work and more sophistication in implementation, but get it right, and the result should be more effective management, leading in turn to more productive organisations.
As with flexible working more generally, it’s not hybrid in itself that creates business gain. It’s a tool to enable better management, from which everything else flows. For this reason, our top policy recommendation is for government to lean into the innovation remit of The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills by encouraging businesses to experiment and innovate in how work is designed and managed. Who remembers the Worklife Balance Challenge Fund, which more than twenty years ago provided financial aid to employers to help them develop work-life balance policies and practices? It wasn’t perfect, of course, but we can look back and recognise how it fostered an important and increasing normalisation of concepts around, awareness of, and the development and implementation of policy and practice in work-life balance, including flexible working.
Worth another try, we say!
