14
Examination of witnesses
Danny Mortimer and Dan Moczulski.
Q185 The Chair: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to this House of Lords Select Committee on Home-based Working. A very warm welcome to our two witnesses this afternoon.
We are in a public session. The transcript will be available in a few days’ time and will be sent to you to check for transcription errors. If you wish to provide any supplementary evidence in writing, you are welcome to do so.
I start with a question for Mr Moczulski. First, tell us a bit about your organisation and your policies towards home-based working, including how they have changed over time from the pandemic to now. Crucially, what factors have led you to decide whatever it is that you have decided?
Dan Moczulski: Thanks for having me, everybody. I am the managing director of eToro in the UK; I also look after the German operation. eToro is a brokerage offering retail investors the opportunity to trade stock, crypto or retail derivatives. We have around 4 million users in the UK and around 40 million users globally. As a firm, we have around 1,600 members of staff. In the UK, we have around 60.
At present, we operate a policy of three days in the office with two days working from home. That has changed over the past couple of years. Originally, we were in on two days but, in January last year, we went up to three days working in the office. This is the way I have structured this working from home in the office: on Tuesday and Thursday, everybody is in the office, then the third day is floating for the individual department to decide. In the UK, we have compliance, marketing, finance, sales and PR—the variety of departments that you would expect a brokerage to have—and each one decides which day of the week is best for them.
The Chair: What factors led you to make that move to two days and then to three?
Dan Moczulski: The CEO and founder of the company would like us to minimise the number of days working from home. He firmly believes that being in the office is more collaborative, helps with creativity and helps with the culture of the company. He wants to move towards more people being in the office. We have the office—it is a big, 100-man office—so it makes sense to get people in there for that.
I temper that slightly with different departments working in different ways. Our sales and marketing operations work well in the office; you can see that it is collaborative and creative. Other departments, such as compliance, where it may be more intensive, seem to work well at home.
Q186 Lord Stevenson of Balmacara: This is a question for Mr Mortimer. I appreciate that we are talking here about a huge organisation with much variation across it, but I would be grateful if you could, in your introduction, give us a sense of the various styles and approaches that your different employers take to this question of hybrid working.
Danny Mortimer: I am the chief executive of NHS Employers. We are the employers’ association for the NHS in England. We both represent the NHS to the Government and carry out some responsibilities, particularly in managing the national relationships with trade unions on behalf of the Government in England. Obviously, there are devolved parts of the NHS elsewhere in the UK, as your Lordships will know.
It is fair to say that the experience for my members is very different from what Dan has described. The best data we have is that about 1.5% of the 1.4 million people who work in the NHS regularly work from home. Clearly, the nature of what most people in the NHS do is clinical. It is about public contact; we are a high-public-contact industry in that sense. The ability to work from home suits the support functions far more than it does front-line clinical roles, in professions such as nursing or our allied health professions. We do have, though, a set of national agreements with our trade unions that govern how organisations manage hybrid working or working from home. We see in every trust and every large employer in the country a policy that gives effect to that locally.
You are right, Lord Stevenson, that there is variation. Our survey of our staff that we carry out every year tells us that different groups of staff feel that they enjoy different levels of access to flexible working, including home working. It is stronger for administrative staff and weakest for ambulance staff. Certain settings of care report greater access to flexibility. Our mental health and community services report more flexibility. A lot of people in those services work out in the community in other people’s homes as well as, potentially, in their own homes. The ambulance service, again, has a lot less flexibility. We see variation across organisations and also between different groups of staff working in the same organisation.
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara: Following that up, you said 1.5%, which is a small number, but it is a very large organisation, so it is still a significant number of people who have access to hybrid or agile working, as you mentioned in your evidence. Can you flag up for us any trends that you see when you look at that? It is interesting. Is a majority moving this way or that way, or is it locally dependent? Are other factors in play?
Danny Mortimer: In truth, it is a bit of both. Clearly, it grew during the pandemic when non-core clinical staff both needed and wanted to work from home. Two things in particular are starting to reinforce the change. One is that, in some functions, people are reporting that it is a helpful tool for recruitment and retention. Parts of the labour market expect a degree of flexibility; Dan will, I am sure, have had the same experience. People in administrative professions might expect a degree of being able to do that.
