OUR HOMEWORKING NEWS AND BLOGS

In 2020, almost everyone was talking about the effect of enforced working from home. Studies were quickly undertaken where academics explored how the sudden change in working arrangements had affected people – in particular their mental health.

Burnout was common. Depression and stress were often being triggered by a low quality of leadership – because leaders were simply not equipped to manage people remotely. This BMC Public Health analysis from 2022 said: “While personal factors are not controllable, the quality of leadership provided to employees, and the ‘place and pattern’ of work, can be actively managed to positive effect. Innovative flexible working practices will help to build greater workforce resilience.”

In the early days of the pandemic it was clear that executives needed to manage rapid change across a number of fronts. Many were moving to a work from home (WFH) environment with no experience of remote management. Many leaders had no way to manage without constantly calling and micro-managing their team and many individual team members found that working in this environment, with none of the social activities of a workplace, became intolerable.

But how have attitudes and management practices changed? Have companies learned how to work within this flexible environment or are they still muddling through?

Learning from our WFH mistakes:

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development stated in their 2022 Health and Wellbeing at work report that ‘management style’ is still a main cause of work-related stress. The report stated: “This finding is a stark reminder of the negative impact people managers can have on people’s mental wellbeing, if they are not trained and supported to go about their management role in the right way. Good people management can help manage and prevent stress which can be linked to common mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression.”

The CIPD has created some practical guidance for managers, to help them become more aware of how their actions can influence the mental health of their reports.

What the research is telling us:

Research by the International Labour Organisation titled ‘transforming enterprises through diversity and inclusion’ notes that the experience of the pandemic has elevated the importance of how companies manage the mental health of their employees. The report said: “The physical and mental health and well-being of employees quickly rose to the top of the enterprise agenda as it became critical to continue operations at the start of the global crisis (Fisher 2020). Remote working has been implemented at scale, almost overnight, with many enterprises now moving towards ‘hybrid’ working, i.e. mixing remote and office-based work, even though that was unthinkable for many before the pandemic”

Forbes published an analysis of research from the office group IWG. This said that WFH and hybrid workers are in a strong position to improve their mental health because they exercise more, they don’t waste time commuting, they sleep more, and all this additional exercise and sleep is drastically improving mental health.

The Harvard Business Review said: “In 2020, mental health support went from a nice-to-have to a true business imperative. Fast forward to 2021, and the stakes have been raised even higher thanks to a greater awareness of the workplace factors that can contribute to poor mental health, as well as heightened urgency around its intersections with DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion).”

The HBR article makes some powerful statements about how employees now see their workplace: “Employees need and expect sustainable and mentally healthy workplaces, which requires taking on the real work of culture change. It’s not enough to simply offer the latest apps or employ euphemisms like “well-being” or “mental fitness.” Employers must connect what they say to what they actually do.”

Planning your hybrid strategy:

This is the real message. Before the pandemic, helping employees manage their mental health was the type of support that a responsible employer would offer. Others would see it as an unnecessary expense. The HBR research notes that, when they surveyed employees, 76% said they had reported the symptoms of at least one mental health condition in the previous year.

Three-quarters of the workforce have faced at least one mental health issue in the previous year. This is why the sudden change since the pandemic needs to be baked into boardroom strategy. More people are talking about their mental health and attempting to deal with problems through treatment or therapy – rather than just “coping.” It also applies to all levels of the organisation – even the top. 

There are also many specific factors about how work is organised that can contribute to mental health conditions. In the HBR research, 84% of respondents said that at least one workplace factor was influential in their mental health problems. 

The way we were working before the pandemic was not working. By adopting WFH and hybrid work with good communication and support we can create workplaces that don’t contribute to stress and anxiety. It’s in the interest of both the employer and employee and can contribute to a wider strategy focused on diversity and inclusion. 

What is your own post-Covid strategy and does it directly embrace how to improve the mental health of your employees?

London has always dominated the British economy. Our national wealth was more evenly distributed when there were still shipyards in Belfast, productive mines in Wales, and vibrant ports, such as Liverpool and Hull. However, as all this heavy industry has declined more and more service sector jobs – such as banking and insurance – have gravitated to London and the South East.

There is even a government department for ‘levelling up, housing, and communities’ which is focused on creating opportunities for business and employment all around the country.

But is there an opportunity to more strategically use working from home (WFH) as a way to create opportunities outside of the South East?

It’s clear that WFH has quickly become an expectation of employees. Bloomberg recently reported that three-quarters of workers in London would quit if their company demanded that they return to work in the office. But this also means that those workers don’t really need to be in, or near to, London at all.

