Sync NI sat down with four industry professionals with a wide range of experience and expertise to discuss how Hybrid working has affected life within Northern Ireland’s technology sector.
They hosted John Healy, Managing Director of one of NI’s largest employers Allstate, alongside Brian Craig, Director of Architecture at Liberty IT, Roisin Finnegan, Senior Manager at Deloitte and Emma Lyttle, Operations Manager at Diversity Mark. Their roundtable conversation is discussed below.
Does hybrid working actually work?
Roisin Finnegan
Yes I think for the majority it does work. But it is important to understand the different profiles of people in the office, depending on where they are on their career journey. I think it works better for those who are perhaps more established in their careers, and people who are confident in terms of their role and where they are. In terms of their personal development for perhaps more junior members of staff there could be potential issues around hybrid working in the sense are they getting the same exposure to learning opportunities, networking and career opportunities? We need to think about how our people progress and learn and share that learning piece with colleagues otherwise they could be at a disadvantage.
John Healy
I do think hybrid, and the new way of working is working. As we went through the pandemic, we as a business didn’t really miss a beat and people were able to get home in pretty short order and still able to maintain an exceptional level of service and delivery within the business. Now that’s not to say that there isn’t still scope for improvement. I am a firm believer that the Office has a place in terms of driving social interaction and networking that really helps to make the world of work, work. Now in terms of the actual hybrid model of having people in the office but not out of the office it’s worked throughout the pandemic and I think it’s going to continue to work for us into the future.
Emma Lyttle
I’m coming at this from a slightly different perspective in that I’m not necessarily within one organization given we work with over 125 organizations within NI and the rest of the UK. I would concur with what John said and for most organizations the data seems to show that they are still being very progressive and productive in terms of actual outcomes. I would tend to think about how best to service that from a diversity and inclusion perspective and how that filters through different organizational structures, there is still lots to be done around that. It will take a bit of time to get data in and then consider how we can drive it forward. For now I do think Hybrid does work in many, ways.
Brain Craig
I would agree, hybrid has worked well for us given we already had a some experience pre COVID and when COVID came along we were required to fully embrace it. We may have had a leg up because we have offices in Dublin and in Belfast already so even when people were in their offices they were still required to be remote from other parts of their team. And certainly facing into the US, you’re already working remote from your customer so we already had that experience of being in one office while our people were in another office and then we all had home offices so we were still remote from each other.
I would definitely call out the point about the importance of inducting new people while bringing on board new and junior staff. We’re having to look at that and will be reviewing how much more structure we need to have in place because that’s the important bit as people are not going to get learning by osmosis if they’re not actually sitting beside people. So again, that is an area that we’ll look to explore further.
John Healy
I definitely agree with Roisin in terms of the early careers piece around hybrid working through the pandemic, We literally on-boarded hundreds of graduates into the business and it’s only now as we come out of the pandemic we’ve been able to run events to get all those people together. While we’ve done those inductions and brought people through and got them productive in their teams they were obviously missing out on that social element. Work isn’t all just about work, it is about those social connections and those opportunities to build networks that help sustain you throughout your career. We just ran an event for the graduates and they were eventually able to meet people that they didn’t know were in the company and start forming some of those relationships that will make them successful in the future. We definitely have a lot to learn still on how to make it work best but in terms of the model itself it’s brought great benefits, especially for the company.
As Brian already mentioned, I completely understand the dynamic of the Dublin and Belfast axis, but also to then have that back into Boston, or in Allstate’s case back into in Chicago and there was a great leveling effect of everybody being on the screen working together and being kind of equalized as opposed to the power dynamic of the conversation being in a room in Belfast or a room in Bangalore or Chicago or wherever it happens to be and we need to keep that. We can magnify the benefits of that but still learn as we go forward. For example if there are suddenly more people in the office then we will have to change the dynamic to make sure that there’s still that inclusion piece and people don’t feel isolated in the office or isolated at home work. Wherever the shift in the center of gravity is we will learn how to make this successful but the fundamental question does Hybrid work and Yes, I think it does.