Secondly, NHS organisations, particularly hospitals, have pressures on space, so we see examples of people looking to encourage flexibility in home working to release space that can be converted into clinical space. We have seen an example of that in Southampton recently. We also see in our corporate services, such as HR, finance, IT and procurement, that moving to scale up those services—we have a small number of service providers across the 250 or so NHS organisations—will both concentrate people away from NHS sites and, probably, encourage greater use of home and hybrid working. That will play out over the coming years.
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara: That is very interesting.
Q187 Baroness Featherstone: This one is for Danny Mortimer. How does the NHS handle a variety of different working arrangements where some employees are remote, others are hybrid and others are on-site? Does it cause resentment or concerns between different groups of employees?
Danny Mortimer: That is an important question. There are two things there. First, we already have a wide variety of working arrangements. I have worked in the health service for 35 years. Only for three or four of those years did I work shifts in the 24/7 working pattern that my clinical colleagues more routinely work. Large numbers of teams, including clinical teams, work a more typical Monday to Friday, 9 am to 5 pm or 8 am to 6 pm pattern. It is very pronounced for us; that is the first thing.
Secondly, there are some optics issues because of, frankly, some of the brand problems that working from home has. When I talk to my trade unions, they are concerned that people can be exploited and work too much, but the general population probably has more of a fear that people who work from home are in some way shirking a bit or not working as hard as the people who are present. That is not true or fair. You can get just as distracted—probably more distracted—in a normal workplace as you can in your own home, but we have a bit of that.
What we find in practice is that the organisations that take time and care to work with their staff on the whole range of flexible working arrangements that we have—whether it is working at home, more predictable shift patterns or term-time working—overcome many of the issues that you rightly highlighted. We have seen some good examples of people doing that in places like Devon.
Baroness Featherstone: Do you do surveys on how people feel about it?
Danny Mortimer: The questions that we ask focus far more on people’s experiences rather than their perception of what other people get. It tells us the point that I highlighted with Lord Stevenson: different groups of staff have very different experiences of flexible working, including home working. About 70% of our staff report that they can talk to their manager about home working, but, clearly, that means a significant number of people—hundreds of thousands—do not feel able to have a good-quality conversation with their manager about the flexibility that they need.
Q188 Baroness Featherstone: You referred to offering hybrid working being a pull for employment, but is there any evidence that people will choose not to work in a particular organisation because they cannot work from home? Will it affect people going into the clinical side at some point, or do we not know yet?
Danny Mortimer: The truth is that we do not know yet. It is a long lead-in time for us in our careers because of the training that is involved, as I know you know. We also have a stable workforce. People work their entire working lives, or a big chunk of them, with us in clinical roles. It is too early to tell.
We do know that, over the course of this next decade, we will be asking more of our people to work in community settings, to work in our homes and to work differently than the slightly more institutional-based way of working that I have grown up with. We will need to help our people with that change. Elements of that may mean that they would more naturally do some of their work at home than in a hospital, for example.
Q189 Baroness Featherstone: Can you both comment on how access to remote or hybrid working varies by occupation or income level in your organisation or sector? You have slightly answered this already, but are there risks of creating a two-tier workforce?
Dan Moczulski: My answer is the quickest: everybody in the company is on the three-day/two-day pattern, no matter what position they are in.
Baroness Featherstone: You do not have two tiers?
Dan Moczulski: Certainly not two tiers. The more senior members of staff may have to come in on more than three days. I suppose it is worth me saying that it is a minimum number of days to come into the office, rather than a maximum. If there are circumstances where somebody needs to be in on four or five days, they will do that.
Baroness Featherstone: Not everyone’s home situation is good to work in. Presumably, they can go into the office five days a week.
Dan Moczulski: Absolutely; it is encouraged. On lovely days like today, the air conditioning in the office is popular, so people do like to come in.
Danny Mortimer: What we have reported to us chimes with many parts of the wider economy. The biggest challenge is for colleagues from more socially excluded backgrounds, who perhaps do not have the same level of broadband access and are far more reliant on smartphones for accessing the internet than the broadband connectivity that we might see more commonly in other parts of the population. We are aware of that issue.
We see home and hybrid working among some of our clinical professionals, particularly people who have more of a community element to their work; that is growing, as I said. We see it particularly in our administrative functions, many of whom are at the lower-paid end of who we employ, are typically not degree-qualified professionals and come from more diverse, socially excluded communities. We are aware of some of those issues, which are reported back to us by staff.
