From the archives: This week, the government announced it wants public servants back in their offices rather than working from home. Public Service Minister Nicola Willis says “working from home arrangements are not an entitlement and should be by agreement between the employee and the employer.” In 2022, Listener contributing writer Sarah Catherall considered whether we would regret the Covid-fuelled WFH revolution. Many of the arguments for and against remain relevant now.
Laureen Reeve has just spent three hours in front of a whiteboard with some of her 150-strong team who work at Vodafone’s head office in Auckland. They’ve endured the Auckland commute on Wednesday, the only day they are required in the office.
For some, it is the only day in the week they will physically mix with their colleagues. On other days, many are doing what is becoming known as “the 30-second commute’' as they log in from a home office or from a laptop on the kitchen table.
Reeve, who is the head of Vodafone’s voice and messaging department, says the Christchurch-based members of her team have chosen Monday as their “base day’', when they head into the office. Every other day, the company’s 1800 office-based employees can choose to work from home as much or as little as they like as part of the technology giant’s “flex work’' policy.
On quiet days, just one in five staff are in a Vodafone office. At peak times, about half are there – well down on the 60% office attendance in pre-pandemic times.
Pandora’s box
Although Covid lockdowns now appear to be a thing of the past, one hangover from that time is the impact on workplaces, which often look completely different from three years ago.
Hybrid working – spending some days in the office and the rest at home – appears to be here to stay, as many professionals cling to the casual attire and cheap lunches they’ve now gotten used to.
For organisations worried about what effect that’s having on workplace culture, one of the biggest challenges they face, especially in a tight labour market, is how to coax these reluctant workers out of their pyjamas.
Across the Tasman, ANZ Bank recently told its global staff they must return to the office half of the time – a policy that means its 7000 employees in New Zealand have to resume commuting up to three days a week.
Auckland seems to be the city most affected by the transition and, for now at least, it’s forcing some corporates to up the ante. Perks such as free meals and carparks — even a towel service for employees who cycle in — are among the incentives now being offered.
About four in 10 New Zealanders currently work mainly from home – more than 10 times pre-Covid levels, according to Jarrod Haar, a professor of human resource management at Auckland University of Technology. He adds that 8% now work from home all the time, and some jobs now stipulate that employees can work solely from home. “That’s a totally radical change to our working lives,” Haar says. “We’ve never seen this before.”
Haar’s latest Wellbeing@Work study – the sixth since 2020 – found two-thirds of employees who work part- or full-time at home would quit if an employer made them return to the office every day.
“Employers need to be wary of changing to ‘no working from home’ because workers are likely to go,” he says. “And the job market is still tight.’’
He describes two days a week at home and three in the office as “the sweet spot’', ideal for employers and employees. “But that’s such a radical change from 2019, when fewer than 3% of employees mainly worked from home.
“To go to 40% is huge. As terrible as the pandemic has been, it has pushed the opportunity of working from home to a new reality for many.”
We pride ourselves on culture and people to create culture. It’s very hard to create culture with remote working.
Mixing it up
Reeve, who has worked for Vodafone for 15 years, says the company had a flexible working policy before the pandemic arrived, but many of her team still worked in an office. They have since had to acquire new tools and technology to facilitate remote work.
“There are people who have taken some time to return to the office, especially in Auckland. We had a period of being locked down for quite a time and some people got comfortable with working remotely.”
As her team sit down for a shared pizza lunch – and some head to Vodafone’s in-house gym or basketball court – Reeve talks about the energy that happens during face-to-face contact, which can be more difficult to achieve on video calls.
“When people come in on their base days, we don’t want them sitting at their desks like they are at home, so we’re being really intentional in making sure that it’s been worth everyone being in here together. We’ve still got to run a commercial operation, so we’re still trying to figure out how this all works for everyone.”
A recent survey of 1200 people, conducted by Talbot Mills for branding agency Anthem, found that almost half said they would consider a new job only if they could work remotely. There is a generational divide: almost three-quarters of under-30s think employers should adapt their business models to allow more remote working, while half of job seekers aged 30-44 would want to be able to work from home if starting a new role.
Shannon Barlow, managing director of Frog Recruitment in Auckland, surveyed her job-seekers recently and found about a third wouldn’t consider a job if a workplace didn’t offer remote or hybrid working. They also said they would leave a job if an employer cracked down on their time working from home. Some only want a role where they can work from home full-time.
“With the current talent shortage, working from home needs to be offered if it can be,” says Barlow. “It’s making a big difference in what jobs people will do.”
