Summary of discussion
This session addressed the issues to consider in returning to the workplace including an overview of the key areas of response, decision criteria and components of a robust transition plan.
This is an edited transcript of a presentation by Christie Rall from PwC’s People and Organisation practice with contributions from Andrew Farr, specialising in employment law and John Tomac specialist in occupational health & safety (OH&S) and compliance.
Key points
Return to workplace is now return to workplaces
Across all organisations leaders are acutely aware of the impacts COVID-19 has had on their business
Decision criteria, applied as part recovery readiness, needs to inform the your return to workplaces transition plan
The four key decisions to evaluate in preparing to bring back subsets of the workforce are 1. health and safety; 2. type of work; 3.financial (cost and revenue); 4. Employee needs and preferences
The four streams of a return to work transition plan are operations, facilities, health & safety and change management
Return to workplaces
Over the last two months, conversation has focused on rapid response to the COVID-19 crisis. That includes the immediate health and safety challenges and continuing business through remote working. Whilst the impacts and timeframes from a health and economic perspective still aren't completely known, in recent weeks, we have seen clients locally and globally accelerate their thinking around what a return to workplace looks like and how to prepare for it. As federal and state government officials begin to set parameters around reopening businesses, we know that bringing employees back on-site, successfully, won't be as simple as flipping a switch. It was a lot easier when we moved to remote working than it will be bringing people back. Every organisation is unique, some have knowledge workers who may be able to work remotely more effectively. Whilst others have factories to restart or bricks-and-mortar retail locations to bring back to life.
One thing that all organisations face is where to begin. How do they keep people safe? When do they communicate? What's the right way to move forward? There are some real practical yet complex considerations from a workforce operations and facility perspective. There's also more strategic questions like what does the business look like coming out of COVID-19? What do workplaces look like? Do they involve an office or physical location? What does work look like in the future? How do we ensure that we use this period as an opportunity to reset and reimagine aspects about business and workforce strategy. How do we leverage the positives coming out of COVID-19 and the lessons learnt around new ways of working?
We’re not likely to return to the same world we were in. We expect enduring shifts emerge in terms of different work being performed by a different workforce from different workplaces.
Leaders are acutely aware of the impacts COVID-19 has had on business
Business leaders are acutely aware of the impact COVID-19 has had on their businesses. Most have responded by looking at the need to manage cost and workforce. For example, 85% are predicting a decline of at least 10% in revenue or profit; 60% are considering deferred or cancelled planned investments; and 37% expect layoffs to occur as they focus on productivity.
Organisations have settled into new ways of working. 48% are looking at accelerating automation and digital ways or working; 50% say remote work is here to stay for some roles; and 72% say the work flexibility they have created in their workplaces will benefit the organisation in the long run. However we also know that approximately 50% think they'll be a bit of a productivity gap associated with it.
Organisations are preparing to return to the workplace. 43% anticipate a higher demand for employee protection; 64% are confident in their organisation’s ability to provide a safe working environment; and 83% have defined critical roles and functions that can be performed remotely.
How to prepare, respond and emerge stronger
Organisations are responding in three ways. Firstly, setting up return to workplace offices or taskforces. Most will have done that by now often as an extension of the COVID-19 response. Secondly, as they think about return to workplaces, what are the criteria for decisions and readiness to bring people back and what are the different underlying scenarios? And finally, building robust but agile plans and ensuring they incorporate all the key elements that you’d expect to bring people back.
Focussing on decision criteria, what are organisations contemplating around the timing and sequencing of workforce movement?
Health and safety
Any decision about returning to the workplace should prioritise the health and safety of employees, as well as clients, suppliers and visitors. At a minimum this requires an understanding of what's required to comply with local, state, and federal laws and guidelines, and that includes privacy.There are also hidden and unexpected risks to be considered, for example, recognising that home isn’t always the physical and mental safehaven it should be for all people.
Type of work
Organisations are identifying the jobs or tasks that actually require in-person interaction with other people to be effective or interaction with technology or machinery. They are also looking at where productivity decreases or has been decreasing, if work is performed off site or remotely. This information is critical to inform decisions based on different priorities and allows organisations to consider timing and sequencing from a planning perspective.
Financial implications
This starts with an understanding of the costs incurred or saved by bringing people back, such as cleaning fees, compared to the cost of remaining offsite. It also involves understanding new revenue streams or expanding different or existing offerings or new products and services, and how that might have an impact on bringing the workforce back. Organisations are planning for fluctuation during The COVID-19 recovery and therefore flexing the workforce around that.