Sync NI
Do you think the hybrid model was born out of necessity due to the pandemic or was it always an inevitability?
Brain Craig
It depends the type of work you’re doing. Some teams only do delivery or develop software that’s required by the customer as opposed to the innovative creative stuff which is about getting people into a room. Now at times I expect Liberty and other companies will require that and as such we’re going to change our office so that people are coming in to meet with purpose. We’re probably going to do away with as many desks in the building and look to create more collaboration spaces. We certainly have a need for people to come in but they’re going to come in for an actual purpose as opposed to every day Monday to Friday and I expect that concept will spread to other companies particularly around the creativity and the problem solving aspect as opposed to the hands on keyboard just coding. That’s the stuff that can be done from anywhere and we’re seeing that happen.
Roisin Finnegan
It’s interesting, you should say that Brian, because that’s exactly something that we’re looking at alongside our real estate team with regards to our new building. There is a real focus on collaboration space and the feedback up until now is that it is the main reason for coming into the office. However, that needs to be tempered with the business needs. In reality how much collaboration and how much brainstorming will our teams be doing on a day versus focused and desk centric work. I think that’s a critical question still to be answered about how will we use our new offices day to day when we do come together as teams.
John Healy
I would say, we need to be careful that we don’t think that the offices are just going to be about collaboration, it’s also about socialization and I think that there is a kind of a fallacy that says that collaboration begins with a meeting, it doesn’t mean that and it’s not the way we work in technology. Actually, the tools that we’ve had to use over the last while like zoom have amazing functionality within them that actually can really facilitate that collaboration by allowing people to break out into smaller groups and brainstorm and then come back and share with it with a wider group. I don’t want the office to be thought of as just a space for collaboration, I want it to be much more around socialization, networking, somewhere you come to actually have maybe some of the crunchy conversations, you know, the difficult ones that you don’t want to have through a screen but you want to have face to face. That’s how I kind of imagined the office is going to be and we have invested in this approach. We’ve taken out hundreds of seats and put in soft seating in formal places for people to just go and sit and be together. Now I need to get more people into the office to see if that is working but you know it has been well received so far. I still look and think we could be doing more on this but it’s not so much about the collaboration. It’s about the innovation, the socialization, the networking, the things that will help people and sustain them whenever they’re actually back in their homes working remotely. I think the office is going to be that hub for people to come together. We’ll learn how to use it but for now we know the tools are definitely there.
You asked whether Hybrid working would it have happened anyway. I don’t think so. I think that there were huge inertial forces around the office as an institution and I think that the jolt that we all got with a pandemic has really made us think about things differently. Who would have thought that you could run big training programs from somebody’s bedroom and be just as successful in terms of the outcomes… never, you all thought you had to be in the room with all the equipment in the room now and we’ve actually realized it really does suit the way that we work.
Sync NI
Can Hybrid working still foster a sense of loyalty if you’re not actually in the building and meeting with your peers, your friends and your colleagues on a daily basis?
John Healy
I don’t know what it’s like in other businesses but what I see from my attrition data is that if you don’t have that affiliation with the brand it’s just too easy for somebody who’s joined your company virtually and been inducted to then leave for another company if they don’t have that part of work that goes beyond just the delivery. It’s about the fun that we all have after work; the team building; the opportunities that we have in terms of giving back to the communities and working on social enterprises altogether. It’s these bits that actually makes the whole company. People will leave and move on if they don’t feel that they’re actually part of something substantial, helping to build the company and the company ethos.
Brain Craig
We refer to that as the glue, the stickiness of keeping somebody onboard. , they’ll come for the tech and the initial opportunities but they’ll stay for the people they’re working with but they won’t meet those people if they don’t have the social events.
