Supporting wellbeing across the flexible extended workplace: why we need a different approach

At the moment, it is commonplace to see trends in the world of work through the distorting lens of polarised opinion about working from home, and corporate mandates to return to the office (RTO). It’s time we moved beyond the limited horizons of this binary, rather backward-looking debate.

Instead, we need to look at how both work and people’s experience of work can be improved, wherever and whenever people are working across the ‘extended workplace’. This is a much more varied and interesting landscape than the choice of a desk in an office or a desk at home.

Photograph: iStock

What is happening is a major shift in how work is done. There are a number of underlying trends changing the nature of work. These include:

• The continuing possibilities for the decentralisation of work in a digital age
• The rise of artificial intelligence, automation and robotics, which have profound spatial impacts on where and when work is done, and by whom
• New communication technologies that will create ever more immersive forms of virtual collaboration, and our growing familiarity with working at-a-distance with colleagues, especially as new generations progress through the workforce
• Changing aspirations in society, for a better balance, or harmony, between work and the rest of life
• The growth of more inclusive recruitment practices
• The growing ubiquity of activity-based workplace design, which over several decades has become the norm for new build and refurbishment
• The growth of alternative third-party flexible spaces for working
• New thinking in the design of inclusive workplaces
• A focus on creating human-centric workplaces, with greater focus and new thinking around ergonomics, acoustics, air quality, and facilities for health and wellbeing.

When we think about this range of changes underway, we can see that we need a much more progressive approach to working practices and workplace than is offered by a traditional approach to flexible working or the typical hybrid working approach (two days here, three days there).

How to roll out a smarter form of flexible working

In my book, Beyond Hybrid Working – A Smarter and Transformational Approach to Flexible Working, I’ve set out a strategic and benefits-focused approach to delivering flexible working. Crucially, it depends on having a joined-up approach, bringing together changes to working practices, work culture, leadership practices, workplaces, technologies and processes. And it’s based on 30+ years of experience in helping organisations do just that.

The aim should be for benefits to be delivered across the Triple Bottom Line: to the business, to individuals, and to the environment. There’s a large amount of research evidence that there are numerous benefits when employees work flexibly. Even more can be achieved when organisations take an intentional approach and target specific and measurable benefits within a programme of transformation, rather than responding individually to employee requests for flexibility. These are benefits such as productivity, employee wellbeing, improved retention and recruitment, and travel reduction.

The benefits an organisation targets can be incorporated into a high-level vision and a set of principles that are the touchstone for different parts of the business to frame their working arrangements, in line with the nature of the work tasks involved. That’s why it’s important not to implement one-size-fits-all policies that fail to recognise the different requirements.

A key principle is to embrace flexibility and virtuality as normal. This is different from the approach enshrined in “right-to-request” legislation, where an individual can apply for a pattern of work that is different from a default normal, based around set hours and set place of work.

Instead, individuals and teams decide the best way to do their work activities, within a framework of guidelines respecting the need for hands-on and site-specific activities, service delivery, security and colleague dependencies.

This also requires engaging people at all levels about how their work can be improved by changing working practices and processes. That means thinking through where and when work activities are best done, and how they can be done differently. It also involves thinking about what needs to change to enable work to be done in an optimal way.

Rethinking everything

One of the reasons some organisations have struggled with new ways of working is that they have tried to replicate place-based practices in a digital environment. This is evident, for example, when people move meetings into the online space and expect them to work just as before.

It is possible to get better at conducting virtual and hybrid meetings by training in the skills involved. But it’s even better first to deconstruct the purpose of meetings, and secondly to work through what other and more effective techniques – both in-person and virtual – can be used to achieve the purpose of the meeting.

The maxim here is, ‘think purpose, not presence’. This way it’s possible to reduce the overall amount of time spent in meetings while being more productive.

An idea that needs to be challenged is that while focused work can be done better at home, collaboration is better in person. It’s a kind of retreat to the cosiness of the familiar. But it’s worth challenging such an assumption by breaking down the different types of collaboration, then seeing how interaction needs fit into the other needs of a working day, and exploring how else the purpose of the collaboration might be achieved.

