19
Examination of witnesses
Alice Arkwright, Maggi Ferncombe and Lauren Crowley.
Q70 The Chair: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to this meeting of the Home-based Working Committee and a special welcome to our witnesses today. This session is live. It is being broadcast, and a transcript will be taken and sent to you in a few days to check for accuracy. You are very welcome to provide any supplementary evidence after the meeting. When you speak for the first time, please introduce yourselves and say a little bit about who you are and what you do.
I will start with a very general question about the broad ways in which remote and hybrid working affect workers differently, depending on their characteristics such as age, race and gender.
Alice Arkwright: Thank you very much for the invite. I am from the Trades Union Congress. We have 48 affiliate unions across the UK, and I work in our equalities team, leading our work around flexible working.
On the different impacts for different groups of workers, it may be worth saying some of the general things that we have found before looking at the specific information we have on gender and BME workers. When we ask workers about hybrid working, regardless of demographic characteristics or protected characteristics, hybrid working is very popular among people who can work from home. That does not mean it is for absolutely everyone though; there are still people who prefer being in a workplace.
Of those who could work from home during the pandemic, 90% of people wanted to carry on doing some form of home working in the future. That was 89% for BME workers and 88% for 18 to 34 year-olds; it was slightly higher for disabled workers but was fairly consistent.
On the different groups, most people said that it is good for well-being and their work/life balance. This connects to a few core issues. Less commuting time comes up very often and, for a particular group, the ability to manage caring responsibilities is important. It can give people time to volunteer and there is support it can offer for disabled people, although that is very dependent on people’s health conditions and impairments.
One of the key points I want to make is that location-based flexibility provides benefits in and of itself, but it also opens the possibility for time-based flexibility, which is often not available to those in workplaces. That is an important point to start with: for example, if you are working from home there is more ability to choose when you take your breaks, and when you start and finish work because you are not tied to a workplace. Those time-based flexibilities are also particularly important when we think about people’s experiences of home working.
On different groups of workers, we have done some work on gender and the impact that that has on hybrid working. It is very well evidenced that fully remote, or hybrid is good for gender equality; it primarily supports people with caring responsibilities, who more often tend to be women still. It is worth pointing out that this is important especially for single parents but also important for things like the menopause. Being able to work from home means you can control the temperature more easily. There is avoiding commuting and access to a private bathroom. From a survey of almost 13,000 working mums, about 90% of those who were working flexibly said they would find it difficult or impossible to do their job without it, showing the importance of it in allowing people to stay in work.
Some of the downsides we hear about women’s experiences is that, when they work from home, there is often an experience where they take on more domestic work in comparison to men. However, research by Heejung Chung shows that, when men have access to home working and other forms of flexible working, that can act as an equaliser of care, which can help address issues like the gender pay gap.
We know that men can also face unique barriers to their access to home working and other forms of flexible working. TUC polling of men found that half of new dads and partners did not get any or all the flexibility they asked for in their role. That rose for those on lower incomes—those under £40,000 a year. The Fatherhood Institute has also done a lot of research on men’s experiences of flexible working.
I can talk a bit about BME workers as well, but do you want to go to other members of the panels or can I continue?
The Chair: No, let us hear that.
Alice Arkwright: The first point on BME workers is that their experiences of flexible working is an extremely under-researched area, in particular around home and hybrid working. We have attempted to plug some of that gap with a small piece of research that was done with the University of Kent. We looked at the percentages of workers from different ethnic groups who had access to home working then we did a small but quite intensive diary study over the course of a month with 20 BME workers who were all working hybridly, to varying extents. For some people that was one day a month in the office; for others it was three days a week in the office. There is quite a big variation in hybrid working.
When looking at the data, we found that there were certain ethnic groups that consistently had less access to home working than others. Black British and Caribbean/African workers, Pakistani and Bangladeshi workers and Chinese and other Asian workers, and particularly men in those groups, were least likely to report access to home working. The rate of increase that had happened since 2020 was slower for those groups as well in comparison to others.
The TUC looked at this and it is partly down to occupational segregation. We know that these groups of workers might be more likely to work in occupations where home working is just not possible. The University of Kent did further research where it controlled for a series of factors that would indicate whether you were more likely to have access to home working, like sector occupation, size of company and different factors, and the results were broadly similar. The conclusions we drew from them were that we think that workplace racism is likely to be playing a role as well in who can have access to flexible working and hybrid working.
The Chair: Did your data show that the issue is not just about hybrid working but about flexible working more generally?
Alice Arkwright: The data we looked at was just hybrid working, just home working, but there is broader research. For example, Timewise found that BME workers were more likely to say they would not feel comfortable speaking to their current employer about changing their work pattern in comparison to white workers.