Employee needs and preferences
This includes understanding workers’ attitudes towards health and hygiene in the current climate as well as their personal situations, carer responsibilities, financial stability and comfort with remote working and collaboration tools. Organisations have responded quite quickly to working remotely in many cases. The greatest lesson learnt is that there’s enormous individual differences across the employee population. In adjusting to remote working, we’ve seen people grappling with loneliness due to living alone, struggling to find their own space in shared accommodation and balancing parenting, homeschooling and work.
Feedback from PwC employees that indicates that 43% expect to mostly work from home with some time in the office or client site as required. 25% expect to work solely from home while 13% expect to attend to the office or a client site for the majority of the working week. While the context of PwC’s business is different to many others, this provides an indication of where sentiment lies. Further, 23% are confident returning to a client site and 38% are confident about returning to a PwC office, However you want to interpret those results, but there’s still a huge sentiment around ‘am I safe and am I confident returning?’. Finally 73% of our people use public transport to travel to work, but only 11% currently feel comfortable doing so at present. Even if we create a great environment within our workplaces, we’ve got the additional challenge for how people actually get to the workplace.
Key components of the Return to Workplaces transition plan
Any return to work plan needs to be robust, agile and flexible. The requirements are going to be nuanced and will change over time so the plan must be adaptable and able to accommodate new data as it becomes available over the coming months.
Most of the clients we work with are in the mobilise phase. They have begun to mobilise their transition offices and their transition plan. Critical to this phase is taking stock, establishing the baseline and determining what the transition should look like. This starts with what has worked well for each organisation’s response to the COVID-19 crisis. What learnings from the experience should be maintained as part of the transition plan to new ways of working and accelerating to the workplace of the future? What do you want to accelerate and how do you embed that in the plan from the start?
In building out the plan we have identified four key areas that every organisation will need to address, with some variation depending on circumstances.
Operations
Operations involves looking at the demand forecasts, to calculate workforce requirements and operating hours required for the coming weeks and months as well as what roles need to be prioritised for both onsite and offsite work. It includes thinking about access and demand, and pivoting to the granular, individual and team based schedules to meet health and safety requirements such as social distancing and mobilising incident management teams to ensure a clear line of command for responding to COVID-19 incidents.
Facilities
From a facilities perspective, designing a workplace that enables safe distancing is key. This needs to be undertaken at a macro and micro level, not just the office infrastructure floor by floor, but entranceways, shared office spaces and traffic flow. What needs to happen in terms of the renegotiation of shared spaces with landlords and other tenants?
At a tactical level, what is the required space between workstations? What do you look at in terms of the home office as part of the workspace? What is the duty of care in terms of setting employees up for remote work on an ongoing basis including ergonomic considerations? In current building structures we’re seeing that organisations might need more space rather than less in the short to medium term. But the transition to more virtual workplace, will require less space over the long term.
Health & safety
This area focuses on the policies and practices to ensure safe and sanitary work environments. Here, communication is key particularly around requirements for personal protective equipment. Health verification methods such as temperature checks and the timeframes maybe also required and consideration given to when they are going to be needed and when they will be discontinued. Some organisations have introduced self reporting apps so employees can check in daily or weekly on their own health and safety to gain access to the office. There is also an overarching piece on reviewing wellness policies and programs which are now being thought about very differently at an organisational level. That includes mental as well as physical health, We believe many of these shifts are here to stay.
Change management
Effective change management is critical to the success of any transition plan. The question here is how do you manage the adoption and keep a finger on the pulse of employee sentiment? Whether they are returning to the workplace or working remotely, for either part of or the entire working week, do your employees feel connected? Do they feel safe? What else do they need? Employee sentiment is likely to be unstable and change dramatically in terms of peaks and troughs and needs to be monitored and managed effectively.
Coming back to an earlier question, what parts of your new ways of working organisational culture do you want to keep moving forward? In a crisis, it's easy to build energy momentum and focus on the urgent needs with clear decision making. Part of the change plan is what you want to continue and what infrastructure or ways of working norms do you need to sustain? It's not possible to sustain the energy of crisis management with the same focus and consistency over the long term. What parts of that do you want to continue and what organisational infrastructure norms do you need to make it stick?
Our experience
In terms of PwC’s experience, our transition plan has redefined workplace to workplaces. Virtual ways of working has proven the workplace extends beyond a PwC office to three possible environments; a PwC office, client site and working from home and staff are encouraged to select a workplace which best suits their needs. Obviously it's much easier to have virtual norms when everybody is working from home. But as we transition back to the office, we’re encouraging and formalising our policies, for example around meetings which will have to have a virtual element so that they are equally accessible to all teams and there is no prioritisation on the basis of being physically present.