One of the challenges we do have is if people decide to have a collaboration day and we have other people come into the office then it’s a requirement of our leaders to talk about team norms and what’s okay. Also if people are coming in as a team, what days are the others coming in? because there’s nothing as disheartening as somebody actually traveling into the office and then realizing nobody else is there. It wasn’t a problem before but it’s now a problem. However we are now seeing that dynamic change with better tooling, improved processes and practices so it’s now a case of ‘Oh, he’s in the office that day, or she’s in the office that day, that would be a great day for me to go in’ We also have staff reserved desks so we can manage our real estate to make sure somebody has a desk. COVID completely wiped out any routine of visiting offices but now we’re starting to build it back.
Sync NI
Are decisions about returning to the office generally top down or bottom up? Or is there somewhere in the middle, where you ask for your staff to give you what their preference would be and then you do your best to accommodate for everybody?
Brain Craig
Certainly, ours was bottom up. We asked our staff what did they want, and then observed the impact. Now we’re actually going with formal surveys because eventually you do get to a point where you have to change their contract from a legal perspective as well as from a health and safety perspective. Obviously it’s great being completely open but unfortunately employment legislation doesn’t really allow you to be completely open.
Roisin Finnegan
Decisions in Deloitte have been led by government guidance and then very much decided with a collaborative structure that works for the business and its people.
How do we encourage and get to that level where we can create that unique culture, the glue that makes Allstate, Deloitte, liberty and diversity mark places, where you want to come to work and that actually gives you a reason to stay beyond just the job itself.
John Healy
I think that is so right. I think as leaders, you can maybe set expectations and you can have a view as to what you think might be optimal but it’s an employee first agenda. We have been regularly taking the pulse of the organization and they’re telling us they are quite happy with a hybrid model so who are we to get in there and think that we can upset that and mandate something that actually might not make them all happy, that just doesn’t make business sense to do that so we will provide tools and give guidance to help them in terms of thinking about how they might want to re-engage with the office but ultimately it’s going to be the employees who decide.
Roisin Finnegan
I think we need to step up as leaders, and make our places of work and those days that people do come in extra ordinary. For example, create events and spaces that our people will want to come to and make them special so that people really want to come. I was recently over at an away day for our ventures team in the UK and they went to a monumental effort to create something special and meaningful . It didn’t feel like a work meeting but rather more like a festival with live singing, music and poetry and it’s live events like these that I think make such a difference to building company culture. It was really quite special.
Emma Lyttle
A recent report by Gartner highlighted the importance of emotional connections employees have with their employer brand and this is driven by personal interactions. I don’t think anyone has the magic key to that right now and it will take time to navigate what hybrid looks like and what works best, but in terms of the feedback we’ve been getting It’s so important to communicate with employees and get their feedback, on what is working for them and then why and how senior management intend to implement these new ways of working. The communication piece is really important along with a continuous feedback loop to keep it moving forward and ensure all employees are happy with the process.
Roisin Finnegan
John and Brian both spoke about the tactics that you’re using in terms of the cultural piece. You talked about taking out hundreds of desks but that is also tempered with the fact that you have empty buildings at the moment. I can you see there are tactics there and you’ve got plans in place to improve that and so on but are you confident that you’ll get to a place whereby you feel that Allstate and Liberty’s culture is being invoked in such a way that people do feel that stickiness and a desire to stay?
John Healy
It’s probably my number one concern at the moment and the answer to that question is no, we’re not in a place yet where there’s sufficient differentiation. At Allstate we’ve always had great flexibility in the way that we approach the workplace and for people to arrange their days to suit their lives. Now, all of a sudden, that differentiator for us is completely gone because everybody’s offering the same level of flexibility. Historically we always had a culture that was very much about connectivity into the communities in which we live and operate and it was really difficult to sustain whenever you couldn’t do in-person volunteering or there was no opportunity to bring people together. So it is probably one of the things I worry about most and I do put a lot of focus into what it means to come and work at Allstate. It is something that we need to get on top of and get an answer to and continue to innovate. With everyone being remote it makes it easier to communicate now because we’ve had to learn how to use all these new tools to do synchronous and asynchronous communications. We all have to innovate around culture and how we engage our people and how we think about what it means to be part of, of a company like an Allstate, or a startup or product company, or whatever it happens to be what is that cultural imprint and that’s where I think that again the office has a real place to play because you can use that space to bring people in new ways. For example we recently ran an event for the graduates and brought in a band. We had never run an event with live music but now we’re thinking about things in such a different way and having to experiment and now we’re having beer and pizza on Fridays, and we never would have had that kind of a thing before so it’s definitely making a difference to how we think about our workspaces.