The Fawcett Society has found that BME workers were more likely to agree with the statement that they would like greater flexibility but were worried about the implications for their career. It seems that there is a pattern, although it is very underresearched, that there may be more fear about asking for flexible working for BME workers. This is potentially not surprising given the wider labour market experiences of BME workers. We know, for example, that they are more likely to face disciplinary procedures, are more likely to experience scrutiny or surveillance at work or to be overlooked for promotion.
In the diary study we did of hybrid workers, the benefits were similar to those that other groups of workers talked about. People felt that they were more productive in a hybrid model, had better work/life balance and the ability to manage care. Those key things came up.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: You said that they felt they were more productive. Do you have any triangulation on what their employers think?
Alice Arkwright: For this study we just spoke to the workers rather than the employers.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: So we have no relationship between their perception and those who employ them.
Alice Arkwright: No, with this study we just spoke to the 20 workers.
Q71 The Chair: We would be really interested to hear about that, but that might be something you could send us in written evidence. I will move on to your colleagues.
Maggi Ferncombe: I am the director of political strategy for UNISON, the trade union. We are a public sector union and the largest union in the UK with 1.3 million members. We represent any worker who delivers public sector services in the UK.
I will not repeat some of the stuff specifically about gender that Alice has talked about. In our experience, young workers, a particular group who entered the workforce just before, during or just after Covid have a very different expectation about the ability to work flexibly and work from home. We have anecdotal evidence where young workers are not even applying for jobs unless the ability to work flexibly or work from home is in the advert. A lot of them finished their education while working from home and I suppose it makes sense for them.
The only other thing I will say on this question is that—and as a trade union I would say this—any procedure must be a formal agreement, and it must be with the trade unions. I have concerns with the number of ad hoc arrangements that employers allow to happen. There is real potential for discrimination claims, so having a properly negotiated agreement, whatever that is, means that there is consistency and that it is less likely for groups of workers to be impacted.
Lauren Crowley: I am assistant general secretary of FDA. We are a trade union for civil servants across government departments and parts of the public sector.
We have conducted two research projects in recent years about the impact of hybrid working on our members. One was in 2022, as we were emerging from the pandemic, on how hybrid was affecting them. The other was last summer in response to the Government’s mandate of a 60% blanket attendance quota for all civil servants.
An area where there was a particular difference in the members was disability. There was a disparity between disabled and non-disabled members showing that disabled employees were much more likely to face difficulties because of the blanket attendance quota.
Where the original research had shown us that hybrid working was very much welcomed by our members and helped our members, particularly disabled members, to work better and more effectively in government departments, the blanket mandate significantly worsened their work/life balance, with 32% saying that it had significantly worsened their productivity.
Many talked about the difficulties, particularly for neurodivergent members, of having to work in government buildings that are not designed for good hybrid working or being able to find quiet spaces. They talked about the impact of that on their productivity.
The other area where there was a big statistical difference was with our younger members. We represent members in the fast-stream scheme, which is the grad scheme equivalent. Not all of them are young but many are early in their careers. There, 77.5% of our members said that the mandate had not been beneficial for them and that they were spending additional time on admin tasks that could be undertaken remotely. We had 7,000 respondents to that survey, which shows the strength of feeling. It was the biggest response we have ever had to a survey, which shows how topical an area it is for us and that we continue to do our work within.
Baroness Manzoor: What percentage and numbers were disabled? Could you break that down a little further?
Lauren Crowley: I have the stats but not with me. I will have to go into the report to see how many of the overall 7,000 respondents said that they were disabled. Sorry; which did you want me to break down?
Baroness Manzoor: I wanted to know whether that was broken down by gender and ethnicity as well for the 7,000. You have talked about disabled employees particularly, and I wondered what those figures said or could say.
Lauren Crowley: We did ask for all characteristics and those were the areas that showed the biggest disparity between the respondents who belonged to the characteristic and those who did not. We did not find significant differences on the other characteristics although, as Maggi said, anecdotally we know—and particularly from previous research that we had done—that there are positive benefits for women carers, for example, and many of our other members who fit into those groups. There was not a statistical difference in this piece of research.
Baroness Manzoor: It is interesting because we have had other witnesses give evidence to say that there is potentially an adverse impact on women working from home. It is just to better align that thinking.
Lauren Crowley: It may be that it did not impact our members in that way but there are different impacts for the wider workforce. Our members tell us that flexibility generally helps them to be able to balance caring responsibilities and juggle things around work/life balance. One of the things that we cannot draw out of the data, but we speculate, is that, as more of our male members are also able to do more working from home, they are also able to undertake caring responsibilities that maybe previously they were not able to do. That may be why there is not a difference in how much they feel hybrid working is important to them because both groups are finding that the benefits are equally helpful.
