UK 
United States
1) The HRD Robert Hicks
Until last month, Robert Hicks was the Chief People Officer at Atheneum. When the first lockdown happened, he was Group HR Director at Reward Gateway:
“As a global business, we were already early adopters of video-conferencing tech – such as that by Google – and as soon as it became clear that work was going to go remote, for us, it was a case of just accelerating what we were already doing. Around 80% of the business ordered some form of equipment or tech to enable remote working, and around 50% of the business ordered home working equipment. You might say our immediate evolution was more leaping up a few rungs, rather than jumping all the way up to the top of the ladder.
What we did decide pretty early on however, was that any meetings we did have would be ‘all-Zoom or no-Zoom’ – that is people had to be visible and un-muted.
When I began to feel that this way of working was likely to be a more permanent way of working, I sensed it was essential that we devised rationales for why. The outcome of this was the creation of our Covid Knowledge Centre. Looking back at, I think people appreciated the way we helped achieved good outcomes for people at that immediate point in time. We allowed people to self-manage; we decided we’d put people’s health first; and resignations were almost non-existent. We had no conversations about whether we felt people were sloping off.
We probably experienced what I would call ten years’ worth of digital innovation in one year. With it, the biggest change was the realization that everyone can now work remotely – which to me, actually meant that we ‘lost’ something of our pre-Covid USP, which was the ability to offer work flexibly. Now, everyone was doing it, and we were no longer different about what we could offer.
I also think this did mark the arrival of a change in employee expectations. Suddenly flexibility almost became something that was ‘demanded’ as a right. I think this explains why there’s been so much pushback against return-to-office requests.