If employees are WFH then they could be in a remote village in Scotland, Wales, or a small town in Yorkshire – they just need broadband. There is an obvious opportunity for regions of the country that desire more residents paying local taxes to create greater pull factors for these professionals.

Some civic executives have encouraged an end to WFH because of the effect on cities when people start working remotely more often. These effects include fewer people enjoying the city, fewer people visiting shops and business – especially hospitality, and a general change in how people use the city centre.

Dr Jesse Matheson of Sheffield University published research exploring the regional effects of WFH and found that there is a significant increase in economic activity in suburban areas – many of those coffees are still being purchased, just closer to home. Dr Matheson estimates that over £3 billion in retail and hospitality spending will permanently leave city centres in the UK. This is also depressing property values in London, but is increasing housing prices in traditionally less expensive places to live – such as Sheffield.

The Office for National Statistics has managed to capture an interesting picture of regional changes and how WFH has become more popular. ONS data shows that between October to December 2019 and January to March 2022, homeworking in the UK more than doubled, increasing by 108.8% (up 5.2 million), from 14.5% (4.7 million) to 30.6% (9.9 million). The number of homeworkers increased by more than 50% in all UK regions and Scotland saw the largest percentage increase in homeworking (203.5%, up 544,000 people). 

Regional patterns captured by the ONS are also interesting because it is clear that the number of workers living in or commuting to London has dropped by 4.8% at the same time as a 3.1% increase in the East of England. The UK WFH population is now roughly the same as the entire working population of Austria. 

A large number of countries have enacted policies to specifically attract remote workers – often called digital nomads. Argentina, India, Spain, Croatia, Estonia, are all examples of countries that make it very simple for skilled workers with remote online jobs to move to their region. These countries want smart, generally well-paid, people who will come and pay taxes.

But isn’t there a similar opportunity inside the UK? Surely Manchester, Liverpool, or Hull could create pull factors that would draw remote workers to their regions? If you look at the government agenda it is aspirational and worthy, but it doesn’t feel like there is anything to make a professional want to leave London and move to Liverpool.

Property prices, rent, and council tax are all lower outside of London. Could regional mayors offer extra tax discounts or subsidised rail travel or other financial incentives that might attract professionals? Many nations have seen the opportunity and are actively promoting their region to digital professionals. If we saw this happening inside the UK then it would be a huge shot in the arm for levelling up plans because once people are focused on WFH, they don’t need to be in any specific region of the UK.

The regional possibilities are clear, but will mayors have the vision and ability to design attractive pull factors?

According to the last major UK HomeAgent survey*, 75% of contact centre advisers who CHOSE to work from home (WFH) were 35 or over, with 61% having over 10 years’ experience in customer contact roles. Over 200 advisers took part in the survey.

By comparison, the average age of an office-based contact centre worker (pre-pandemic) was somewhere between 26 and 31**, with the differences in life experience as well as customer contact experience between home and office-based workers obvious.

Clearly this picture will have changed significantly post pandemic with home/ hybrid working options available to a lot more people, young and old. However, the observation about WFH being attractive to an older, more experienced demographic remains.

Here at Sensée, our average employee age is 41. Over 50% of our 1400 employees are working parents, many live in rural areas (so can’t easily access city centre offices), while others live with a disability, or care for an elderly relative. For many of these people, homeworking is a practical necessity as much as it is a lifestyle choice.

What you typically get with an older, more experienced workforce is better listening skills, higher levels of empathy, a greater understanding of customer issues, improved problem-solving skills, and better service quality.  

So how can organisations embarking on their home and hybrid working journeys make better use of these skills? Is it possible to give older, more experienced workers greater autonomy when handling queries – perhaps enabling them to adjust processes, handle more channels, and create innovative new approaches in search of better customer outcomes? 

Displaying this sort of trust in colleagues is important in any workplace but especially so in @home environments where colleagues are out of direct sight.  Furthermore, it could be an important step towards building positive engagement within your broader @home community.

 

• The 2020 UK HomeAgent survey
• Various sources incl. 2008 YouGov survey, BBC3 programme ‘The Call Centre’, 2004 ‘CFA Business Skills @ Work Contact Centre Labour Market’ Report 2012

The generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT was launched at the end of 2022 and hasn’t left the spotlight since. Journalists have been covering it endlessly and marvelling at the incredible ability of this bot to answer almost any question with authority.

In the customer service environment chatbots have been used for a long time, but most customers groan when presented with a bot as a communication option. They have often been poorly implemented and limited in what they can do. ChatGPT is showing how natural conversation with a bot really is possible, whereas most of us still struggle to find a missing package using bots.