Q72 Lord Fuller: You have been focusing on the individual, but I want to broaden it a little more to the organisations and to the logistics of operating offices, other facilities—the work environment that can allow an office or work situation away from the home, flexible or remote working. My question is in that context: what hard data can you point to? We have heard a lot of opinion and a lot of anecdotes but no absolute hard data about what the employers’ side needs to provide to make home working a success.
Maggi Ferncombe: I will not have an answer for you, unfortunately, because I do not have any hard data. I am not sure if it is because, although it feels like we have been doing this for quite some time, it is still relatively new. Technology is changing all the time, and it is becoming easier and easier to be able to either work from home or hybrid but also for managers to manage. There is probably a lot more pressure on middle managers now with people working from home, but I am afraid I do not have the data for hard evidence.
Alice Arkwright: I do not have the stats in front of me, but we did some research with disabled workers during the pandemic. One of the key things that came out for those who reported poor mental health experiences was that they had not been given things like the relevant equipment or software to be able to do their jobs at home or had not received reasonable adjustments. That might be software, but it might also be physical things to have in your home such as an ergonomic chair. There is a core set of things we would expect employers to provide in a home to make sure that people are working safely and healthily.
A big thing that came out in our diary study was that people felt their employers had provided them with very good equipment to be able to work from home. That ranged from equipment to furniture as well—for example, chairs, in some cases tables, laptop risers and footstools to put your feet on to adjust your posture. There is some data that shows that there has been an increase in postural conditions because of working from home and impacts on back pain.
Lord Fuller: We are getting back to the individuals again. I am thinking much more about the organisations and reasons why people might not want to go back into the office. What are the logistical problems? I know this is the PCS and it is not to do with FDA or UNISON, but there is all sorts of press now on the MHCLG about all sorts of reasons why, “We can’t go back into the office anymore”. What evidence do you have from the union perspective for why that might be, because in the olden days they did?
Lauren Crowley: One of the factors there—and we have not pulled out stats on this, but I can follow up afterwards—is how in that example the Government have managed its estate strategy, and I think this is also the case for employers more widely in the private sector. As employers have started to decrease their physical footprint, office working has become much more challenging. Open plan offices that were designed for sitting at your desk and conducting work in a particular way may not be necessarily fruitful for people who want to come in to collaborate or need quiet spaces.
When you come into the office now it may be that you want to do team meetings, but those spaces are not there. Our members have told us that they are coming in to sit on Teams meetings and they may not be sitting with or located anywhere near the rest of their team. They are questioning, “What is the purpose of me coming into the office if I am not getting the benefits of in-person working with the people who I work with?”
Q73 Lord Farmer: This question is primarily for Lauren but the rest of you please join in. You may not be talking to employers but why do you think some employers have required staff to increase their office attendance, including the Government’s 60% mandate for the Civil Service? Why are they insisting on this?
Lauren Crowley: Those are potentially two different considerations. I will take the government mandate first because that is the one that we have the most interaction with. As you say, the Government have implemented a one-size-fits-all approach for 500,000 civil servants across 200 organisations. There was no evidence provided when the decision was made and an evaluation or a review has not been undertaken since to understand the impact that that has on civil servants. The previous policy was 40%; it was increased to 60% and no evaluation was undertaken to understand why 60% would be better than 40% or any other figure for office attendance.
In the absence of any evidence, we must conclude that the policy was really driven for political reasons. We know that the Government were under pressure significantly from the media: journalists were stood outside Whitehall buildings and counting how many people were going in the front door and using that as a measure of performance or productivity for the Civil Service.
It is particularly disappointing that this Government have continued that approach without dialogue with the unions or without any evidence that we can see. As you can see, we have evidence that we could have contributed to that discussion to inform the policy decision. The reasons about collaboration and in-person team working and all those things do not stack up to any evidence that we can see. The decision seems to be driven by—
Lord Farmer: Could I just interrupt? When your union negotiates—and I know you are with the Civil Service—with an employer, do you take account of the effect of greater employee choice around work location and other demands on the firm’s productivity and on the Civil Service’s productivity? Do you take that into account?
Lauren Crowley: We would if we could get a good sense of how the Civil Service measures productivity, which currently is a difficult thing to do. If I give the example of HMRC, it looked at customer service lines, for example, and how many calls were taken from home and how many were taken from the office. There was no difference between the number of calls that were taken.
Productivity is an extremely difficult thing to measure for civil servants’ performance and how many calls you take does not tell you the quality of the service that a person received. There is not a Civil Service-wide measure of productivity that we can use, but if that data were available for us to use, yes, we would take that into account when we are negotiating agreements with employers.
Maggi Ferncombe: It is the same with the public sector. Unfortunately, very few of us here represent people who are just making something like a widget at the end of the day. When you are talking about clients and working with the public, it is difficult to be able to say, “This is what productivity looks like”, because it is so different across the board. But absolutely trade unions will always consider the evidence and the discussion the employer wants to have with us as well.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: Can I come in? I am interested in your answer, Maggi, because somebody I know who works for UNISON has told me that UNISON has asked its staff to come back into the office more. Is that true, as an employer?