My members report a similar approach to that of Dan’s organisation, which is that there is no compulsion for people to work at home. If people need to come in because of that access issue, for example, they can do that. Of course, the trade-off then is a cost of living one for them: public transport costs go up as they have to travel into the base. Those are the kinds of issues that we experience.
Q190 The Chair: Danny, you mentioned that you have a small number of people who work hybrid, given the nature of your work, but do you have a figure for the number of people who work flexibly in other ways—for example, with staggered hours and those sorts of things?
Danny Mortimer: The evidence that we have is self-reported. It is not systematically collected; that is self-reporting of home working as well. Self-reporting often understates the reality. About 50% to 60% of our workforce reports some level of flexibility in their working patterns. Many more report that they would like more access to flexibility in their working patterns; we see the variation that I described to Lord Stevenson across our workforce. I would be happy to provide you with a little more detail on how that plays out in practice afterwards.
The Chair: That would be helpful, thank you.
Q191 Baroness Nye: You have mentioned this already, Mr Mortimer, but we are interested in both of your thoughts on recruitment and retention. You have described it already as a useful tool, but how might it be measured for hybrid working, especially if it has an effect on women, carers, disabled people or, potentially, older people staying longer in the workforce?
In the written evidence, Mr Mortimer, I was interested in the work that you are doing at the University of Sussex with agiLab, which is run by a steering committee of NHS decision-makers, practitioners and academics. Is there any data from the work that it is doing that feeds into this recruitment and retention issue?
Danny Mortimer: Let me start with agiLab. We have been working with Dr Emma Russell and her colleagues since the pandemic. They are carrying out an extensive programme of research on all the questions that you have raised. It is fair to say that they are at different stages of that research.
They have done some research in the disability and neurodivergence space. It has shown, notwithstanding the conversation that Baroness Featherstone and I had about the challenges of social exclusion, that access to home working appears to have improved access to work for neurodivergent colleagues and colleagues with a disability. They are small numbers relative to the size of our workforce, but they report a statistically significant incidence.
On some of your other questions, they are carrying out an ongoing research programme in the NHS, in other sectors and internationally as part of the Digit programme, which is funded by research funders. More evidence will arise from that. They cite to us in particular some of the published evidence from other sectors, which shows, again, a positive influence in certain roles on both recruitment and retention. There is also a sense that, in certain areas of work, it is a growing expectation. They find that in their research, and that is reported by employers.
We have been working with them for about four years now. We will shortly publish a stocktake of all the work that they have done to date—both the research that they have done and the more qualitative work that they have done with my members. Again, I would be really happy to provide a copy of that to the committee before it is published.
Dan Moczulski: The number one question that I have had consistently come up in all interviews over the past two or three years is, “What is your policy on working from home?” It is always asked. Anecdotally, I know of some firms that work in our industry that are five days in the office; I can absolutely see a preference for not being in the office five days a week when I speak to the staff there.
We do a yearly satisfaction survey with all our staff and exit interviews if they leave. We ask them about our policies on working from home. Generally, everybody enjoys where we are and thinks we are in about the right position. We continue to monitor that to see how it goes for satisfaction levels and things, but, at present, that seems to be where it is.
Q192 Baroness Nye: Do you advertise working from home in your job adverts? Secondly, what are your sickness levels? Have they changed over the course of your practices changing?
Dan Moczulski: We refer to it as hybrid working in that regard. I believe that the number of sickness days has gone down. People are not calling in sick. It does not seem to happen. However—at least anecdotally; speaking to my HR this morning, I asked a similar question—long-term sickness seems to be increasing, but that day here or day there has decreased.
Q193 Lord Fuller: We have heard how preferential it is for the individual. They like it; maybe they hang around a little longer than they otherwise would have done. How do you evaluate the effect of working from home on individual teams or on involving the whole business or organisation?
I suppose it is the Swiss cheese problem: you must have all the holes lined up for it to work. I know from my own personal experience of working with lawyers that, peculiarly, they take different days off. You find that the weeks go by and something that should take two or three weeks can take six weeks. You think, “My goodness, what about that?” How has that evaluation worked? Did you mandate the Tuesday and Thursday as a result of some research, or did it feel about right and was the rhythm you got into?
