The past two years have demonstrated the efficiency of remote and hybrid work, but the challenge for businesses is to ensure it works well, and that means helping people adjust through yet another transition period.
Although some of the challenges unique to remote working have dissipated, such as trying to simultaneously juggle child care, hybrid work brings its own stressors, according to Australian employers and successful implementation starts by looking at employee wellness.
The past two years have demonstrated the efficiency of remote and hybrid work, but the challenge for businesses is to ensure it works well, and that means helping people adjust through yet another transition period.
Although some of the challenges unique to remote working have dissipated, such as trying to simultaneously juggle child care, hybrid work brings its own stressors, according to Australian employers and successful implementation starts by looking at employee wellness.
“Only about 10 per cent want to return to an office full-time, compared to three in four people who want a mix of remote and in-person working,” says Lawrence Goldstone, Future of Work lead partner at PwC Australia.
“That’s going to become more of the norm.”
In the survey, conducted in March, PwC found 25 per cent preferred mostly virtual but some face-to-face time over the 13 per cent who preferred mostly face-to-face with some virtual. An even split was preferred by 34 per cent.
But while permanent hybrid working might be more popular than traditional office dwelling, it requires employers to keep the focus on employee wellbeing.
“Mental health and wellbeing has become one of the big focus areas for organisations, as they manage burnout, fatigue and the blurred lines between how and where we work,” he says.
“Particularly when we’ve been in lockdowns, working from home has crossed those lines.”
For businesses looking to retain or attract talent in the current economy, being deliberate about how ways of working support wellbeing is critical, he says.
“Wellbeing experience comes in right behind remuneration and reward [for employee priorities] and when we look at specific employee motivations, half the top eight can directly relate to hybrid working,” Goldstone says.
“They are things like valuing work-life balance which came in number two, flexibility in work choices came in number five, and then there was autonomy to complete tasks and activities, and the ability to work from home.
“This is what workers want and right now the pendulum has shifted massively to the employee in a way that it hasn’t done before to have choice.”
At Westpac, the appointment of the bank’s first Chief Mental Health Officer in 2018 has proved prescient, with David Burroughs finding his experience as a psychologist and strategist in hot demand in the past two years.
Westpac has leaned into its focus on mental health with regular seminars run by Burroughs for employees, as well as a daily “wellbeing hour” that automatically blocks out an hour in employee diaries to take a break.
The bank also added breaks between meetings during lockdowns to help manage what it describes as the additional cognitive load of virtual work, as well as providing resources designed to help employees better juggle family stress, relationship tensions, and coping in isolation.
“Helping our employees through the challenges of remote working, including staying mentally healthy, has been a major focus for Westpac since the start of the pandemic,” Burroughs says.
“Leveraging the latest research we take an evidence-based approach to our mental health support, which in recent times has focused on emerging risks out of COVID. This includes looking at job design and how individual roles are impacted by remote and hybrid working to help improve people’s experience of work beyond the pandemic.”
SEEK resident psychologist Sabina Read warns that there remains a gap between what employers think they are doing to support wellbeing and the perceptions of their workers.