Maggi Ferncombe: As an employer, we have an interim policy, and I understand there is discussion with the trade unions about what the final policy will look like.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: What is the interim policy?
Maggi Ferncombe: I think it is up to 50%.
Q74 Lord Parker of Minsmere: I am interested in what you were saying, Lauren, about public sector productivity because, of course, Ministers make statements about it, including just the other day in the Lords. The figure used for comparative productivity before and after the pandemic is 6.4%. They must base that on something, but I do not know what that is. I am interested in any comment you have on that, but more widely on what any of you want to say to us about the relationship between these more predominant shapes of working and productivity in the economy.
Clearly the big national challenge we face is about productivity in the economy and our international competitiveness. What comments do any of you want to make about how what is now normal for those who can—hybrid working—relates to productivity in the public sector but more widely?
Lauren Crowley: I will take the first point about productivity. I will not pretend to be a productivity expert, because that is a very particular skill set, but I think that lots of false links have been drawn between productivity and office working. In the media over recent years we have seen lots about DVLA, HMRC or the Passport Office. We know from working in those organisations that the efficiency of those services is much more to do with technology, understaffing and backlogs that were created by the pandemic. There is no evidence that we have seen that has shown that there is any link between home working or increased hybrid working and the performance and productivity of those services.
We have information on perceived productivity from our members who tell us that they believe that their productivity was increased by having access to more hybrid working. Employers must balance that against the benefits that they see from in-person working and what our members feel is increased productivity by being able to work individually at home. That is why most of our members are in favour of a hybrid model, not of sole home working or sole office working but being able to reap the benefits of both, if hybrid working is done in a good and thoughtful way and a way that encourages collaboration and increased teamworking.
Maggi Ferncombe: I will add that the ability to have hybrid working combined with flexible working is very helpful and specifically really helps our women members because, for example, they are not having to pay somebody to look after a child and take them on the school run. If you can work your hours around that because your job is flexible and you are working from home, our members are clear that they feel much more productive working from home. They can concentrate without the distractions that you might have from working in the office. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence where people talk about specific jobs that they line up in the week to work from home, because they know they need to be able to concentrate more.
Q75 Lord Fink: I have one contrary view. I am not an expert in productivity, but I know, with AI and other things, that companies have been trying to drive productivity up over the last eight to nine years. The number of people in the Civil Service in 2016 was 384,000. That has grown by 34% over the last eight years despite improved technology and so on. If working from home or hybrid working is more productive, what extra are we getting from the 34% increase in civil servants? That is the question I cannot box in my mind. I am not saying it means that the answer is wrong, but the numbers do not box with me. Why do we need 34% more people to do broadly the same jobs, albeit there is a backlog?
Lauren Crowley: That is it; several factors must be considered. If you look at the workforce growth over the period for the Civil Service, Brexit happened and the pandemic also happened during that time. Many services that were done in Brussels had to be done by the UK Government now, and there was the response to the pandemic. Any Government must look at what work they want to deliver and shape the workforce to that. It is not a direct link between the number of people working for the Civil Service and productivity because the work changes and factors change over time as well. It is difficult to find a direct correlation between the two.
Lord Fuller: On the consequence of Covid and Brexit having worked their way through the system, what is the objection now about going back to 2016 or 2018 staffing levels, as Lord Fink said?
Lauren Crowley: Sorry, I could not quite hear that.
Lord Fuller: To your answer that the number of civil servants increased substantially for Covid and for Brexit, as those two episodes now work their way through the system, so they are now in our rear-view mirror—behind us not ahead of us—what is the objection about going back to those 2018 levels of public sector, Civil Service employment, especially given that the Minister said on the Floor of the House the other day that there is a 6.4% reduction in productivity? We have 20% more civil servants; I am suggesting to you that there is not 20% more work to be done now because the Brexit load and the Covid load have been—
The Chair: Sorry; can I just stop you there? I do not want to go into the size of the Civil Service and the link with productivity and such. We will go down a whole different debate, if you will forgive me.
Lauren Crowley: I am happy to provide you an answer separately if that is helpful.
Lord Fuller: That would be good.
The Chair: Yes, I think so. If members will forgive me, that is just not a fruitful avenue for this committee, although I can see why members are interested in it. I stopped before Lord Parker had finished.
Lord Parker of Minsmere: In the interests of time, I will not finish.
The Chair: Thank you. We are up against time.
Q76 Baroness Manzoor: Very briefly, there have been IT advances, including AI. It does not matter whether it is the Civil Service or any other sector; you would see that the efficiency and the productivity would have increased significantly as a direct result with fewer people. Do you think that is the right or wrong statement? Much of what we are hearing is anecdotal evidence, and a lot of the evidence has that good feeling: if you are disabled or a woman working from home it may well be better. However, the stats do not stack up and that is where I am struggling with it as well.