Dan Moczulski: I would like to claim that it was research, but it was the rhythm we got into to start it off. Measuring it has not proven easy to do. We have some rough data that we have worked on throughout the group, which implies that office days are more productive, but it is not particularly conclusive.
I can measure quite well certain departments such as our sales departments. They would be measured on their time on the call and on the number of calls. On the whole, there is a consistency between working from home and coming into the office—apart from the odd day when a plumber visits or a child is sick and has to stay at home, which does not happen if you are in the office. There is that consistency. I can show in certain roles, such as sales, a consistent KPI that I can measure people on, but, for some other roles, I cannot do that as easily.
Danny Mortimer: That assessment of benefit to the organisation and, in our case, benefit to the patient is absolutely central. All organisations report that they must have that conversation with their people. It is about the impact on care provision of a request for flexible working or home working.
Colleagues do not report any issues with productivity from people who work in a hybrid way. The experience is much like Dan’s. If anything, the feedback that we get from colleagues and the feedback that our colleagues at the University of Sussex have had is that it is believed to help with productivity. People are retained and, also, are more concentrated and focused on what they are doing, notwithstanding the exceptional events that Dan referred to. That is anecdotal.
Lord Fuller: It is quite interesting because this committee has heard a lot of anecdotes so far. I asked the question about evaluation because we are interested in that.
Danny Mortimer: It raises an interesting question about the evaluation that we do of office-based or workplace-based productivity as well. In my industry, the metrics are about the number of patients we treat and the complexity of those patients. For colleagues who are a bit further away from direct contact with patients, it is more complicated.
We see an ability to scale and share services across a much bigger footprint of my members. We believe that there are real productivity benefits there, in common with lots of other industries. The distinction for us is less about whether people are in an office, in a hospital or at their home doing the work; it is about the ability to use technology and scale that so that, rather than having 250 HR departments in the NHS, we might have a dozen HR providers in the NHS.
Q194 Lord Fuller: The NHS is one of the world’s largest employers, and you represent the employers in aggregate. I am somewhat surprised that we are relying on belief, anecdote and a general feeling that productivity is there. I do not wish to be unkind, but I would have expected a greater degree of numeric assessment. You employ 1 million people. The effect of getting 1% or 2% either way will be significant in terms of not just fairness to the patient but quality for the taxpayer. I can understand that, in a commercial organisation, Dan has a feel for it—he is accountable to his shareholders and his owner, that is fine—but we need to nail down the data a bit more, please. I am challenging you; please come back.
Danny Mortimer: If I may, what I have described is that 98.5% of the 1.4 million people who work in the NHS do not work from home. I have described an evaluation project with an academic partner looking at the experience of the 1.5% who do. That feels like a proportionate response, given the relatively small number of my workforce who carry out that work as compared to Dan’s: 100% of Dan’s people are working in some kind of hybrid arrangement, but only 1.5% of mine are. There is also something about a proportionate response.
Lord Fuller: You can see how frustrating it is for us to grab hold of the hard facts in this, but I will give way because there are other questions.
Q195 Lord Parker of Minsmere: How do you both balance the different factors at play, with employer and employee interests, when you think about those work patterns and when you make that shift from two to three days? Your 1.5%, which my mental arithmetic tells me might be about 20,000 people or something like that, is quite a big body of people, although a tiny percentage. How do you balance the different factors? It would be easy to say, as an employer, if you are only talking about the employer, “I want maximum juice out of this orange, whatever that is”. Most employees, where it is possible to work hybrid, are asking for that, and the law supports them increasingly to press for that. How do you find a balance?
Dan Moczulski: I appreciate that, given the last question, this is not overly helpful, but I made that move through Covid to everybody working from home. Then I went to two days. Now I am at three days in the office. With the move from two days to three days, I gave around four months’ notice to say, “This is the change that will be made.” I would suggest that it was not a particularly popular move in the office when we said, “This is what’s going to happen”. Other offices in the group had gone to three days so we thought it was natural that we would go to three days. There was some pushback.
Do I feel that anyone has left because of that move? No, I do not. Everybody saw the sense in the three-day move and the reasons for it, and accepted that the creativity, the collaboration and the culture of the company could be shown through being in the office. I feel that I am at a touching point at the moment. I say things like, “If we don’t do three days in the office, it’s a natural move for us to go to four or five days in the office”; that has meant people coming in three days a week.
