Seminar: Are staff missing out in the working from home revolution?

We all know that working from home on a massive scale has engendered a sea change in how we view employment and what we expect from employers.

There are positives to increasingly flexible attitudes to where people work and how they split their time between home and the office.

But what are the downsides to these changes? Are some workers missing out on vital opportunities to learn when they have little or no face-to-face contact with colleagues?

And if offices are partially or even completely empty for much of the week, what does that mean for efforts to build a distinctive, vibrant office culture?

These questions and more were addressed in a seminar held by TheBusinessDesk.com and sponsored by audio visual solutions provider, Universal AV.

On the panel were Dr Helen Hughes, associate professor at Leeds University Business School, Shelley Townend, marketing manager at Universal AV, Mark Grayson, partner, head of logistics and manufacturing at RLB and Sandip Khroud, head of office in Leeds at Hill Dickinson.

The discussion was chaired by Michael Taylor, North West editor at TheBusinessDesk.com

Khroud focused on the importance of developing a positive office culture. He emphasised that for this to work, staff have to be in the office to create this culture and benefit from it.

Highlighting his own business, he added: “As a firm we’re known for our culture and that’s why people want to join us.

“But to have this culture you do need to be in the office, which is why we do want to get people back. There has to be an element of interaction and flexibility and it has to work both ways.

“And a lot of law firms now say that if you want to get promoted you have to be in the office.”

Shelley Townend, marketing manager at Universal AV, said: “People want a positive culture and to work somewhere they feel they belong.

“We’re now working from everywhere but that’s because it was forced on us and there are no procedures in place to manage it. We’re still on a learning curve.”

Grayson noted that his firm is 100 per cent employee owned, so workplace culture is highly valued.

He said: “Growth at the expense of culture isn’t where we want to be. When we recruit new staff we’re looking for people who share our values.

“People who were going through higher education during the pandemic didn’t have the best experience in terms of education. They want to be in the office because they don’t believe everything can be done online.”

He warned home working has negative implications for learning new skills from more experienced colleagues and also for employees’ mental health.

“With people working from home there is a mental health challenge,” he said. “We’re social animals and we do need personal interaction with other people, which is why being in an office is so valuable.”

Hughes said working from home can be problematic for younger employees who have only recently entered the workforce.

She said: “They struggle with ‘unknown unknowns’. They don’t know what they don’t know. They may know how to do their own bit of work but not know why they’re doing it or how it fits in to the bigger picture.

“School leavers benefit from being in office with other people around them. In my opinion there’s no substitute for being surrounded by role models day-to-day.”

When asked about whether working from home harms business productivity, she said: “There are studies that show performance doesn’t necessarily dip when people work from home. But it does affect the bigger picture – the overall quality of work you do can decline.”