Lauren Crowley: Those are two different answers that I would give. What we have not seen is AI or technology advance significantly enough over the last period such that it would replace headcount. We are seeing some tasks made easier or maybe some tasks replaced, but in the departments that we work in we are not seeing significant enough advancements or even investment from the Government just yet to see that there would be any efficiencies made through AI or tech rollout. What we are seeing is several pilots and trials in different departments that we hope, and our members hope, will make their jobs better and easier as those things come through. At the moment, we are not reaping the benefits of those things.
Baroness Manzoor: It was not so much the Civil Service; I was thinking of health, public health and the advances that have been made in technology and in medicine, but the numbers are not there.
Maggi Ferncombe: We are probably in a similar position. In the big scheme of things, we are fairly early on with AI being significant enough to have made a difference to the headcount number, for example, that work in the NHS. We are a bit early in that.
Q77 Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: I must declare that I am on the board of NHSE and I am a nurse by background. There are some issues for which you can reduce headcount and others where you need to increase it.
I would like to ask this question. Recent and proposed flexible working legislation may impact remote and hybrid working. What further changes do you think that we should consider, such as an employer’s right to refuse to disconnect? At the moment, my understanding is that an employer can ask you to be available. It depends whether you are on shift work or whether you are in middle management. One of the issues for the committee, just to put this in context for you, is that we know that some people, like teachers and nurses, must go to work and others have the benefits that you have been talking about. Could you try to pick that up and see whether you could make some suggestions where these things might be important for legislation?
Alice Arkwright: We welcome the changes suggested through the Employment Rights Bill in connection with flexible working. There are two points here where you could perceive potential further legislation or changes.
On the right to disconnect, it is important that you have raised the point that this connects to multiple different workers, not just those who work from home. We know that there has been an increase in work intensification across the economy and we see that also play out for home workers. A lot of research shows that people who work from home tend to end up working harder and longer for a variety of reasons, but we also know that that happens to nurses. We know that people in the public sector—for example, teachers—end up answering emails outside of school time or outside of working hours. Retail workers will end up closing shops when their shift is technically finished.
We also know the other side to the rise in new technology in the workplace. Since the Covid pandemic, because of the move to remote, we have seen a massive increase in surveillance technology being used against workers. That is both people who work from home but also in workplaces. What can happen is that it can lead to a quite unrealistic expectation on workload. If you feel like you are being watched all the time as a worker, it can drive that intensification of work.
For those reasons, the TUC would support—as you have suggested—a statutory right to disconnect, but we see this as an opportunity for employers and workers to create a policy together as to how that would work. It will look different in different workplaces. That would consider the needs of the employer—for example, to respond in an emergency—alongside balancing the needs of workers to have that proper time to rest. Those two things are not in opposition to each other: rested workers are good for employers; you do not want burnout or high levels of stress.
The second point I wanted to make on legislation is that the TUC for a long time has called for an advertising duty. This is because we see a slight mismatch between the demand for home working and the benefits it can bring for employers in recruitment and retention in comparison to the percentage of jobs that are advertised with flexible working options in. There is some Timewise research that shows that just 12% of jobs have home working included in job adverts, even though we know that it is possible for many more jobs.
This would be good not only for employers, in that it could help with attraction of talent, but for people for whom flexible working is essential for them to manage their job, whether that is caring responsibilities or others. It means that it is easier for you to enter the labour market or to move between jobs if you already know in advance of applying whether it will work for you.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: Can I just come back with one thing? It is a small example, but we have heard of young people who are either still living at home or living in a bedsit who do not want to work from home at all. Have you picked that up in any of your surveys or have very few surveys been done on people just entering on low-grade jobs? Those seem to be the people who find this difficult.
Alice Arkwright: We have anecdotal evidence, yes.
Maggi Ferncombe: Unfortunately, I do not think enough actual research has been done to provide you with the statistics. One thing that I would add to that is, yes, UNISON would very much support the right to disconnect because of the huge numbers of hours of unpaid overtime that workers work. One of two things should be done. If a job requires you to work more hours, there should be negotiation to amend the contract—so rather than having 35 hours it is increased—or to have proper systems in place so that they get adequate overtime, the ability to take TOIL or unsocial hours.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: Can I just come back to one thing? You have talked about flexibility for women in particular. I used to love to be able to leave my children and go to work and not worry about two things at once. I wonder whether you have picked up anything. You talked about how it can be very convenient taking them to school and I can see that, I really can. However, if they are ill, many of us used to just have to take a day off and declare it. Now there appears to be less sickness taken for people who are hybrid working. Do you think that is because they are managing two things at once?
