Hybrid working: How to develop a truly agile organisation

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Almost two years since the pandemic began, organisations are still trying to navigate how best to implement hybrid working arrangements that balance business needs and employee preferences. Mai-Po Wan, an HR and payroll thought leader at Sage, tells Personnel Today what HR teams need to prioritise in order to develop truly agile organisations.
While the intention to create truly agile working arrangements is there, employers have not yet cracked an important conundrum: how can we work in a way that caters for the needs of employees at an individual level, but meets employers’ productivity requirements?
Mai-Po Wan, Director of Product Marketing, HR & Payroll at Sage, says the pandemic has accelerated the need for employers to act on the organisational redesigns and improvements that they foresaw some years ago.
“Pre-pandemic, things like flexibility over working hours and location were considered a ‘nice to have’. There was still a stigma around letting people work from home, for example,” she says.
[pullquote]The pandemic has given employees space and time to figure out what their preferred way of working is at an individual level”[/pullquote]
“But now a lot of this flexibility is essential to being an attractive employer and retaining staff in the war for talent.
“Employers need to recognise that one size doesn’t fit all now. Typically, most people used to work in the same patterns – 9am to 5pm with an hour for lunch – but the pandemic has given employees space and time to figure out what their preferred way of working is at an individual level.
“For a successful hybrid workplace in the future, it’s going to be necessary to offer as much flexibility as possible and to create a personalised experience.”
Employers must now really think about how they can improve the ways they can manage employees and enable them to work, and consider evolving outdated processes and practices.

Myriad challenges

With a vast proportion of the workforce now spending some of their week working from home, it would be easy to assume that organisations have a handle on hybrid working.
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