One respondent to Inside Housing’s recent survey of housing associations stated that his workplace had a “flexible, agile culture” despite only 20-25% of staffers working from home at least one day each week.
This proves how quickly this year has accelerated incoming workplace trends, so where do we go from here?
“We were already starting to work in a very agile way prior to COVID hitting everybody,” said Nina Evison, head of people at Yorkshire Housing. “So for a number of our customer-facing roles we’d moved away from people being based in a traditional office into a more agile way of working. But for a number of our colleagues who were based in our head office in Leeds, most of the time most of those people were still working in quite a traditional way, and we were just taking steps towards what an agile, more flexible future might look like.”
Yorkshire Housing in particular equipped remote employees with laptops and other devices to make the shift easier.
While every association that responded to the survey revealed its office staff had transitioned to working from home, some workers that are required to be on-site haven’t had the same privilege. This means that organizations have had to up their safety and sanitation protocols to keep these employees safe.
However, it is clear that there is a demand from employees to continue working remotely or flexibly in the future.
“People have got much more freedom to work in a way that suits them, and work hours that suit them around the needs of customers,” said Evison.