Maggi Ferncombe: I think that there is a reduction in recorded sickness. For people like me who travel from south-west London into central London, if I am feeling pretty grotty because I have a rotten cold or a cough, I am less likely to go into the office, whereas if I am working from home I can still work; it is just that I do not want to subject South Western train passengers to my cold. I do not think that it is tied to children’s sickness; I think that it is their own sickness and the fact that they are able to work, just not necessarily commute into the office.
Q78 Baroness Freeman of Steventon: Thinking more broadly about the societal effects of the change in working, I am interested in the geographical and regional differences and the effects that the changing work patterns might have on our geography and wage distribution and how that also might intersect with broadband availability. Could you comment on anything you have seen of regional disparities, changes in wages at different places in the country, and then the geographical effects of these changing work patterns?
Alice Arkwright: In advance of coming, I looked at the data for the ONS percentages of where home working is broadly spread across the country. Probably not surprisingly, the highest percentage of workers who report mainly working from home is in the east of England, London or the south-east. It tends to be concentrated in those areas. Workers in Northern Ireland and Scotland have the lowest percentage rates of mainly working from home, and the east Midlands and West Midlands come out at the lower end of that as well, so there are geographical differences.
There was some research by Nicholas Bloom around productivity and hybrid working, which showed benefits around productivity and hybrid working. One of the key things that came out was better retention rates for people who lived further away from their workplace, which is potentially not surprising if you do not have to come in as often. This, I guess, raises a question as to whether hybrid working can potentially spread the radius that employers can recruit from, which is beneficial for employers but also means that access to certain jobs is not so concentrated in certain geographies within the country.
Lauren Crowley: To add to that, hybrid working is one tool that can be useful to the Government’s places for Growth strategy, which is a strategy to increase the number of Civil Service roles outside of London. As you were saying, it enables them to widen the radius of the pool of people from whom they can recruit without having to significantly increase the physical footprint of government estate. It is something that can help to support increased diversity and talent in places outside of London.
Baroness Freeman of Steventon: Do you have a sense of whether people are commuting less because of hybrid working or whether they are able to take jobs that are further away, so they must do one day with 100 miles of travel each week rather than living closer to their workplace and doing it every day? Do you get a sense of whether people are doing that?
Maggi Ferncombe: Representing public sector workers, most of them live around and close to where they work, unless they have then subsequently moved out. Part of it is broadband catching up around the rest of the country making things a bit easier. I am not sure that there is any statistical evidence from which we can surmise that it is greener because of less travelling. The other thing that I was thinking about in preparation was that, because of technology, if you are in the office, you log on to a system, whatever the system is; if you are working from home, you are logging on to the same system. Having to print out reams of paper and take files with you to different workplaces has probably reduced quite significantly.
Lauren Crowley: Our experience anecdotally is that we have members who have taken a job that they might not otherwise have applied for because they live further away from a government hub, which are mostly city-based areas, but they are willing to do that because they know that they will not have to travel that distance every day.
Q79 Baroness Featherstone: This is primarily for Maggi but others must feel free to join in. What challenges do remote and hybrid working pose in mixed workforces comprised of workers working at home to varying extents? Are there any issues around two-tier workforces? Might it be that, if you work from home, you are given different tasks to those who come into the office? What about promotion; is that affected? Are there delays? If you are not at work, does that cause delays and co-ordination issues? Is that a problem? Is there any lack of a sense of belonging or commitment that differentiates those who go into the office from those who are working from home?
Maggi Ferncombe: That is a lot. In the public sector, we have agreements with most of the national employers across all the public sector when it comes to hybrid and home working. There will be a form of agreement, but they will all be slightly different because of the needs of the service that is provided. I would say that for a lot of front-line public sector workers, specifically those dealing with patients or clients, there is an acceptance that they cannot work from home: you cannot care for somebody through a screen and you cannot provide medical assistance to a patient, if you are a paramedic or whatever, from home. There is an acceptance of that.
For a lot of the admin and office-based roles within the public sector you can work from home. We have not picked up any evidence and I am not aware of any national employer that has come to us and said that there are delays because somebody is not in the office two days a week. If anything, as I have said, we have picked up that productivity seems to be higher. We are not aware of any issues that you can pinpoint and say, “That bit is not working”.
With promotions, we cannot say, “Here is an ideal policy that every employer should do, and it will fit every worker”, because everyone has different needs, of course. However, again, we have not picked up any areas on that.
What I think is important is that there will be some roles within the public sector—for example, social workers—whose week will consist of visiting clients, attending court and writing reports. If they are given the flexibility to manage their week, they may have a day at home writing their reports. For those who cannot work from home because they are doing front-line jobs, there are other ways that they can be flexible. They can be flexible on shifts; when shifts start and finish could be taken into account.
