Jeanette Harrison

Columnist

Jeanette Harrison

Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management (HRM) at Ulster University Business School (UUBS)

Navigating The Future Of Hybrid Working

Jeanette Harrison, Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management (HRM) at Ulster University Business School (UUBS), discusses hybrid working and the crucial role HR practitioners can play in navigating their organisations beyond the pandemic in order to find sustainable ways of working for all employees.

Remote working is not a new phenomenon, but the Covid-19 pandemic made it a reality for an increased number of people and their organisations. According to data from the Office of National Statistics, only around 5% of the workforce worked mainly from home prior to the pandemic. Recent research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) confirms that 65% of employers either did not offer working from home at all as a regular option, or offered it to 10% or less of their workforce. A couple of years on, a pandemic and an everchanging landscape of government guidelines have radically shaped our concept of work to the extent that working from home has become the norm for all but key workers.

Moving beyond the pandemic it looks like remote working is here to stay as research from YouGov (2020) indicates that the majority of workers would prefer to continue to work from home at least some of the time. Whilst these findings present organisations with opportunities to establish new ways of working, they also create challenges in managing people within such hybrid working scenarios.

It is widely known that remote working has major benefits for employees and businesses alike – from supporting business continuity plans, attracting top talent, increasing diversity and improving employee wellbeing (we can see this manifested in job descriptions where hybrid working is now lauded as part of the organisation’s total reward package).

To better understand the long-term opportunities and challenges of a hybrid workplace model and a range of other pertinent people management issues, UUBS MSc HRM students are using evidence-based research to create significant value and impact in their respective organisations, contributing directly to employee wellbeing during these challenging times.

For example, Ashleigh Brimacombe, a current student of the MSc HRM programme and HR Business Partner for a global engineering company headquartered in NI, is researching remote working within her organisation as part of her dissertation. A large number of employees within her organisation were unable to work from home being classed as key workers. Recent engagement surveys from within the company highlight varied responses across the workforce – key workers felt a sense of missed opportunity at not being able to reap the benefits of remote working whilst other workers were eager to return to the office as the novelty of working from home wore off.

As course director of the MSc HRM programme, I have recently led a significant internal review and restructuring exercise alongside alignment to CIPD’s (2021) Profession Map. The newly refreshed programme embeds core knowledge such as business acumen, analytics and creating value and core behaviours such as ethical practice and working inclusively, together with specialist knowledge areas such as resourcing and talent management, employee relations and engagement and employment law.

Whilst the MSc HRM is a specialist programme for graduates with at least one year’s experience in HR, designed to enhance career prospects and future employability, the programme is also highly relevant to practitioners who may not have completed a degree but who have a wealth of experience from within the profession.

Additionally, the MSc HRM provides routes for the development of line managers who have an increasingly vital role to play in people management and for organisations who are seeking to professionalise their HR departments via CIPD’s accreditation of the programme.

The CIPD’s rallying cry of ‘championing better work and working lives’ is the call for people professionals to be a force for positive change in organisations and society. Never more than during the pandemic has this been played out, highlighting the strategic importance of HR practitioners at all levels – they are pivotal to driving change and innovation necessary to bring organisations out of the pandemic and to find healthy, effective and sustainable ways of working for all.

If you would like to discuss how this programme can add value to your business, or if you are interested in other organisational development opportunities, please contact UUBS’s Business Engagement Team at www. ulster.ac.uk/business/engagement.