05/04/2023
Nearly a third (29 per cent) of business leaders say they have hired purely remote workers in response to labour shortages amid growing positivity towards new ways of working, a survey has shown.
Boston Consulting Group’s Centre for Growth has released its inaugural business survey, State of UK Business 2023: Squeezed but still standing, which showed that while some companies are calling for staff to make a near-complete return to the office, this idea does not “chime with” the views of the business leaders surveyed, with just 8 per cent believing the move to remote working had a negative impact on staff performance.
While the Office for Budget Responsibility and the Bank of England have predicted the unemployment rate will stand near to 4.5 per cent at the start of 2024, up from 3.7 per cent currently, the survey, which included 1,500 UK business leaders, suggested that firms may not be as quick to lay off workers. Three quarters (77 per cent) expected their headcount to stay the same or grow over the next 12 months – well exceeding those who expect it to reduce (20 per cent).
Daniel Wheatley, reader in business and labour economics at the University of Birmingham Business School, said the findings “come as no surprise” considering the benefits of remote work and the increasing demands of staff for location flexibility in their working lives.
He also acknowledged that, in addition to offering benefits to employees, remote work “offers employers the ability to draw on a larger geographical pool of workers”, which is welcome during the current economic climate, as well as enabling businesses to rationalise facilities and office spaces.
Molly Johnson-Jones, co-founder and CEO of Flexa, also pointed out that fully office-based work only meets the needs of a select group of people, while other groups such as parents and older workers often struggle to fit in caring responsibilities if they are tied to the office.
“Offering remote work is therefore crucial if companies want to appeal to these currently underutilised pockets of talent – groups that have been identified as key to plugging gaps in the workforce,” she said.
While media reports show large companies including Netflix, Goldman Sachs, Salesforce, Amazon, Citigroup, Disney, Google, JPMorgan and UK fintech Ebury have adopted an office-first policy following the pandemic, asking workers to return to the office either full time or for the majority of the time, employment experts suggest that such approach might come at a cost.
Wheatley said that while “it must be acknowledged that not all work can be conducted remotely… the approach represents a lack of willingness and/or ability to adapt job design and workplace culture”.
“Not making this change is likely to result in these employers missing out on talent who increasingly see location flexibility as central in decisions over job movements,” he said.
In addition, Laura Ibbotson, head of HR UK at Heras, said that presenteeism might be on the rise amid mandating near or complete returns to offices. For this reason, she advised that instead of blindly mandating a certain working pattern, employers should focus on workers achieving their sales targets, objectives and KPIs, regardless of their working location.
In the meantime, the latest Flexible Jobs Index by social enterprise and flexible working experts Timewise suggested that the proportion of job adverts offering any flexible working remained at only 30 per cent throughout 2022, lagging far behind candidate demand with the majority of workers (nine in 10) wanting flexible working conditions.
But Jenny Vadevalloo, head of Timewise Jobs, pointed out that there had been a further surge of flexible ads on the jobsite more recently, noting a 246 per cent increase in the past 12 months alone. “There’s no doubt that labour shortages have played a key part in employers expanding the talent pools they are searching in,” she said.
As People Management recently reported, a study, conducted by Gallup and Amazon Web Services, found that employers were struggling to find the talent they needed, as 72 per cent of UK businesses had vacancies for workers with digital skills and more than two thirds (68 per cent) were finding it challenging to hire such workers.
Original Article: People Management
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