There is an ability for them to have some form of flexibility, so I would not say that there is a two-tier workforce. I can quote chapter and verse the number of two-tier workforces we have in the public sector, but this is not one of them, I would say. Rather than just thinking about hybrid working per se, if you take into account flexible working, I think that most workers within the public sector would find a benefit from being able to work more flexibly.
Baroness Featherstone: Do either of you have anything on those issues? Is it just that it is not something that we have looked at or we have data on? Is that the issue—that at this point it is too early on to see the divisions that might be created or the benefits? I do not know.
Alice Arkwright: What we have in the data is that, alongside the growth of home and hybrid working, we have not seen growth in other forms of flexible working across the economy. Sorry; I know that is not specific to the public sector. There is a concern, I guess, that people who cannot work from home are not necessarily getting access to flexible working, which would be beneficial for them and for employers.
On your point about belonging and commitment, we have some anecdotal stuff in the diary studies we have done of workers, which I am very happy to share, on how important the relationship with the line manager is for fostering a sense of belonging and connection to your workplace while you are hybrid working.
Baroness Featherstone: We have heard from other witnesses that management needs a whole new effort.
Maggi Ferncombe: In my experience, managers have the will and want this to work across the board. When you are bringing in a hybrid or flexible working policy, you need to ensure that it is not just what is written on the paper, but that they also get adequate training, because there is a lot of responsibility on them to maintain that working relationship.
The Chair: Before I bring in Lord Farmer, could I ask about this question of management that we keep hearing about? In your branch of the Civil Service, Lauren, is there any acknowledgement or a sense that there is a different skill set to managing workers who are working remotely some of the time, and is that being addressed?
Lauren Crowley: It is not something that I have seen rolled out yet, but it is something that I know is under consideration and is something that our members tell us.
In that survey that I cited earlier, over half of those respondents were managers and they feel that they have to micromanage people at the moment based on who is sat at what desk, rather than being given the tools or skills to be able to think about how they are interacting with people, bringing people together and working together to achieve the best outcome. It is more about how the mandate is negatively impacting their ability to manage people and the focus that they have been given, which is number of people at desks, rather than what they are trying to achieve as a team.
Q80 Lord Farmer: We have seen research findings that suggest significant variance in how individual employees respond to working from home, whether hybrid or full-time, with some improving productivity by 25% and others being less efficient in working from home. If you negotiate a cross-workforce right to a level of home working in a firm that individual employees insist on taking up, even if they are not suited to as they are less productive, where does this leave the employer? Is their ability to manage an employee so that they are working effectively and pulling their weight in a team hampered? In other words, there are variants in how people respond to it: some do much better and others do worse. Is the employer allowed to take that into consideration?
Maggi Ferncombe: I do not think that there is a significant difference. It is around managing people. In the same way that, pre Covid, if everyone was in the office five days a week and somebody was underperforming you would manage that through performance management; I would suggest that you could do the same for anyone working from home. If you believed that they are not producing or completing work that was expected by the manager or the employer, it would be the employer’s right to be able to deal with that through the normal process.
Lord Farmer: Research seems to suggest that the active characteristics of working from home suited some people very well and other people not so well. It seems to me that it might be difficult for a manager to flatten out those differences. The person who is not good at working from home, he might in the end have to persuade to come into the office.
Lauren Crowley: That is why it is so important that these policies are evidence driven and that you do not have a one-size-fits-all approach, because each employer or manager will have that insight to be able to make decisions. Generally, working from home and hybrid working policies will be flexible enough to allow for that based on what is changing as you evaluate how your team is working together.
Q81 Baroness Freeman of Steventon: This is a quick question about where employer and employee responsibilities overlap over provision of a suitable working environment. Presumably, the employer must make sure that the employee has the equipment to work from home. What about broadband? If an employee is in an area where the broadband may not be sufficient to sustain the technology for working from home, how does that work with employers?
Maggi Ferncombe: Alice, do you have an answer for that one?
Alice Arkwright: We do not negotiate directly with employers, so I do not have experience of it.
Maggi Ferncombe: Okay—I did not know if you had done any research on it.
Alice Arkwright: I was going to say that the only research we have done on it is that there are, I guess, mixed results about how much it costs people to work from home. People save money from not commuting, but we often find that workers are paying to upgrade their own broadband and things like that, so that they are able to work from home. There is mixed research on whether it is more expensive for some people to work from home or cheaper because of things like broadband.
Maggi Ferncombe: There is nothing cast iron about who would be responsible for it. It is by employer; lots of employers will buy whatever the booster is that you need and others say, “If you want to work from home, this is the capacity you need to have to be able to do it efficiently”.
Q82 Lord Fuller: There is a lot of consensus that better managers get better results; who knew? That is not unique to working from home; that goes for all economies across the whole world. What I am interested in is whether we are being realistic here. If you are running a team of half a dozen people and you know them intimately and it is a small business with good management, you can make allowances for the individual circumstances in the business due to how they work their lives. However, if you are running a team of 500 people, on an ostensibly similar activity, are we being realistic that the manager can negotiate 500 individual customisations on what is a large employment base?
