By Neil Coupe
Last week I attended an online economic forum where people discuss the current state of play in their businesses, and what issues they are currently facing.
Events of this nature do tend to be quite predictable, with people venting on topics such as inflation, cost of living and interest rates, etc.
In previous meetings, I had heard of challenges around recruiting and retaining staff, but a new challenge I had not heard before was how ‘work ethic’ was having an impact.
This comment really resonated.
On the one hand, people were objecting to their employees leaving work on time, rather than in the old days when people liked to be seen to be working late.
Imagine having to pay people just for the hours they work.
However, I also thought of the guy we offered a job to a few months ago who was seemingly happy with everything we had to offer, in terms of the job itself, the salary, holidays etc.
‘How days sick leave am I entitled to?’ then turned into a huge issue.
We explained that this was a safety net rather than a perk and would be discretionary but more than our legal obligations. He continued to assert that he considered sick leave to be essentially extra holiday. We concluded that perhaps we were not an ideal match after all.
A friend of mine works in the upper echelons of the media industry. When attempting to arrange a call with representatives of a media organisation on a Friday, he is just laughed at.
Friday is no time for anything too strenuous involving actual work. It is the time to drop off dry-cleaning, do Pilates and catch up with friends for coffee in that part of West London.
How else can they be expected to make the most of the weekend?
When one of our high street banks announced that its administrative staff who had been working from home would be required to come into the office twice a week, apparently 500,000 messages of complaint were put on their intranet.
Among the objections were that people could no longer afford the costs of travel, or more importantly they had no-one to look after the dogs.
‘Dogs are forever, not just for Coronavirus’ to partly plagiarise a famous old advert.
While a decent work-life balance is to be commended, but does it work for customers?
In my professional capacity, it is frequently necessary to speak to our bank. Or rather, attempt to do so.
We send emails with the hope of a response potentially within a week. If that does not occur, then we phone and ask our Relationship Manager to call us back.
Eventually, we may receive a response from another part of the bank asking us to call a call centre, and the consequent half an hour on hold, before being told to call another number.
It is difficult not to conclude that a culture of banks allowing work to fit in around employees’ other commitments does anything positive for customer service, particularly if the banks’ processes were originally set up in a very different era when working remotely was not even a consideration.
One of the challenger banks, Revolut, apparently has a 100% flexible work policy, allowing them to work from home or the office and even work 60 days per annum outside the UK.
One of their employees, a Romanian had worked in Dublin, Edinburgh, and Portugal this year, happy to experience other cultures without having to take annual leave.
This clearly works for them in a way it may not for a monolithic high street bank.
People like the idea of flexibility. It can be positive for employees and customers, but only if the companies involved are properly set up to be able to operate remotely.