Lord Parker of Minsmere: Are you saying that, if the sentiment were neutral, you would go upwards from three?
Dan Moczulski: The natural feeling in terms of the culture, and the desire of the owner and the board, is to minimise the number of days working from home. We are on that path to ensure that people are still happy with working at eToro and have the degree of satisfaction I want them to get.
Lord Parker of Minsmere: That is presumably because of an underlying belief by the bosses about productivity, cohesion and all of that.
Dan Moczulski: There is certainly creativity, collaboration and culture. The data does not necessarily show productivity in different departments. I cannot say it across the board but I can absolutely say that those three things, by their very nature, have to be better in an office environment.
Lord Parker of Minsmere: Do people’s working patterns make any difference to salary determination?
Dan Moczulski: No, because everybody is mandated to come in three days a week.
Lord Parker of Minsmere: Would it be in your head if there was a two-tiered approach?
Dan Moczulski: It is hypothetical at the moment. Currently, I like the idea that everybody accepts the benefits of coming in three days a week and enjoys the benefits of also being able to work from home. At the moment, everybody does it. It would be difficult for me to single out one or two people without a reasonable response as to why.
Lord Parker of Minsmere: Danny, the same questions, please, on your tiny percentage?
Danny Mortimer: A large part of the source of this change was the experience of people who had to work at home during the pandemic. Increasingly, there is a pragmatic response to the way the labour market is going in certain functions, which responds to the needs and aspirations of employees from all types of backgrounds. This is an important thing that we work on.
Our colleagues at Sussex report that people go into the conversation about home working with an ideal in their mind. They would be a lot younger and probably a lot more digitally savvy than me, as per the stereotype, or they might be a woman with caring responsibilities. There is something about recognising that, as Dan reports, people in certain types of roles in certain parts of the labour market now expect some balance of home and office-based working. We have to respond to how that is going in the job market for people of all backgrounds and generations.
Thirdly, we are starting to get reports of it making sense; I guess you will have colleagues who would report this. We can repurpose some of our facilities for clinical reasons. We are not well blessed with fantastic capital assets in the NHS, so our ability to better use the space we have works. I guess you will have colleagues who have shrunk their footprints slightly, which also has some business benefits.
The Chair: I forgot to call Lord Monks; I had a moment.
Q196 Lord Monks: It is my fault for being late. With a Bill in the House this afternoon, I found myself needing to be in two places at the same time. Apologies to our guests and to you, Chair.
My question is about office space. In fact, yesterday, my son, who works in finance, came round and said, “We’ve all been working from home. Now, we’ve got to go in three days a week and there aren’t enough spaces. We don’t mind hot-desking. We don’t mind moving around and having no fixed abode in the office and all that stuff, but we’re really stuck for space”. Representations were being made to the management about that.
We are interested in finding something out: people get used to it, I suppose, but is it a problem that affects client-facing people? Is it a problem that affects the administrative people who have different roles? How do you see it? Is it a major problem or are people overcoming it relatively straightforwardly?
Dan Moczulski: I very much had that narrative over the past few years when deciding what we were going to do specifically with our office in mind. We have a relatively large office, but that would quickly become full if we had everyone in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays. At various times over the past, say, three or four years, when I looked at the office on a Monday, when not many people were in, I thought that it would make sense to cut back on the size of the office. If I had done that, it would have dictated my future policies on the days on which people come in or the days on which we send people away.
I would argue that, with the suggestion I had originally—as I mentioned, I asked people to come in two days a week, with the third being a floating day for each department—what I had in mind was, if I decided to decrease the size of the office, whether I would have a situation where I could not get everybody in on the same days. In the end, we went for the same-sized office that we had before, so I did not have to make that decision, but it would have been a decision if I had cut back on the size of the office.
Lord Monks: What about the health service? That is the state, of course.
Danny Mortimer: Yes. In practice, my members do not go through the cycle of decision-making that Dan goes through, in terms of the length of his lease and the size of the space that he leases.