I am not sensing that we are being realistic here. However good that manager is, there just is not enough bandwidth to negotiate those flexibilities for an individual, so you must have some default rules. I am not sensing that there is an acceptance that there can be some default rules: “Well, it is not based on evidence” or “We have not done this” or there is an excuse why we cannot come in. At some stage when you get to a large organisation, there must be ground rules and I am just not sensing that, particularly from you, Lauren, but to a lesser extent from Maggi and Alice. It is said, “Well, there isn’t any evidence”. I put the counterfactual: if there are no ground rules, there is chaos and the organisation cannot proceed.
Where there has been a huge amount of success is in His Majesty’s Passport Office, which is a department transformed for the better. It has good management, everyone is on the same team, but they are in the office, for the most part, not least because you cannot have the blank passports leaving the office. It is secure. Are we just not being realistic here? We have drifted into the cult of the individual and the needs of the organisation have been emasculated, it seems to me. Can you comment?
Lauren Crowley: If I can just directly respond, I am not aware of anywhere in the Civil Service where one person manages 500 people or would be responsible for negotiating 500 different agreements.
Lord Fuller: There will be some accountability at the 500-person level.
Lauren Crowley: There would, and I have not suggested at all that there should not be some ground rules. What there should not be is one percentage of attendance for 500,000 different people across 200 different employers. It does not make sense and it does not work. Each employer should be given the discretion to establish and negotiate the policy that works for them, dependent on the area of work that they deliver and the people that they manage. That will be some accountability, some ground rules that are set at the top, as we do with all our collective agreements. There will be policies that apply across several different people with some flexibility for individuals and dependent on what that employer or department must deliver for, depending on which area of government policy it is delivering and for whom it is delivering it.
Maggi Ferncombe: I am sorry if you thought that we were talking about everyone having to have an individual agreement. We are trade unions, so that is not the line we will go down. We will talk about collective agreements. The likelihood in the public sector of having one manager responsible for 500 people is horrifying, but I get your point.
When we talk about the relationship between a worker and the manager, we are talking about the immediate line manager—the person responsible for sickness absence, who talks about performance management, who talks about arrangements for work. They would not normally have 500 people; it would be a much more manageable figure. This would be based on a collective agreement that we have negotiated with the employer in the best interests of the employer and the workers, and there will need to be some individual arrangements made because of different people’s circumstances—the Equality Act, for example.
Q83 Baroness Manzoor: Very briefly, how many collective agreements have you made on hybrid working and what size of organisation were these?
Maggi Ferncombe: We have one for NHS England and we have NJC for local government, but we will have hundreds, if not thousands, for the smaller employers that are not covered by national collective bargaining. We have a lot of examples. That is why I am saying that they will all be slightly different, because the needs of the employer need to be considered.
Q84 Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: You have talked about reducing space for work in the office—shorthand for going to work. How do you make sure that those offices are used for five days a week? I visited somewhere that is really innovative: HR is always a Tuesday, finance is always a Thursday and then everybody must do one Friday or one Monday a month, so that there is a desk for everybody. It is almost a rota for office attendance, but it means that people are there with their own teams. Is that the kind of thing that you think we should be moving towards?
Alice Arkwright: It goes back to Maggi’s point about collective agreements. Every workplace will look slightly different as to what works for the employer and the employees and that could be—
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: Let me just come back: is it reasonable to try to maximise the use of your office?
Lauren Crowley: Yes, I would say so.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: That is really our question. Monday and Friday never being used is perceived as a problem. I am not saying that it is, but do you think that it is reasonable to negotiate at the right level to use the office Monday to Friday, because we have reduced the size of offices so dramatically?
Maggi Ferncombe: Yes. There have not been huge amounts of it in the public sector, but some councils have sold buildings and stuff because they have reduced the square footage. Hot-desking is necessary, so you must do things on a rota. To my mind, it makes sense that you do it on a team basis, so you can have a team meeting on one of those days, for example.
Lauren Crowley: Yes, and that is what our research showed: it is driven less by the building but was more about why people are coming together. Anchor days was one of the things that had widespread support in our research. You are not coming in just to sit on Teams calls with a team that is spread out across the country, but you have designed work so that you come together and collaborate and work together in person.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: You call that an anchor day. That is helpful; I do not think that we have had anchor days.
The Chair: No, that is good. I will draw this to a close. It would be helpful if you could each drop us a line—this is your homework—if you had a recommendation that you would like us to make or a recommendation to government. It would be good to hear that from you. I am sorry that we have run out of time to hear it now. Thank you very much for your interesting evidence and the clarity of your replies. I will bring this session to a close.