Brain Craig
I support everything John just said certainly from Liberty’s perspective we’re also talking about maintaining the integrity of our culture in both the engineering practice’s culture, and then the culture of LIT itself and again it is a number one priority for us.
We know it’s going to have to evolve because as our staff continue to work remote and because that’s what they want to do so naturally our culture will evolve to reflect that. We will work with our leadership team and our staff to work at how to ensure that culture evolves the way that we want and that the people continue to want to work for LIT because they are supported. While it’s people first it’s so much harder whenever people are no longer together every single day of the week. So we are talking continually to our staff about what do they want and how can we support them. Traditionally there was an onus pre-COVID on coaching and mentoring and that obviously needs to be ramped up again but now because we don’t have the traditional coaching that would happen whatever somebody is sitting beside you we now need our leaders, whether it’s tech leaders or management leaders actually reaching out to people to find out if they need support and whether they need it now or do we need to set up an ongoing series of support. These are the things that are now coming into play so we need to ensure that the culture spreads across not just our new starts but also for people who joined two years ago during COVID. It’s strange to think that some of the people that have joined us have never set foot inside the building or met another person from the company for a full two years. That’s just insane. You wouldn’t let it happen any other time yet we were required to do it for two full years.
Sync NI
When you survey your staff what percentages of people would actually want to be in an hybrid model, and how many people would like to be back into the office full time as opposed to remote?
Brain Craig
Actually we’re right in the middle of that and we’re just getting some early results, but right now it’s 85% of our staff are looking to work remote, full time. One person so far, has requested to be in the office full time and they’re actually not on the software side but more on the organizational support side. That leaves about 15% that are looking to do hybrid, which hybrid in our case is only 20% of your working time in the office. So it’s not as if it’s, you know, three days a week, it’s less than that. That’s certainly what we’re seeing and there are a number of reasons. Some of the people who report to me have actually moved out of Belfast while some people in our Dublin office are no longer living in Dublin, they’ve moved over to Galway where things are more affordable so naturally it makes sense to them.
John Healy
Yes, it’s a very similar story at Allstate. Very few people want to come back into the office. When we have been taking the pulse of the organization, as we did the whole way through and now subsequently as well, very few want to come in on a full time basis so we’re pretty much settled on hybrid as a the way we’re willing to move forward. We’re not defining what that means as for some people it will be one day while for some people it will be three days but you know it really comes down to what do you think you need to organize your life?
Roisin Finnegan
That’s reflected in Deloitte as well. The majority of my colleagues working on client side also have the ability to work remotely while there is an encouragement to try to create anchor days in the office for different teams. But yes, the majority of our people want to continue with the hybrid model of working.
Emma Lyttle
This is also consistent with what we’re hearing from Diversity Mark signatories and remote working reports, the hybrid version whatever that might look like is here to stay. What that looks like moving forward is going to be different for different organisations. From our perspective in terms of diversity and inclusion it definitely opens up many opportunities within diversity. It will look different for organizations depending on sectors. It’s possible that you can work from a desk, have your laptop and a phone and you’re good to go vs whether or not you have to be on a factory floor or in a retail face to face role for example. What that looks like for inclusion will differ.
John Healy
There’s no doubt about it we’re very privileged that we’re able to have that kind of flexibility within the tech sector in the way that other parts of the economy can’t. I don’t want to think for a second that it’s all a panacea. There is a wellness piece that we have to really focus on and I know that my organization has and I’m sure that the other organizations have too have thought in terms of staying connected with the individuals, helping them with mental health issues as well as physical well-being. If you’re sitting at home and you’re not getting up to walk around the floor, you know that you’re not getting your steps in the same way that you do when you’re in the office environment. We’ve been putting on basic exercise classes and wellness programs for employees just in terms of our duty of care to people who we don’t get to see on a daily basis and who we’re not connecting with in the same kind of way as before. These are the things that that we’ve had to really step up and address and make sure that we’re not missing anything while our workforce is at home
Sync NI
I was recently on a telephone call with a senior HR director of a fairly large company and candidly she told me that remote working was wonderful but maybe a four day week might be a step too far too quickly. What would your views on that be?
