Homeworking can be a catalyst for change

As the country begins to look beyond lockdown, conversation is turning to the future of working life. In the utilities sector, thousands of call centre staff have been forced to work from home, but is this a permanent shift? As companies get to grips with the logistics, cultural changes and impacts on mental wellbeing for their home-bound employees, Adam John discusses what the workplace of the future will look like.

Only three months have passed since a national shift to homeworking on a scale and speed unimaginable previously. The question now is whether these workers will ever return to an office – and if they do, what it will look like.

For Philippe Commaret, retail director of EDF, which managed to move 3,200 staff to homeworking in a matter of days, the implications of this dalliance with mass remote working is clear.

“I believe that in our new future, we will introduce a much more flexible way to work in the industry”, he told Utility Week. Commaret’s views are shared with a number of senior industry voices who recognise many changes born out of necessity may become permanent features of employment.

“I think if we just go back to where we were, we will have missed a real opportunity”, says Kay Penney, Northumbrian Water’s HR director.

Penney says that her company is “thinking deeply” about the purpose of the office and making sure that when staff do return, it is to something more effective than the old ways of working. She adds that while the company will remain largely office-based, homeworking will “certainly play a part”.

She continues: “I do not think it’s a straight line from where we are right now back to where we were. I think the disruption effect of Covid-19 has enabled us to bring new things. We have thought about jobs and the way we work together in a completely different way to how we’d ever imagined this time last year. We have all learned how to use new technologies and we have routines and rhythms to our day that we didn’t have last year.”

Logistical challenges

Across both energy and water, entire call centres, usually brimming with hundreds of workers, have been forced to retreat into employees’ homes, presenting major logistical challenges. Workers, many of whom rely on multiple screens and desktops in the office, need the correct equipment to do their jobs remotely and companies have had to ensure enough laptops are available. While the challenges have been vast, the sector has proved working from home is technologically viable for large organisations, a previously unthinkable prospect.

“We wouldn’t have ever done that before because we just didn’t have the technology to back that up”, says James Crossland, IT asset manager at Yorkshire Water, referring to several hundred staff members, mainly in the call centre, who have made the switch. In Yorkshire’s case, it used NetMotion, a secure VPN, to allow any of its employees with WiFi to connect to its corporate systems – effectively creating a virtual call centre.

Crossland adds that now staff have proven their capability, the company will look to becoming more “laptop focused” in the long term.

The concept of out of office working is nothing new for Scottish Power, which has allowed staff to work remotely for several years. HR director Sheila Duncan points out however that the pandemic has amplified the numbers doing so. As a result, she says, working arrangements for a large number of employees had to be changed “almost overnight”.

“That involved a lot of logistics including providing IT kit, upgrading our servers and testing systems. We already had the tools and systems to do video conferencing and it was amazing how quickly this has been adopted and become the norm for our teams.”

Cultural change

While the logistics have proven to be challenging but achievable, there was a worry among business leaders about the level of productivity of homeworkers. It is too early to truly assess how homeworking has affected productivity, but there is a feeling in the sector that staff have adapted quickly.

Yorkshire Water’s Crossland says the metrics around the efficiency of call centre staff have been “quite positive”.

“I think they were expecting a lot of negativity around the efficiency of colleagues working from home. I don’t just mean that in a trust perspective but just in the ability to actually do what they do. Normally they would have two monitors and a desktop powering that, they would be quite efficient in terms of having the billing platform on one and maybe the customer service application on the other whereas they are only using a laptop screen at the moment. We still found they have only really lost about 10 per cent of their productivity in most cases. In some cases that changes around completely, they have had no distractions.”

Similarly Richard Pennington, chief executive of technology company FourNet, says he has heard anecdotal evidence that attitudes are shifting. FourNet was responsible for enabling 2,000 Npower call centre staff to make the transition.

He says: “To some extent we have opened Pandora’s box to homeworking and anyone seeking to push that back in again is going to find it exceedingly difficult. Historically, there were multiple challenges around enabling people to work from home. There has been a cultural challenge and sometimes, at a senior level, organisations did not want people to work from home because they thought their employees could not be managed properly. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this attitude is beginning to change. The mental and cultural barrier to allowing people to work from home has been broken.”

Pennington takes pride in the fact that in moving across 2,000 Npower employees, not a single service level agreement (SLA) was breached. The utilities sector is a heavily regulated industry and so extra caution has to be taken when implementing changes to working patterns.

Nick Ellins, chief executive of the Energy and Utility Skills group, says while homeworking has more of a place than ever before, there must be careful consideration as to whether this should be a permanent feature going forward. Ellins recognises that companies have proven it can work, but argues there should be a balance to allow for activities that are otherwise difficult to do via video calls.

“When it comes to simple things like doing someone’s appraisal, or managers staying in touch with their staff to really understand how they are feeling, how they’re doing, how they’re learning etc, you can get so far with remote working but people need to be together. It’s a balance.”

Similar concerns are shared by Penney, who says younger colleagues starting out their careers are missing out on the benefits of an office environment.

“There are people who tell me they are missing the banter in the office and in particular young people who learn a lot from the discussions that go on in open plan offices are missing those. We are trying to find ways in which we can replicate that online and are making sure that our people continue to be connected”, she says.

Duncan points out that the majority of Scottish Power’s workers do not need to be in the office every day to do their jobs and questions whether commuting every day to sit at a desk is the most productive use of its employees time or of its buildings and office space.

“A hybrid model – where people can divide their time between homeworking and the office – seems to be, for most us, our likely approach to working practices in the future”, she adds.

A looming mental health crisis?

One of the more worrying aspects of the cultural shift is the effect on employees’ mental health. For some, interactions in the office are a critical part of their social wellbeing and homeworking takes this away from them. Companies have had to find ways to mitigate the more negative impacts on their employees’ wellbeing.

Scottish Power for example ensured its staff felt informed of what was happening and the help available via its occupational health team and its employee assistance programme. Furthermore, the company made sure staff stayed connected throughout the company, and not just in their immediate teams.

Duncan explains: “Practical changes included the creation of a dedicated microsite on our staff intranet as a hub for all information and advice about our response to the coronavirus crisis; the introduction of weekly updates from CEO Keith Anderson that go out to all staff; established virtual events utilising Teams Live; increased engagement on our internal social network Yammer; creating opportunities for two-way conversations, using open and transparent platforms for employees to ask the questions; and promotion of measures in place to support colleagues’ mental health and wellbeing.”

Scottish Power is also running pulse surveys to measure the effect of its actions. A recent survey showed 89 per cent of colleagues said they felt connected to their team and manager while 96 per cent said they were satisfied with the level of company-wide communication.

Utility companies have proven they have the capability to shift vast numbers of their staff to homeworking and technology is largely to thank for this. The technology has allowed the creation of virtual call centres , with new platforms emerging and established ones coming into their own to enable employees to stay in the loop with both their employer and each other. It may well be only a matter of time before we start seeing entirely remote-based utility companies.

What is clear is that the widespread changes to working life enforced by coronavirus will have a lasting impact on the utilities sector.

As Duncan observes: “Thankfully, I think the days of huddling around spider phones in a meeting room are well and truly over.”