And it’s also valuable to challenge assumptions about linear working. By that I mean the processes where people do focused work separately, then share via email and/or meetings, then revise, and so on. Instead, both in person and virtually there is much more scope to work collaboratively on documents and other products, or gather around live data on dashboards and make decisions in real time.

Automating processes, using cameras, drones and remote monitoring all create shifts in how and where work needs to be done, and by whom – or, indeed, by what, as we increasingly employ AI to carry out or enhance the work.

The centrality of autonomy and trust

Research into flexible working consistently highlights the importance to employee wellbeing of having a degree of choice and control over how they do their work. It has been shown to reduce stress, improve engagement and support work–life balance.

Research over several decades shows that on balance, having flexibility also supports improved productivity. However, an intentional approach that also streamlines processes and rethinks working practices will have a greater impact on both increasing output and reducing the input costs of work (for example, by reducing property-related and travel costs).

This requires a shift away from managing by presence, and towards managing by results. And that requires managers operating within a culture of trust, supporting individuals and teams to make decisions about the most appropriate times and places to carry out their work.

One mistake some organisations make is to try to decide who can work flexibly on the basis of role, by classifying some roles as fixed, and others as flexible, mobile or home-based. Inevitably this throws up inconsistencies and perceptions of inequality and unfairness. So it’s always best to focus on tasks, not roles, when working through how flexibility can work in practice.

Time to rethink back-to-office mandates

While the full-time return-to-office mandates are the ones hitting the headlines, monitoring by organisation like Flex Index show that these are a minority. Most of those that do mandate presence in the office are doing so on a part-time basis, usually two days or three days.

This can be specific days, or a specific number of days, in the office. The advantages are basically clarity and familiarity, or of finding a halfway house between strongly held views.

But from a Smart Working perspective:

• Mandates compromise work effectiveness and employees’ work experience
• Tasks which may be better carried out elsewhere are constrained by being in the office, or by having to go there first before going out – for example, to see customers
• The focus in work organisation fixes on time and presence, rather than on results
• It limits the talent pool for recruitment – both geographically and in terms of diversity
• It reduces the potential for improving environmental performance, as it requires unnecessary travelling
• It compromises the potential to reduce the physical footprint of work, and the potential for achieving property-related financial and environmental savings, by trying to fill the building on some days of the week while leaving them largely empty on others.

In the end, if organisational leaders insist on mandating presence in the office, it’s better to specify a percentage of time over a longer period, such as 40 per cent of the time in the office or out on company business, over (say) a three-month period.

That allows more autonomy and flexibility for teams and individuals to align the times and locations of their work with the actual needs of the tasks they carry out. Even so, it does raise the question whether it’s a valuable use of time to be counting the hours when achieving the output ought to be the priority.

Our recommendation, whatever the starting point, is to aim for the more dynamic forms of flexibility, supported by a trust-based and results-focused culture.

“This flexibility is great. Let’s nail it down!”

Change can be challenging. Even people and institutions who support greater flexibility sometimes fear the loss of control. We see this both in over-prescriptive flexible working policies within organisations, and, in some countries, legal regulation of flexible working practices. In some countries there are also requirements to negotiate what is permissible with trades unions or other social partners.

The main risks here are in constraining freedom of choice for individuals and teams, and in acting as a brake on innovation in working practices.

Currently, there are moves in the UK to legislate for a ‘right to disconnect’. This is intended to protect workers from having their work intrude into their private life. In principle, this perhaps sounds like a good idea.

However, research by Eurofound in 2023, though broadly supportive of the approach, found that the most common response from employers in countries where such a right has been enshrined in law has been to switch off systems at a set time of day. That involves either switching off email, or switching off remote connection altogether. The fear driving this is of potential litigation on the issue.

