Last week we attended Bucks Business First’s Future of Work Summit where there was much consideration of different working styles, their benefits and disadvantages.
For us at A4Y, we have seen the benefit of hybrid working for office based team members. At first we opted for flexible hybrid but quickly found that didn’t meet our need to get together, share ideas and just enjoy each other’s company so we settled on fixed hybrid which works very well. There is no decline in productivity or collaboration.
We have a number of freelancers who work remotely and that is a different situation. They are highly skilled, capable and committed people in roles which don’t need to be in the office but there is definitely a need for extra effort to be made in communications to ensure they really feel part of the team, understand our ethos and know enough about how the organisation works.
Our front line delivery teams have a different pattern of work and don’t have the luxury of working from home as they have to be where the young people are.
So for us, we’ve embraced all the possible variations of modern working and they are all working for us!