Brain Craig
We currently have people on what we call compressed hours where they’ll generally do 10 days work in nine days. We were already seeing those models pre COVID and for some people they’re very successful. I think moving all the way to four days does seem aggressive at the moment and some of the models that I’ve seen it’s actually more like four and a half to five days work in four days so it’s a bit like smoke and mirrors. But when I look at it I go that’s practically just compressed hours that we already offer when you look into the detail it’s like going to do pretty much your five days work in four days and I’m not sure what the benefit is there. So again we already have compressed hours as an option for people to do that.
John Healy
The technology sector is very different, it’s not like working in a factory where when the horn sounds at five o’clock and everybody punches out and goes home. The ebb and flow of the delivery of software or managing the infrastructure requires great flexibility so as a sector we already had all kinds of opportunities for people to avail of flexibility. Whenever it comes to release time there’s often a kind of payback in terms of all hands to the pump to get releases out and products delivered so as a sector we’re very used to being able to flex. Those programs were in place before and now we’ve had to augment them and amplify them.
We already had summer flexibility in place knowing people would want to maximize their first opportunity to get away post COVID and would be travelling to be with family and friends as well as people coming to visit our employees from abroad. We were saying we want to be flexible with you and to know that you can tell us that you want to do four days next week and that will be fine. We know that you are having people to stay and you’ll want to start early and finish early or to give able to enjoy whatever bit of sunshine is thrown our way, whatever it happens to be. I think as a sector we’ve always had that flexibility and that’s just the kind of way that technology is delivered and our employees expect it. One thing that I think we haven’t been particularly good at as a sector particularly from a diversity perspective is around part time working where we offer maybe just three day type contracts or indeed job shares as they’re not prevalent in the sector and it’s something that we’re thinking of as a business. In this kind of brave new world where there are a shortage of technologists we need to explore what other options are out there and what other opportunities are there for us to tap into different types of talent that we haven’t had access to before. I think that’s where the challenge is and not so much about should we be on a on a path to four days a week as there’s plenty of flexibility in there for our workforces already and identifying opportunities for job share and opportunities to offer true part time working is something that we probably as a sector have a bit more distance to travel.
Roisin Finnegan
It’s a bit of a conundrum because part time working and technology historically don’t naturally go together because what you’ve just described there in terms of project deadlines is quite commonplace. So for example, a working mother might want to work condensed hours between the hours of school however it’s very difficult practically speaking to achieve this on certain projects. Within the tech sector this is something that could be improved and I do think there’s some way to go if you are going to fully incorporate the needs of people who want to work part time. I do think it’s a good aspiration and it’s something where we should go further within the Technology sector. COVID has started this conversation and forced us to take seriously the needs of part time workers.
John Healy
I think the untapped workforce is key as you look at how many job vacancies we all have in our businesses and we will have to find the resource somewhere so we will have to be innovative about how we approach them. So is it really related to flexible working in a post COVID recovery? Not really, it’s just the natural demands of our business are such that we have to be even more flexible and more creative than maybe we were before?
Roisin Finnegan
Absolutely. I agree.
Sync NI
With remote working, does that mean that it also extends beyond the borders of Ireland? Would some be thinking, ‘well, I can supplement my workforce with potentially cheaper labor across Asia, Africa, and so on’?