In terms of a safe return to office for those employees who have chosen to do so, we have introduced individual health assessment checks to be completed daily and weekly to identify exposure risk and obtain permission to access the office. Then accounting for traffic flow to and from our building, employees are granted a time slot to enter the premises to ensure we don't have an influx of employees or visitors at certain peak hours of the day.
PwC’s offices had really been designed for collaboration. They’ve been built as teaming spaces and now have to be redesigned for individual use. While there’s social distancing between desks but it’s all the collaboration spaces, board rooms, brainstorming rooms that will need to be rethought to prioritise virtual participation and reduce the need for face-to-face collaboration.
In terms of access, all kitchens, lounges, food, beverage and coffee facilities will no longer be available in the office. So clear communication of change management plans and policies will be critical in terms of shifting very significant cultural and behavioral norms in terms of what people expect when they come to an office.
Finally, from a change management perspective we are implementing a training program that all employees will have to take before they can request access to the office. And then of course, driving that change adoption communication through all of our team leaders across the organisation.
Key questions to consider
In terms of the key questions executives are asking, we’ve seen three distinct themes.
The first is around setting up the approach, the guiding principles and key decision criteria for return to workplace; alignment with Safework Australia guidance; establishing and empowering taskforces; and understanding the lessons learned from COVID-19 and embedding them into return to workplace strategy. .
The second area looks at how organisations are monitoring new risks related to return to workplace strategy; changing and emerging regulatory requirements and protecting their licence to operate; and decision making based on pre or post COVID-19 risk appetite.
The third area includes some very strategic pieces around lessons learned that we want to apply moving forward. How did this help us accelerate transformation around digital and the customer experience, what will the future really look like and what does that mean from a workforce productivity perspective?
With more people working from home, what impacts and potential liabilities might arise that Directors might want to consider when more of their workforce is at home?
As Directors, you need to take all reasonable steps so far as reasonably practical in order to maintain a safe workplace and clearly home is one of these workplaces.The other really important sideline here is OH&S where we’ve always focused very much on the safety side and now for the first time we’re really having to balance that with the health perspective. Thinking through Directors Duties, it is that level of due diligence about understanding risk, measuring risk and then taking appropriate steps to respond. It's a session but it is critical for Directors to be asking senior leadership teams how they are responding and measuring against what other employers are doing from a reasonably practical perspective.
One of the things we’ve been doing at PwC is asking everyone to undertake a very brief online, education session that goes through here’s what we're putting in place to keep you safe; here's what we need you to do; and what your responsibilities are as well. Consultation with workers is really important through all of the requirements of health and safety under the model Workplace Health and Safety Act.
Consultation is probably one of the most underdeveloped areas in the OH&S field. How you consult and engage with your team both ticks the legislative box, and gives confidence to your employees about how they’re going to be re-engaged back into the workplace. Many organisations have appointed a chief medical officer, so they can say they are responding in a certain way because they’ve been advised by an external party. This is the type of consultation that we’re seeing to be highly effective.
Ultimately everybody’s got to have their own accountability for making the workplace work and I think a lot of that is cultural. Part of the question is the responsibility to just not come to work when you're not well.
Reflecting on the statistics showing PwC staff’s perspectives of their level of confidence coming into the office compared to going to client offices, there's something on our minds as to how we satisfy ourselves regarding our staff’s safety. Even though there was a higher response in relation to PwC’s office that might be because there’s more information available about what’s going on in our offices relative to a client site. The thought around an individual’s responsibilities for getting across that comes into play as well.
In terms of temperature checks for example, we are seeing a lot of our clients thinking about introducing temperature checks for people visiting their sites or coming into their offices. From an employers point of view you just have to do what's reasonably practical and while that can be quite an amorphous term we’d recommend everybody has checked the guidelines from Safework Australia around assessing what is reasonably practical for particular situations as there are a number of principles that sit behind that.
Do you believe you can have collaborative, open sessions virtually on wicked problems and highly strategic issues - or are you assuming that in the short term these can be suboptimal so as not to risk employee health?
We think there is still a space by which we will move back to at some stage for groups coming together physically to solve these types of problems, no doubt. But what we've learned is the virtual experience is very accessible and agile although it may not always have quite the same impact. We've successfully been part of a number of sessions where you can be more inclusive and still leverage the technology to solve those ‘wicked’ problems. There is a place for face to face but in the short term we can’t see that happening for a while.
It can be easy to spring back to what we’ve done before works better. We’re in this interesting intermediary period where it's time to test new ways of working if that's what an organisation wants to do. One of the things that we’ve heard that virtual collaboration feels messier, feels different. But we’ve also heard that there are new voices at the table now. Being virtual has enabled some people’s voices who may not have spoken quite loudly in a session to actually put their points of view on the table. When we talk about collaboration, creating those inclusive spaces for new voices is so important for new ideas.