People have the opportunity to develop new facilities. Last year, I visited Papworth, which is a beautiful new hospital in Cambridge. They thought really carefully about their office space. They have some of the flexibility built in, with hot-desking and so on, whereas, in lots of other places, the estate is so old and so relatively inflexible that it is not necessarily possible to be that creative or to weigh up the decisions that Dan reported. As people start to develop new facilities, they will think like that.
We are starting to have reported, for the more community-based services, how people will move to the shared working spaces that you may have heard be described in more rural locations. I grew up in hospitals, so that is the picture I have in my head of how people work, but more of our people will work differently in the next 10 years and will perhaps require some things for how they work at home and some slightly different spaces in terms of where they work, such as colleagues basing themselves in places like libraries or more shared spaces with local authorities and so on. Some parts of the NHS are starting to think differently about the space they need and when they need it, but for slightly different reasons.
Lord Monks: Are you faced with groups of people—I do not know why I am thinking of doctors, but I am—who insist on status symbols, such as offices and so on, and perhaps cause some industrial relations ripples?
Danny Mortimer: We have industrial relations ripples, but for other reasons. If that has been a factor at times in my career, it was long ago.
Q197 Baroness Manzoor: Can I declare an interest, which I should have done earlier? It was a long time ago, but I was one of the eight chairs that oversaw the NHS Executive when we had it in my region. I chaired the northern and Yorkshire regions of the NHS, so I get the familiar picture a bit.
You will know that, at the moment, the Parliament is going through the Employment Rights Bill. There are interesting areas. One issue is how it will affect flexible working requests, particularly with the emphasis on the requirements of employers. Of course, you have talked about flexibility, but something in the Bill makes it clear that employers will have to give clear reasons as to why they are turning down the demand. It rests with employers at the moment; it is almost 50:50. How will you tackle that when you have doctors, nurses, midwives and other people, because this may well be mandatory?
Danny Mortimer: I have two things to say. I am also a member of the council of ACAS; I know that it will give evidence to this committee in a couple of weeks. ACAS’s advice to businesses, as they prepare for the Employment Rights Act, is to prepare in particular for that question of transparency and to start doing that transparency better now, in terms of the circumstances and the explanation that they offer people.
Secondly, that has absolutely been our experience in the NHS. We have had an agreement with our trade unions for the past four years, which is pretty much equivalent to where the Employment Rights Act will take the rest of the economy in the next couple of years.
That test around explanation is important. As I explained earlier, we still see variable experiences in terms of people believing that they can have that conversation with their manager; this includes the more formal conversation that you described. The agreement that we have had has been positive. Our trade unions report that it is positive. Our survey of our staff reports that it is positive. Also, we still have some work to do with managers to help them manage that conversation, to have that transparent exchange about why something is possible or to work through a compromise in responding to a request.
Clearly, we also have situations in parts of our workforce where people do not feel able to make the request even though they have a contractual right to do it, which we have had for a number of years now. Something about some of our cultures prevents people making the request in the first place; we know that we have some work to do in that regard.
Baroness Manzoor: You, Dan, are potentially moving to five days.
Dan Moczulski: Potentially; we have to be ready for the moment when somebody does not want to do it. As I mentioned before, various roles have different demands put on them. In a marketing position or a sales position, that act of collaboration and sitting with other people is positive. In other roles, it is not as important, so we will react to it given the circumstances at the time. We always want to be as supportive as we can to all our employees. If the time comes when people do ask for that, we will try to support it.
Q198 Baroness Manzoor: What I read from that is that you are looking at clarity in communications and good management practices as the two things here, if I am hearing right. Looking at the implications, if this Bill becomes law, it will be difficult to police. What would you recommend that the Government do to police it? Employment tribunals take a long time to come; you talked about ACAS. Where is the balance? What could the Government put in this Bill to make it stronger for both employers and employees?
Danny Mortimer: Based on our experience, the issue is how the new legislation is implemented in practice. It is about making sure that the approach is positive. It is about making sure that we can support managers to have those conversations as positively as possible, but, sometimes, it can be difficult to work through something with a colleague or with a team. There is something about educating people about who might want flexible working and why they might want flexible working, as well as who might want home working and why they might want home working.