Brain Craig
It’s interesting for us because we actually have the opposite in that staff who are in Ireland are asking, Hey, I’m going home to visit my relatives, can I work from such and such a country’s jurisdiction,
You can’t really have people work in other countries unless you’re set up for them to work in that country so now we’re having to consider it. Liberty is part of a global organization so it’s less about Liberty IT and more about talking to our parent company about what structures can we have in place. It’s not about people permanently working in other countries, it’s more they want to visit it and the challenge we have is that now you can work remote. The staff are now going well, can I work remote anywhere, not just within the UK or within Ireland so it’s an interesting challenge. We’re certainly not looking for cheaper resources in other countries. It’s more about how we continue to support our staff that are already employees and over time how we maybe attract new staff. We’ve had our first person we’ve hired out of London and normally when you’re in Belfast you don’t hire people from London so things are changing. They actually had an offer from a company in Reading but choose to join us in Belfast. They’re still going to work remote in London but when they saw the flexibility they just wanted to join us.
John Healy
The taxman is not kind to your thinking in that kind of world without borders and in reality the world doesn’t work like that from a tax perspective. If we’re all sitting working in our bedrooms whether it’s Belfast or Bradford or Brussels the government’s in each of these jurisdictions still want their tax take.
This means we can’t have somebody sitting in another jurisdiction working for us here because that then becomes a permanent establishment and there’s all sorts of ramifications for a start. I think a more pressing situation that we have closer to home is actually tapping in to our nearest neighbor. So for my business which sits in Derry on the on the border with Donegal I am not able to allow my Republic of Ireland Donegal resident employees to work from home. The Irish taxman does not permit that. So if they come and this was always the case, even pre COVID for tax reasons we had to insist that they came into the office and they weren’t able to participate in support rotas and other aspects of work. Actually the debate has now moved from thinking about it purely in terms of whether you are better off in an Irish versus a British tax domain into thinking actually about the benefits of working from home. At the moment for all of our cross border workers unfortunately if they really do want to work from home they can’t and if we’re seriously thinking about growing the economy in the northwest or trying to get the benefits of what’s talked about as the Northwest digital corridor then we are going to have to get rid of some of these anachronistic ways of thinking about the world of work and bring them into the 21st century. I think we should start closer to home thinking about that before we start worrying about whether or not we can hire talented engineers from Belgium to work for our businesses.
Sync NI
In hindsight are there any areas when you were introducing hybrid that you think you might have done differently or better?
Roisin Finnegan
It’s really important to think about the culture piece here and I think companies took people being in the office and creating a culture around that as a given. For a while, organisations did struggle to respond to this new way of working culturally and how to keep people engaged and safe so I think perhaps in my view we could have attempted to look at the culture piece earlier.
Brain Craig
That is so true. Everybody being remote put an awful stress on getting equipment and then once you got them into basic working you really wanted to move to the point where people had an experience at home similar to what they had in the office. For us that meant at the very least two monitors and a camera. A camera used to be an optional thing but if all your meetings are via zoom, or teams a camera is essential because it’s the only body language contact you’re going to get and in the initial few months there was a need to actively promote social interactions in the meetings. Normally you go into to a meeting and there is a purpose and you have an agenda but if you’re in the office you probably had a cup of coffee or a chat with the person on the way to the meeting or on the way out of the meeting. Well, once you’re on the Zoom call, it’s on and it’s off so now you have to take that five minutes to start to talk about the weather, it’s small talk but it is important as it builds social interaction. Once everyone went remote it became alien and even though we had the equipment we realised we needed to stimulate the people to talk again. The other challenge we had because of COVID was everyone sitting at home feeling very nervous about the world so they just threw themselves into their work and into their code. Although they were highly productive at times you really had to look after them and tell them to stop. While people were throwing themselves into work because literally the world outside was not very pleasant so that’s what they were focusing on we actually had to reach out and help our staff and we learnt a number of lessons about how to you care for your staff with the right processes and I think most companies have that now to promote Mental Health. Now people know that it’s okay to ask for help and it’s okay for us to engage them and it’s totally anonymous. That’s what people needed then and they’ll probably continue to need it over the next few years and we continue to see this develop.
