Editor Jon Kennard and Dan Richardson, senior journalist and HR tech lead, convene for the second in the UNLEASHcast HR tech and transformation series.
Is your employee experience on a knife edge, and will we all be back in the office in five years' time?
Get (some of) the answers in our latest HR tech focus discussion, only through UNLEASH.
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Listen above or read an excerpt from the transcript beneath, which has been edited for clarity.
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Jon Kennard: …we’re here to talk about three recent stories in the world of HR tech, you’ve picked up some stories Dan for us to focus on. Two of them are kind of in opposition to each other, so I’m quite interested to see how they stack up. But the first one we’re going to talk about is a piece you wrote from April 4, called ‘employee experience is on a knife-edge‘. Tell us a bit about this.
Dan Richardson: So first of all, I really liked the headline, let’s get it out of the way. I like the tension we’ve got there. So, this is one by CCS insight, we did a bit of work, an interview with Angela Ashenden, back in end of 2021, I want to say, and she had some great insights about what the future of work would look like.
And I think this is a bit of a continuation really of what their latest survey found. And it’s really interesting to see, basically, why employees want hybrid work, and maybe the issues they’re finding within that, I think, are quite common.
We think our hybrid work is sorted because we’ve got a Teams chat or Slack chat – and other communication platforms are available – but you know, message-message-message, oh great we’re all on the same level, and we’re all communicating well, it actually, invariably, there needs to be a bit more than that. And I think that was probably my biggest takeaway from this one. So yeah, I mean, what did you think, to save me going on?
JK: The biggest thing, I think, and I agree, the headline was great. And but I think the biggest takeaway here is, like you say, I think there’s a huge employer-employee disconnect. We know what employees want. We know and we’re going to come into this onto this in another story about what employers want. And it feels like, will this ever end? I don’t know. And then you’ve got to think about where the balance of power lies.
And I think more than ever before, employees are in the position to get what they want, or to not get everything they want, but certainly to make the best ever case for working the way that they want to work, which I think is the way forward. Companies all over the world prove that hybrid work can work. And employees can work out the split, the ratio of office work and home work and the hours they want to work, and there are so many different ways to solve this problem.
So I think, yeah, it certainly is on the knife edge. Because there are companies that are not listening properly to what their employees do want, and some that are doing really, really well. And you can’t say that it’s necessarily going to get resolved. But it’s certainly ongoing and CCS insights’ stats and research backed up…
