Virtual first vs hybrid working

At the start of Covid-19, to remain safe most businesses quickly adopted a ‘work from home’ approach. After lockdowns ended and restrictions were lifted, many companies have increasingly moved towards a ‘hybrid model’ where people are required to work from an office for a certain number of days each week.

‘Productivity paranoia’ and the perception that people aren’t working as effectively as they should be is perhaps one of the key factors in why leaders often prefer their people work from an office. According to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index report, there is a significant gap between how much people say they are working and how much leaders think they are working – 87% versus 12%. 

This could be indicative that leaders believe people are more productive in an office environment and which becomes a driver behind the drive towards a hybrid model.

Staying virtual first

At Capita, we have maintained a ‘virtual first’ approach which means working from home unless there is a specific requirement to be in an office or to travel into a site to access data and systems or for customer meetings. Since adopting this new way of working, we have seen a positive increase of 15 in our employee net promoter score (eNPS) in our most recent annual people survey.

This has meant a greater focus on engagement, driven by a host of virtual events both structured and unstructured – such as coffee mornings, drinks evenings, quizzes, informal team meetings and general check ins, apart from structured ‘stand-up’ team meetings. We make sure that everyone is engaged and informed by using different communications channels including all-colleague townhalls, leadership meetings, regular newsletters and various Yammer communities.

Keeping up engagement

There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to how you engage with the people across the organisation but it’s important to make the conversations relevant.

It’s about empowering, educating and training the frontline managers to carry out the right level of engagement but also encouraging it within their teams. Everyone should feel empowered because it only takes a few minutes to check in with a team member – but it can make a huge difference.

Re-energise, re-train and re-recruit

Being virtual first doesn’t mean that people can’t progress their careers. In fact, one of our key focuses over the last year was to signpost our people to the wide range of courses and content we have available through our various partnerships.

Personal development is very much in the heart of what we do. We want people to reach their potential and we use our channels of engagement to help them get there. I’m personally proud to see so many individuals over the last year take part in career development initiatives.

So, virtual or hybrid?

An article in People Management online magazine highlights research stating that over half (51%) of the people interviewed felt that they were more productive working from home. Since going virtual first, we’ve not seen a productivity struggle, if anything we’ve seen an increase. Virtual first is a model that works for us - and it works well.