John Healy
That is definitely right and even though we have been flexible for the fact that everybody’s at home just looking back at the meeting schedules that we had was just crazy as it was one call and then straight into the next one. I really think my eyesight deteriorated over this time because you’re sitting looking at the screen and literally behind me was a wall so your eyes weren’t getting the chance to change focus and it so intense for so long. I think looking back that we maybe didn’t do enough around helping people on how to organize their days better. We’ve learned so much and what I notice now as I come back and spend more time in the office is that people are starting to be late for meetings again and I think that’s a good thing. It’s not just at the same frenetic intense level and it’s okay to be two or three minutes late as opposed to the way it was when we actually panicked if were even slightly late into a call. So I think there’s definitely something around that intensity that we talked about, of being home but the skill sets were needed earlier to help everyone organise the day to better effect,
Roisin Finnegan
I agree, That very programmatic way of working doesn’t lend itself to human nature.
Emma Lyttle
Absolutely. I think it was a completely different time and that the world was so uncertain that it wasn’t just the aspect of working from home. Even the term working from home is a specific COVID reference and not everyone had the same experiences or pressures. You could have been in a home office or you could have been with three or four other people trying to navigate calls. So certainly, from an organizational perspective it’s very hard to get it right for everybody as certainly not one shoe fits all. I think it’s important to recognize that flexible remote working is different than working from home in a COVID pandemic world where everything was so up in the air.
Brain Craig
Yes, in looking back at our remote working policy it was the same for companies that were fully remote but you would get together once a month but with COVID, you couldn’t get together for two years and that’s very isolating indeed.
John Healy
I think, because we didn’t know that we were going to be out of the office for two years, all of us were perhaps a bit slow maybe in terms of getting some of those critical resources to our employees to help them to be successful at home.
It also brought home to me there, as I was sitting at home complaining about being in my attic, but at least I had the attic, it was my space and away from everybody. I wasn’t impinging on what else was happening within the home while there were plenty of others in those initial days, who didn’t have the same setup, who maybe didn’t have all the tools to help them to be as successful as they needed to be.
Once we realized it was going to be longer than expected we did run office programs to help people get properly set up at home and things improved but looking back, you know, I wish we had maybe done more sooner in terms of getting people set up for that to foster success. We got there in the end and it’s a testament to what an amazing sector we have here in Northern Ireland, you know, full employment all the way through, nobody taking any of the government support or loans or furloughing staff and remaining profitable through the pandemic. There are very few sectors that you can point to with that track record or in the way the tech sector had some amazing resources to bring to bear and still continue to operate.
Brain Craig
I think there is still an interesting discussion to have going forward. As we recruit out of universities, universities tend to have people in house shares and they tend to want to live in Belfast but very few people starting out can actually own a house in Belfast or even rent by themselves. So whenever you bring on those new graduates they may well need the office as a place to work because otherwise they’ll be working from their bedroom. And yes, when you’re forced to do it during COVID times maybe that’s okay but in times where you can go into the office then maybe that’s what they require otherwise alternatively you’ll start to see the demographic and geography change as people will start to move immediately out of Belfast so they can get a house where they have an extra room to be their office or they have a garden just like my nephew who has just bought a house and is investing in one of those garden office sheds because it makes sense for him to work from home plus he doesn’t have to travel into Belfast and pay for parking and petrol which are both expensive.
John Healy
We have talked about working outside the office and mentioned the debate around saving the air miles and it’s true people are getting used to saving the time and now they’ll be interested in saving the cash that goes with it as well by not commuting long distances into work in a particularly Belfast centric technology sector. It’s true we don’t need you to be burning all that petrol or diesel coming in from Ballymena or Antrim or Downpatrick or wherever it happens to be but back to your point around the students coming out and living in perhaps not well insulated or drafty student accommodation. While big offices may not be attractive or compelling for some people on the other hand coffee and breakfast cereal are freely available if they want to come into the office and for students, along with the social aspects that tends to be quite attractive than for the older staff. So does the office have a place in the future? Yes, definitely yes.
Thank you to Sync NI for including Diversity Mark in this important roundtable discussion.