There is also something about implementing the programme as a whole in an organisation. Dan describes a clear approach in his organisation, but he also describes a message to people responding to the new law—for us, the contractual entitlement—which is, “We’ll revisit it”. We can see how it may not be a one-size-fits-all approach in response to the law because different teams will have different needs, both of other teams and of each other. I do not quite know how you capture that in legislation. I know that, for an organisation like ACAS and an organisation like mine in the NHS, our role is about helping to support positive and effective implementation of these agreements and these pieces of legislation.
Specifically on tribunals, on behalf of my members as big employers but also with my ACAS hat on, there is a longer discussion to have about how we can find alternative ways of resolving disputes or avoiding disputes so that we can avoid such pressures on tribunals. Perhaps when you have done home working, you can pick up the question of tribunals.
Dan Moczulski: I feel the same way, but my problems are different in that I have 60 people in my office and I can treat things very much on an ad hoc basis. That is how I plan to move forward.
Q199 Baroness Manzoor: Briefly, going back to Lord Fuller’s question on the hard collection of data to some degree, will you start implementing or looking at data collection so that everyone has access to hybrid and flexible working once this becomes law? You indicated that there were some differences in approaches. How will you monitor it as an employer?
Danny Mortimer: There are two elements to this. We survey all our staff every year—many organisations do so more frequently than that—on their experience. Flexibility in its broadest sense is a key pillar of that assessment. Every manager in the NHS and every head of an organisation has granular feedback about the variation in their organisation and how they compare to their peers on that. That data around flexibility and the employee experience is available; that is the first thing.
Secondly, as we reform and change the way in which we provide our support services, we will absolutely be able to track the data that you mentioned earlier. We already have examples of those scaled arrangements. They have done a lot of work to track that performance and processes, and they are doing that far more systematically than we probably do in the 250 separate organisations. So, yes, it will become a more pronounced feature of what we do, both for people who work in the shared centres and for people who work in a more hybrid way.
Q200 Baroness Nye: This does not follow on from that question, but it follows on from something you said earlier. We are looking at the impact on the externalities of hybrid working. If you mandated for Tuesdays and Thursdays, what day do most of the rest of the staff choose to come in on? Secondly, you said that other similar businesses in your industry are mandating five days a week. What rough proportion are mandating five days, and how many are mandating hybrid working for two days?
Dan Moczulski: Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are split pretty much evenly with everybody else. There does not seem to be a dominant day that I have witnessed. Although the headlines in the paper may imply that lots of firms are mandating five days a week, my experience is that few firms are doing so at the moment. The firm that I am thinking of did it as soon as it could after Covid, but it is very much an outlier in the industry.
Q201 The Chair: To finish off—Danny, this might not be appropriate for you; please say so if it is not—I wanted to ask each of you this: if you had a recommendation to make to the Government in this whole hybrid working space, what would it be?
Danny Mortimer: For us, it is about the support for implementation. It is about how they can help leaders in organisations adapt to different expectations in the labour market and the different things that technology may allow for certain parts of our workforce—but not all parts of our workforce.
Dan Moczulski: I recognise that this is looking at the minutiae, but we have an office in Canary Wharf. Everybody gets public transport into Canary Wharf. I appreciate that this is about our circumstances, but the three days that I am currently mandating tend to be the tipping point of a daily ticket as opposed to a monthly ticket or a season ticket. My feeling is that, if I could encourage our staff to take on board a tax efficiency or a salary sacrifice scheme for a season ticket, so that coming in for that fourth or that fifth day does not marginally cost them—I appreciate that it is a tangible and small thing that I am asking for there—it would have absolute benefits. Whenever I talk to people, I rarely get an argument from somebody that they feel that they are more productive at home or in the office; I rarely have that conversation. I rarely have the conversation about saving time on transport. Rarely do people say that to me, but the one thing they absolutely do mention is the cost of coming in.
Equally, I recognise that, throughout Covid, people moved further away. There was a feeling that this would last for ever, so they felt that they could now live in Brighton or live further away to get into London. That has not happened. We are still asking people to come in, but it means that the cost of getting in is so much more.
The Chair: That is a really useful perspective. There is no need to be apologetic about it; it is a helpful, practical point of view. I thank you both very much indeed for giving us evidence from two really different perspectives. It has been very helpful to the committee.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock: Can I just declare my interest because I have not asked a question? As you know, Danny, I am a non-executive director of NHS England; I wanted to get that on the record.
The Chair: Good. Thank you very much indeed, both of you.