In Auckland in particular, says Barlow, many people are reluctant to return to the traffic congestion of rush hour, or run the gauntlet of public transport. “The lockdowns proved that it can be done and we continue to work productively from home. People saw a lot of the positives that came from working from home and don’t want to have to give that up now.”
A lot of people’s habits also changed during the pandemic, she says. “There are some big challenges for businesses that might have been quite generous in what they allowed once we were out of lockdowns. To change that and say, ‘We need you back here’ – it’s a work in progress for businesses.”
For some businesses, there are clear benefits — they can find talented staff from outside their region if they are happy for them to work remotely. But Barlow warns about what she terms “flex-washing” – a mismatch between what employers offer and what their new employees expect.
“People want flexibility in where they work and also the time they work. An eight-hour day might be spread out over piano recitals and walking the dog on the beach, but the employer may not like that.”
Rethinking the office
Steve Maitland, a Wellington-based director at real estate firm Colliers, which specialises in commercial property, notes that workplaces started changing long before Covid.
It started with hot-desking (when employees are no longer guaranteed their own desk), he says. However, lockdowns pushed these concepts to new levels and in Wellington, Maitland says, many offices now have desks for only four out of five employees.
While some industries have embraced the trend, some are very slow, such as parts of government, he says. But it does mean that both government departments and corporates are downsizing their office spaces.
“Waka Kotahi [NZ Transport Agency] committed to a lease and they’re moving in next year and they’re already offloading one floor. That shows they have changed as an organisation to acknowledge the impact of working from home.”
In Auckland in particular, corporates are making their workspaces more inviting, he says, including providing carparks, subsidising public transport, providing bike parks, and offering a towel service. “They need to incentivise staff and some are running their offices like five-star hotels.”
Maitland refers to a new acronym in employment circles: TWATs are the workers who work in the office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. “There seems to be a 3/2/1 approach – if you have three days in the office, two need to be with the team, and on one day people can work on their own. There is no hard-and-fast rule and there are some who don’t go into the office much at all.”
That’s the case for Carl Rosati, who connects with his Xero work team online from his Featherston home office most days of the week. The 42-year-old product designer took up the job at one of Wellington’s largest technology companies four months ago. When he was hired, there was no suggestion he needed to spend time in the office, and one of his key team members works full-time from her home in Northland.
“I might go into the office once a week but I can do this at my own discretion. Xero doesn’t prescribe where I work at all,” says Rosati.
Although he chooses to stay away from the office most of the time, he acknowledges there are things he misses out on by not having regular face-to-face contact with his peers. As a relatively new employee, for example, it would be much easier to tap someone on the shoulder to ask for help, than to communicate via a screen, he says.
He speaks to the Listener from his garden, where he is taking a break at the end of his working day. The day before, the father of two took the train from Featherston to Wellington – a three-hour round trip which allows him to do some work during the commute.
He says he moved from a smaller firm because he wanted to get more social interaction and enjoys connecting with his teammates in person when he can.
In his previous job, he’d do the three-hour commute just to connect with people, only to find most people were working from home. “So I moved to Xero because when I do make the commute, I arrive to a big, thriving office.”
Seeking balance
Clinical psychologist Dougal Sutherland is CEO of Umbrella Wellbeing, a mental health consultancy that works with businesses and organisations. He worries about workers who don’t go into an office at all.
“They’re more at risk of social isolation and loneliness. There are some good arguments for people coming into work one or two days a week.”
Sutherland, who is also a Victoria University of Wellington lecturer, reels off the benefits of remote or hybrid working: Employees are happier, they generally report less stress, feel more autonomous, and have a better work-life balance than if they’re in the office all the time. “Generally, people are wanting to do hybrid working if they’ve had a taste of it.’’
He refers to one study that found employees rated the ability to work from home part of the time as equivalent to a 9% pay increase.
But the downside of spending too much time away from your colleagues is that you can lose collaboration and team culture. Employees can also lose the boundaries between home and work. He gives an example of a manager who sends out a group email at 8pm to which employees might feel they have to respond promptly.
Many employers are still struggling with how to adjust hybrid working so that it works both commercially and for staff wellbeing, he says. “We have come across organisations where they’ve said, ‘We want you to come back to the office now’, and employees say, ‘Oh, you can’t make us.’”
Although he’s not aware of it being legally tested, Sutherland says organisations should consult their employees rather than dictate terms.
Talbot Mills director David Talbot says with such a big increase in the numbers working from home, it is not surprising there are tensions between employees and businesses about how such arrangements should work.