How should we be preparing for reactivation and what sequencing is involved?
It comes back to a range of criteria including health and safety, type of work, financial, employee needs and preferences and the different scenarios around that. More practically, it's looking back at that type of work, so where work can continue to be done remotely, they are probably the last people to come back. For example, if you have an office in South Australia that has more space and you don't need a lift, then you might bring back your South Australian workers back first. Or if you have clients in Canberra, which in some ways is operating as if COVID-19 wasn't there, then you bring back your Canberra office first. So that might sound a bit simplistic but some of those practical considerations such as office space and of can what your clients are doing will help guide sequencing.
How do directors assure themselves that for people working from home that we won't be liable for any mishaps or unfortunate circumstances while they are at work but doing that work from home.
If we start from the position that home is the workplace, then all the same duties you have as a director in respect of your traditional office in a work environment still apply in the home. As we’ve been moving towards more working from home over the last decade there's been a big gap in the examination by many employers. What we’re seeing often is a checklist attached to the work from home policy for an employee to self assess. That’s followed by an examination of that self assessment to identify risk, and if risk is identified then to address it. If you don't have a work from home policy and if you don't have some practice related to testing the safety on that, I think that does pose a great deal of risk particularly as people are spending far more time working from home.
Considering there is also probably a proportion of your workforce that may not be safe working from home, how do you provide them with a safe working environment? Within PwC, our starting point is unless you need to be in the office then work from home. If you need to come into the office, there is a process for booking in. If people do not feel safe working from home, then they are prioritised. There need to be measures in place to communicate to your workers if they’re not feeling safe then you can put in alternate working arrangements for them.
There are significant diversity and inclusion implications in terms of who can and who feels safe and comfortable to come to the workplace. In some cases, that is very good for organisations because it forces them to cast a very broad net when they talk about diversity and inclusion. It's something to keep in the back of your minds because it's people with caring responsibilities that are most at risk. This adds a very different kind of nuance and that's really important as you're looking long-term, over who you’re going to ask to come to the office. It has very significant implications but really great opportunities also for a level playing field.
Are home inspections something that we’re going to see more of because for privacy and other reasons people might not actually want to be declaring the circumstances in their own home?
It's important to note that not only do employers have duties to take care of the health and safety of their employees, any employee also has the same duty upon themselves. It's a mutual duty and so it does impose the same sort of obligations. Do we think that you need to be doing spot auditing or checking - it's probably not something that we’ve seen many employers move toward at this point in time. I think you can rely on self assessments if it's done comprehensively and if it's reviewed. If it’s just a ‘tick and flick exercise’ then that poses a risk. Going out and knocking on somebody’s door raises a whole raft of other issues, so I think therefore the balance is self assessment and that is what we are seeing other employers put in place.
The complication obviously, for organisations such as PwC with 8000 employees and quite a high proportion saying they prefer working from home, is a level of impracticability of being able to satisfy yourself to the extent of their safety. Probably the legislation hadn’t contemplated this level of working from home and if we’re saying that the obligations don’t change, is there a change to legislation necessary in terms of this?
The legislation is well established around these issues. As employers we’ve traditionally focused on the safety aspect and not the health aspect and so we are playing catch up. The laws provide a reasonable standard and a reasonable balance because you don't have to eliminate all risks - that's not what the OH&S laws require. It's only so far as reasonably practical and so there is a balancing act in that but it does take a conscious mind to understand what are the additional risks that happen because of working in a home environment and assisting your employees to educate and train but also respond to those risks.
How are you managing the people who are not wanting to come into the office or go to clients until a vaccine is available?
From the PwC perspective of how we’re working with our people at the moment, there’s no conversation around making people come into offices to work. Reflecting on the “all roles flex” policies that we have been driving for some time now, I think, if anything, this has accelerated peoples appreciation of how difficult that can be including reduced working weeks, but also in terms of working more collaboratively. The challenge will come with roles that really do need to be face to face and how do we make sure we engage people in the right way through that journey and deal with it as we need to.
As organisation’s moved to COVID-19 we saw huge increases in engagement in so many organisations. That was driven from the way their organisations responded to the community, their customers and their employees in terms of protecting jobs and focusing on health and safety. A lot of the questions today are around compliance and what can you do. There are big opportunities to continue this engagement with the workforce around the challenges and opportunities, and to bring them on that journey as well.
Contact us
John Tomac
Partner, Sustainability Reporting and Assurance, PwC Australia
Tel: +61 282 661 330