It has been interesting to see the media coverage of how such a smart chatbot might impact the contact centre. Forbes published some thoughtful analysis that said the contact centre and human advisers were still essential, but their role will change and evolve. The Guardian claimed that contact centres are now toast and the robots can entirely replace advisers.

It’s easy to see why The Guardian was so amazed by ChatGPT. It is truly impressive and really does return very intelligent answers. You can ask it to write a song about your cat in the style of Bob Dylan and it will do so – because it can immediately study the entire Dylan catalogue and use the same style in a fraction of a second.

Surely any customer service question could be handled this way?

There are a couple of reasons why not. The first is the empathy created when one human connects with another. That’s very hard to replace with a bot, no matter how smart it is. Empathy is why an angry customer can call customer service, but leave the call saying what a fantastic company this is, because the adviser listened, connected, and resolved the problem quickly.

The second is the training algorithms. ChatGPT is pre-trained, it does not learn on the job. There is a fixed body of information that it has studied. This could change for specific instances, such as a large retailer creating their own version of ChatGPT with learning capabilities built-in, but if you allow customers the ability to train the AI then things can go wrong very quickly – as Microsoft found out just a few years ago.

Making sure that users cannot train the bot has helped to guarantee that ChatGPT is only trained on reliable information. However it does mean that in situations where there is a problem that is new, it will not know what to do. That’s a big problem if all your human advisers have left the building.

I believe the Forbes analysis is a more accurate view on the situation. Think about the modern customer journey today. What happens when a customer has a problem with a product?

1. Search the Internet or social media for help
2. Contact the automated help system
3. Call or message for help from a live adviser

Every support journey is different, but this is typical. The first response for most people is to ask Google or Alexa for help, or to put out a request on their favourite social network. If they still don’t have any answers they will contact the brand, which usually means the automated chatbot that is designed to answer common questions. If this fails, then they call.

This means that by the time the customer gets into a conversation with an adviser they have not found an answer to their problem, although they have tried through several channels. It means that the adviser needs to be better than Google.

Replacing step 2 with a much better chatbot system modelled on a generative AI system like ChatGPT will immediately improve the process. It will allow brands to have a generative engine that is trained on all their product manuals, technical design documents, and the FAQ. The bot will be able to immediately find answers from all this information and this will be far more helpful than a bot that just directs customers to a page in the FAQ.

But, as I mentioned, there will still be new problems and problems that require an empathetic approach and these will still require the human touch. This changes the customer journey and the role of the adviser.

The adviser becomes a much more skilled troubleshooter in this situation. The only problems they handle are ones where the customer really needs to be talking to a human or entirely novel issues that are unknown to the chatbot. The majority of simple problems will never get to a human adviser. This also makes the role of the adviser more interesting because each day is different and they are more like an investigator, rather than just noting details from a complaining customer.

These new bots are amazing, but we are still nowhere near to robotic empathy. I’m not sure if it is really possible because even humans get it wrong sometimes. However, there is an opportunity to elevate the role of the customer service adviser and that’s a welcome development for both the advisers and customers.

Our recent survey on Hybrid Working in the Contact Centre has been published as a free e-book you can download here.

The survey found that hybrid is increasingly being adopted as ‘normal’ practice across the industry, generating benefits for both employers and employees.

When asked what they saw as the main benefits of homeworking, Directors/Managers said:

• Happier and More Productive Employees (cited by 72% of respondents)
• Lower Carbon Footprint (61%)
• Additional Business Continuity (52%) 
• Traditional Recruitment Barriers Removed (45% of respondents). 

These benefits immediately stand out. Three quarters of Directors/Managers say that their teams are happier and more productive. Now imagine how that translates into improved customer experiences and reduced attrition.

Likewise, almost half of respondents point out that homeworking removing many of the traditional barriers to recruitment (such as physical location). So now picture how much easier it becomes to find the best talent.

Homeworking can clearly have a huge plus side. But it’s important to recognise the challenges too. Pastoral Care (68%) and Communicating Effectively (66%) are the two issues cited most often by the respondents as key hybrid working issues. These issues really focus on the mental health concerns of some workers if they feel isolated at home and the ability for managers to operate in a completely remote environment.

We can see where some of these issues may originate. Under half (48%) of respondents think that their organisations have given Managers and Supervisors sufficient training and advice to manage, train and support their work-from-home teams.

This is an immediate red flag. It suggests that companies have embraced home and hybrid work without fundamentally changing how their managers work and communicate with teams. During the pandemic this was understandable as it was a period of crisis but in 2023 it is inexcusable.

Managers need to be equipped for this workplace. They need to adapt to a working environment where people are measured more by what they deliver than their ability to always be seen at their desks. 

