How top UK CIOs are planning for the return to office

We hosted virtual discussion groups with CIOs from large and highly complex businesses. This is what they said about open dates, office density, safeguarding, security and equipping people to work from home.

Mapping and density planning for the office

There clearly isn’t a one-sized fits all solution to the next stage. Driven by government guidelines, there are various permutations and combinations being thought through, each unique to the nuances of the industry, and physical space.

Estimates about the future use of existing space varied between 28 to 50 percent capacity of what was used before the Covid-19 crisis. 

“Distancing is an arbitrary measure. We’re looking at virus loading and the relationship with surfaces. Ventilation could be equally important as distancing.”

Those that experimented with barriers found them hard to implement across the floor but installed them in specific areas like the front office or IT desk.

"Separation is easier and more effective than putting up barriers."

An example is a 50/50 mapping of the desks (marked red and blue), and those who feel comfortable returning to work, when they feel comfortable, and have a simple journey to work (10m, 1 train, bike ride, or car) can occupy a red desk. 

“From June, the office is open to our staff, if they feel comfortable to come back”

Often, every other desk is being removed and the opposite desk offset by one, so no one sits next to, or opposite, each other. 

Some organisations cannot have a flexible option of whether their employees would or would not like to come into work owning to the nature of their business and the fact that they had a density mapping of 3.6 (only 36% of staff could return). 

CIOs are, of course, used to driving transformation and innovation and dealing with the disruption that it brings. But it can be different for staff (didn’t someone say that cultural change is the biggest challenge?). Someone may have sat at the same desk for years and have a deep attachment to ‘their space’. Getting them to move – and explaining why (more on communication later) – added an interesting layer of complexity and took some by surprise.

“Having mapped the office, our focus is on staff welfare.”

Having carefully arranged the office space and one-way systems, some companies have decided to keep their canteens open to dissuade employees from going to the street for coffee and lunch. 

Whatever the arrangement, for planning purposes people can’t switch their days of work, nor are they allowed to switch their allocated seats. 

So it’s not about flexible working – it’s rigid but with more WFH.

“A hot desk is right out of the equation now.”

Many meeting rooms end up only being able to accommodate two people with distancing, so many rooms would serve a different purpose and meetings reformatted.

Video conferencing famously championed phase one, and that worked particularly well with everyone at home. But with roughly a third of staff at the office, what’s the best format moving forward? With half the people meeting physically and everyone else remote there’ll be an imbalance in people’s ability to contribute.  

“We're basically thinking that everyone and every meeting will use video conferencing going forward.”

On employee rotation, for some, it’s a case of two weeks on - two weeks off for the staff that return (a standard isolation period). For some, it’s one week on - one week off. Some are asking employees to come in on alternate days. 

“We went from 1500 people in 3 locations to 1500 people in 1500 locations. This is an opportunity to not necessarily ever go back to the office in full”

Not every business sees the need to get their staff back - some tech businesses for instance have seen improved efficiency and reduced cost. The question to staff in businesses well suited to remote working, and in stark contrast to the past is:

 ‘If you can’t work from home why can’t you?’

For those working at home, some companies have instigated zero-touch kit deployment. They can onboard staff and send out or repair kit directly from the supplier without anyone from the IT team needing to touch it. It can be remotely configured, thanks again to the Cloud and SaaS.

“Working from the kitchen table is no longer acceptable.”

Another business asked their staff if they needed furniture and kit. They went through a massive operation to ship a third of their employees desks, chairs and monitors if they needed them at home. In this case, the company has taken the view that they won’t open until September, so it was worth the effort.  

“While revenues and profits have been hit, in the ‘new normal’ costs will be down so there is a viable future – albeit in a very different shape.”

Economics will be a massive driver of what will stay and what will go. 

The general view from the government and most businesses is that if people prefer to work from home they should be allowed to continue to do so – if that works for the business. 

When it’s necessary for staff to be in an office (provided they feel safe in being there) the message is to avoid public transport where possible. One company said that if staff have to travel on public transport they will be provided with masks. 

“I think our accountability extends to people’s travel to and from the workplace.”

An interesting question that came up (for which no one had an immediate answer) was while staff were encouraged to cycle, run or walk to work - how could safe showering facilities be provided? Or any showering facilities in city offices. 

There’s been a reversal of some values and there’s not much teams can do about it. For instance, companies that have always encouraged the culture of ecological consciousness have now asked their staff to stop car sharing.  

“We are asking staff not to socialise outside of work.” 