The Talbot Mills survey found that about half of people think it is fair for employers to put “considerable pressure’' on staff to return to workplaces. And 70% think employers do have the right to expect staff to turn up for specific work.
Missing connections
Behind ANZ Bank’s push for staff to return for half the week is the conviction that real-world contact is essential to company culture. Announcing the change in early November, the bank’s Australian-based global head of talent, Kathryn van der Merwe, said: “High-performing teams need regular in-person contact with each other.”
Michelle Russell, formerly the bank’s general manager of talent and culture in New Zealand, says that before Covid, the flexible working policy was primarily used by working parents. Russell talks of the downsides of remote working: “We have found since Covid that our attrition of new staff is higher than it used to be because people are not forming relationships in the way they used to. We pride ourselves on culture, and people create culture. It’s very hard to create culture with remote working.”
Covid drove a very insular team view, she says. “There were the people you spent all the time with on Zoom calls … but there are so many connections we need outside the direct team to deliver great results. We need people to be reconnecting and rebuilding relationships with some [colleagues] they haven’t seen for two years … It’s trying to drive home that chatting to people in the office isn’t unproductive.”
Russell is focused on staff mental health and wellbeing and says it is difficult for a leader to “truly understand” how a team is doing without regular face-to-face contact with them. “We’ve done [remote working] for two or three years. It’s not the same as being in the room and someone looking you in the eye and checking your well-being. We think people are less resilient than they were. I think, as a people leader, this is a good move to make sure everyone is okay.’’
Many of the bank’s New Zealand employees have worked from home part of the time since Covid. Since lockdowns lifted, about half are returning on the peak days of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. It is up to each team to decide what days they can be together, and the office-based days are for training, social interaction and team interaction.
“When you’re in the office with your team, you’re doing the work which makes sense to be done together,” says Russell. “Some have liked working from home. They’re having to rethink routines and at-home practices. But ANZ still wants parents to pick up children – we just want them to be work-based for some of that time they’d be in a home office.”
One of the reasons both managers and employees are struggling with the issue is because it’s not black and white, she says. “It’s grey, and it also has to be a ‘we’ conversation, not an ‘I’. We hope our people realise that it’s good for them and good for the organisation.”
Russell, like Vodafone’s Reeve, talks of the benefits when staff are in the same room. “People are probably prioritising simplicity over logistics.’’
She notes it’s an issue other big corporates are also grappling with. “Joan Withers, the chair of the HR committee on our board, says remote working is one of the greatest labour relations and productivity experiments in decades.’’
At marketing agency Yellow NZ, CEO Tracey Taylor promoted remote and flexible working well before Covid. “I’m a big believer in flexible working as a commercial discussion, but it also has to work for your business,” says Taylor.
Yellow’s head of content, Sally Knox, prefers to go into the company’s office at the City Works Depot in Auckland. She is like the quarter of those surveyed by Talbot Mills who prefer working in the office when possible.
“I love the buzz when I’m there and being together with my team,” Knox says.
Taylor says four out of five of her 90-strong team also choose the office over being at home. “We need human connection to thrive … There’s nothing like that energy in the room, whether it’s two people or 100 people, but equally, I like the hybrid sense of ‘I can’t be there today’, and that’s cool because we can bring them in in other ways, too.”
I’d do the commute just to connect with people and I’d turn up and find everyone was working from home.
Bottom-line impacts
So, are people more productive working from home or surrounded by others in a workplace? It depends on who you ask, and seems to come down to personality.
Just over half of people are more productive at home, according to Haar’s survey. But according to the Talbot Mills survey, only 40% of employees who work at home believe they get more done in that environment, and 30% admit they’re less productive.
Like Carl Rosati, the rest don’t notice a difference in performance depending on location. Yet four in five employees say they are expected to be as productive at home as they are in the workplace.
Speaking from his home office in Wellington’s Lowry Bay, David Talbot says he doesn’t mind where or how his employees work as long as they meet their targets and get the job done.
In his own case, he feels he is more productive working at home.
At ANZ, Russell says the bank’s outputs are the same as before Covid, and employees may actually be working longer hours from home. But, she says, projects and problem-solving can take longer to complete when people are working remotely.
“For example, I was doing a global one that took longer than it could have when we could have got a bunch of people in a room and solved something in a couple of days.’’
This article originally appeared in the NZ Listener’s December 3-10, 2022 edition. A number of those interviewed for it have since changed jobs.