This question of managers not being ready to manage remote workers feeds back into the pastoral challenges that team members are facing. If someone is hired into a WFH role then they will expect to work from home. This is very different to the pandemic situation where office-based people were sent home as an emergency measure. So the isolation and issues faced during the pandemic are now less of a direct issue.

The WFH Manager must also be a great communicator. Managers that are not familiar with the management and communication processes required to lead a large remote team may end up leaving some of the team feeling isolated and without any focus.

This often comes down to having the processes – and tech. Our own teams use a tech platform called LiveDesk that enables all colleagues to function together in a virtual environment as if they were really together in person. This can be a game changer for both advisers and managers. It allows people to really feel they are a part of a team and it allows managers to communicate more effectively.

These issues of communication and employee care are repeated in most studies of home and hybrid work but many of the solutions are surprisingly simple. It just requires a mindset shift. You can’t manage your @home colleagues as if they are a group of isolated individuals.

Bring everyone on the ‘same work mission’ together as a single team – regardless of whether they work at home, hybrid or in the office – and then manage that team as a whole.

The ebook is a fascinating insight into UK contact centres, with all new survey data from the end of 2022. For more information, and to download the complete ebook, please visit our website.

The Economist magazine called hybrid work the worst of both worlds. The Eat Sleep Work Repeat podcast with Bruce Daisley suggested that companies are confused about which days people should be at the office. The Guardian suggested that inequality in the workplace is further enhanced by hybrid work.

The common theme here is confusion. Companies went from 100% in-office to 100% work-from-home (WFH) during the pandemic and now can’t seem to manage a blend that embraces the best of both worlds. And some businesses are losing patience. Amazon has said that hybrid should be treated more like office-based with some flexibility – so the majority of time should be back in the office. But if you look at employee surveys taken over the past couple of years, the prevailing sentiment is clear…. most employees want to WFH (for at least part of the working week).

Is the problem really that companies are trying to do hybrid on the cheap?

Take a look at who is commenting on WFH and hybrid issues in the media. It is almost always the Human Resources (HR) leaders, with the debate focusing heavily on things like: the health & wellbeing of employees, potential hybrid working obstacles and contractual issues (such as employers’ potential liability for workplace health and safety), how to connect colleagues to each other (and to their managers), and what ‘skipping the daily commute’ really means from an HR perspective.

While unquestionably important, are these the main issues companies should be concerning themselves with?

For example, what about the question of whether businesses need to change the way they manage remote teams. Whether career progression plans need to be re-designed. How managers should measure and improve the output of WFH colleagues. Whether tech can be used in new and exciting ways to help businesses communicate more effectively with their remote teams. Homeworker security and compliance. Or how teams and individuals can be scheduled to better deliver business efficiency and an improved work-life-balance.

Are these operational and tech issues – many of which are at the heart of WHY businesses and individuals are interested in WFH and hybrid – equally, if not even more, important?

Embracing WFH and making it really work, even if your company is only moving to a hybrid model, requires a lot more than just a daily Zoom call to check in.

Contact centres that sent all their people home during the pandemic managed that crisis by adapting business processes and extensively using tech tools like Teams, Zoom, Slack and WhatsApp (most of which were originally purchased for a different purpose). It was never ideal but had to work because there were usually no alternatives.

Looking forward, does it make sense to build your shiny new future on the same makeshift tools and processes… especially when there is now much more time to sit down and consider built-for-purpose solutions?

The answer is clearly ‘no’.  It’s time for companies to unequivocally recognise that the work environment has changed completely… and change both the processes they use to manage, and the tech they use to support their people. If executives continue to manage remote workers as if they are still based together in an office then we will just see this cycle of confusion continuing endlessly.

Creating Digital Workplaces is a great example. Sensée has long argued that businesses need Digital Workplace platforms (like its own LiveDesk) to connect people together into teams whether they are in an office, in a shared workspace, or at home – so that they can collaborate as quickly and effectively as if they were sitting alongside each other. These new platforms are not just about better internal management, they are also proven to improve CX, quality, productivity and enhance employee engagement.

Another watershed moment will likely come when companies take shift self-scheduling seriously and give their employees the tools needed to better manage their workdays around other daily priorities.

Changing a few HR policies isn’t going to make hybrid work – this is about culture, process, and action. Arguing about whether Wednesday is or isn’t an office day isn’t going to make hybrid work. Sending endless invitations to status updates on Teams isn’t going to make hybrid work.

Hybrid will only truly work well when managers realise that it requires a new approach to work processes and tech – embrace this and the future is yours. You really can’t do hybrid on the cheap by pretending that nothing has changed except the commute.