The combination of separation in the office-based on the complexity (and risk of exposure) during a journey, coupled with distancing at the workplace and enhanced cleaning, is an interesting study of mathematical probabilities. With these systems in place, the theoretical probability of the spread of infection at work is surprisingly low. That includes lowering the possibility of someone infected or asymptomatic coming in to work and not affecting co-workers. 

Employee & employer trust

“The overriding principle of safeguarding health and well being is that if you don’t feel comfortable you can work from home.” 

Are workers going to feel comfortable going back into work? 

Every measure taken by an employer and an employee hinges on trust. It either makes the measures work, or doesn’t. That raises several questions especially in large complex organisations with multiple locations.

Some companies are conscious that attrition for remote workers has always been a lot higher than those working from the office. If employees are trusted to make the choice of coming to work, what steps could companies take to keep them engaged?

“How will that whole element of trust be managed, with both employees and customers coming into a facility? It's raising serious concerns and debate.” 

The provisioning of PPE raised interesting questions around trust. If PPE is provided, should it be mandatory to use it? If staff expect it to be available and it isn't, are they entitled to go home? 

For some, the solution is that PPE is provided, but not mandatory unless the role demands it. For others, it’s neither provided nor mandatory. 

Of course this comes back to the nature of the business, however, the debate around PPE touches on that of trust.

On the flip side of whether companies should provide PPE or not, how do you stop PPE from going missing? It’s been a real issue in some European countries where employees have returned to work a few weeks ahead of the UK. PPE gear provided by the company in offices and factories had disappeared. 

“In Europe, there have been quite a few incidents, particularly with large auto manufacturers, were PPE gear has just gone missing."

With the benefit of hindsight, what can UK companies learn? Should they consider implementing inventory control systems that monitor who takes out health and safety protection gear and who is using it, where it’s been tracked and how it’s being recorded?  

Data security and liability 

Companies need data on the effectiveness of the new systems they’ve put in place, and data on the efficiency of employees. This can easily be seen as an intrusion, and that’s an area where trust has to be built. People can be understanding if the data is about safety, but it’s important to know how that data is taken, where it’s stored, who is liable for it’s security and how it’s used.

The collection of data from the introduction of temperature checking at major airports, UK Government offices and banks with large branches as well the development of geo-fencing at football stadiums has also raised concerns about security and liability.   

People will be temperature checked at Heathrow or Gatwick to see if they are allowed to board a flight if their temperature is over a certain level. 

Temperature is not necessarily an indicator that someone has Covid-19. Someone could be asymptomatic and be a spreader – but have a normal temperature.  But this does involve the collection of personal data…

“And there are going to be issues around how that (personal data) can be safeguarded and who takes liability for it?”

One company has put a behavioral monitoring system in place. The data it is collecting is about assessing when people are engaged at work and when they’re not – and have communicated that it is absolutely not about snooping on them. 

The company has worked really closely with staff to make sure they understand why they’re doing it and has built a solid level of trust.

“We use E5 licenses in Office 365 to measure areas like interaction with documents and have written custom AI programmes around semantics and intent.” 

They say it’s too early for hypotheses but it is showing productivity has gone up in some areas. Some teams are thriving and others clearly not. It has reassured staff that the system is not about holding anyone to account – but it needs data to reinvent the ‘new normal.’

Communication

"We’ve massively ramped up comms. We do a lot more video, rather than e-mails and that’s gone down really well with the staff. Weirdly they say they feel better connected to what’s going on across the organisation than ever before.”

While the ex-cos of many companies (often led by the CIO) meet daily to implement strategies - pouring over data, plans and government advice - the sense is that employees are slowly disassociating with the day to day news. They listen to updates every now and then but they don’t quite understand what is being done and why it’s happening.  

Employees have to be educated on the thinking behind the return to work strategy to be on board with it. Effective communication has never been more important. 

One leader’s focus is driving line management tool kits to help them explain to employees how things are going to work for the foreseeable future. 

“The new normal is a chance to reinvent. So we're really trying hard to take this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reinvent what work means and how we work.”

Source - CIO to CIO discussions

Virtual discussion groups of circa 8 CIOs at a time sharing their experiences and learnings from the current situation. CIOs that joined were from a mix of shipping, logistics, staffing, retail, media, public sector, law firms, universities, construction, financial services, real estate, housing, and healthcare. They are typically FTSE250 and equivalent sized private companies.

Chatham house rules apply to the discussion groups and no names are attributed to the quotes.

To join one of these discussion groups reach out to me directly.

Uday Singh , Founder, CIO Icons

The invitation-only network for the most influential UK CIOs from organisations of significant scale

www.ciocions.com [email protected]