Let’s think this through. Apart from the necessity for many people of dealing with variable workloads or working across time zones, having closely defined and immutable organisational ‘working hours’ is fundamentally at odds with people’s autonomy in choosing how best to work.

Managing the work–life interface is much more variable and nuanced than defining a block of work time and a block of non-work time. Personally, though I think the measure is well-intentioned, it is in practice somewhat infantilising of the workforce.

Andy Lake is the author of Beyond Hybrid Working.

If the issue is to protect people from overworking and having unreasonable requests to work outside of their chosen hours, then that is best dealt with through internal conversations and guidance rather than the heavy hand of government regulation.

Rethinking the workplace

Rethinking the where, when and how of work should also prompt some deep rethinking of the nature of the workplace. While the focus in the media and among some politicians has been on office work, it’s worth remembering that the majority of people, even in more advanced economies, do not work in offices. And many of those who do need to spend a great deal of their time being out of the office – primarily with clients or at sites where they need to carry out their work.

Add to this the continuing digitisation and decentralisation of work, and we can see a very different picture of workplaces emerging compared to the Industrial Age. Factories and warehouses have far fewer people working in them than 50 years ago. Offices are getting smaller, but may be more intensively used, when they are used. Third-party flexible workplaces have been the fastest-growing sector of commercial property for some time. People work more often in public places, and, of course, from home.

In this context, it’s useful to think in terms of the ‘Extended Workplace’, rather than a single building as being ‘the workplace’.

We can think of this workplace as consisting of four physical domains – organisation-owned, third-party-owned, public and personal, plus the virtual workplace that we need always to be connected to – or have rapid access to – wherever we are working.

We need, in principle, seamless access to data, applications, systems and colleagues on an equal basis, wherever we work. Choice of where to work should be guided by an assessment of where it is most productive to work, security, reducing costs and personal preference or need (for example, through disability or caring responsibilities).

What we are seeing is, as offices get smaller, the workplace as a whole is growing ever larger.

For employers, this means taking a wide range of possible work locations into account, and supporting employee wellbeing and productivity at all locations.

For example, measures taken to improve the ergonomics, acoustics, lighting and access to nature and biophilic features at organisation-owned workplaces need to be reflected in support, guidance and training for employees working from home and other locations, and in choices for use of third-party coworking spaces.

When the opportunity arises, the organisation’s workplaces should move towards inclusive design, to enable employees to be able to choose between different work settings within a building or campus, as well as being able to work elsewhere in the extended workplace.

This kind of approach should eliminate the concept of ‘remote working’, with all employees having equality and all places considered of equal importance.

What can organisations do to move forward?

After the turmoil caused by the pandemic and the lockdowns, the typical hybrid working arrangement represents something of a pause, a breathing space as we face the rapidly evolving future of work.

Many of the changes organisations have made over the past five years have been tactical. It’s time to develop integrated strategies to move forward. The best place to start is with an assessment of the current state of play, that gathers evidence about current working practices and workplace and technology provision, and the opportunities and constraints for a benefits-focused approach that makes the most of the new possibilities for working in more productive ways, and that will engage the workforce in helping to deliver positive change.

About the author:

Andy Lake is a specialist in flexible working, involving changes to working practices, workplaces, technology and culture. He has worked on dozens of implementations and evaluations across the private, public and voluntary sectors. He has also worked as an advisor in this field for the UK Cabinet Office and the European Commission.

Andy is the author of Beyond Hybrid Working – A Smarter and Transformational Approach to Flexible Working (Routledge, 2024) and numerous other publications exploring smart/flexible working and the future of work. He has led or participated in numerous UK and international research projects looking at the impacts of new ways of working and service delivery on business, government, transport, housing, and the environment.

For more information about Andy Lake’s book, Beyond Hybrid Working, see:

flexibility.co.uk/the-book-to-help-you-move-beyond-hybrid-working/

The Smart Working Handbook can be freely downloaded from:

flexibility.co.uk/product/smart-working-handbook-3rd-edition/

Contact Andy Lake at:

E: [email protected]

linkedin.com/in/andylakewriter