Hybrid working has changed things and we’ve already seen some sectors e.g. financial services mandate that people have to be back in the office five days a week, but after two years of flexible working this seems archaic and I think if a company is too rigid they’ll ultimately struggle to attract top talent.
Culture is not a company fruit basket and discounted gym membership. Companies need to look at how to create and maintain that sense of culture when people spend less time together. So, it’s not just about office perks like free lunch or drinks after work, but spending team time together by playing sport and doing group activities rather than just going to the pub.
People used to offer funky offices and perks like travel, but I don’t think any of that holds as much weight any more. Now, people want to be working for businesses that resonate with them, either from a passion perspective or because they believe the ethos of the company is on point.
When it comes to designing the future of work, one size fits none. Discovering success isn’t about a hybrid model or offering remote work options. Individuals and organizations are looking for more freedom. The freedom to choose the work model that makes the most sense. The freedom to choose their own values. And the freedom to pursue what matters most. We reached out to successful leaders and thought leaders across all industries to glean their insights and predictions about how to create a future that works.
As a part of our interview series called “How Employers and Employees are Reworking Work Together,” we had the pleasure to interviewing Charlotte Gregson.
A consultant turned business leader, with expertise in strategy and business transformation; Charlie has spent over a decade building businesses & associated networks and is specialised in placing independent consultants. She now leads the UK & Ireland division of Europe’s fastest growing consulting marketplace COMATCH.
Thank you for making time to visit with us about the topic of our time. Our readers would like to get to know you a bit better. Can you please tell us about one or two life experiences that most shaped who you are today.
Wow, that is something to reflect on! A major one for me has to have been losing my mum to breast cancer ten years ago whilst pregnant with my daughter. It impacted so many aspects of my life — not least how to navigate becoming a mum when I had just lost my own. My mum was one of six women at medical school in the 1970s, so she was always a role model to me in terms of what women can achieve, especially given I have always worked in male dominated industries. These days the media view that women can have it all is simply exhausting trying to keep up with — no wonder people get imposter syndrome! You can have it all, just not at the same time, so think about what is important, focus on that and look after yourself in the process.
Let’s zoom out. What do you predict will be the same about work, the workforce and the workplace 10–15 years from now? What do you predict will be different?
The pandemic has shown that teams can be more fluid, which is a good thing — and it’s something that we’ll see more and more of over the coming years. Of course the last few years have forced people to rethink what’s important for them, but how exactly hybrid working pans out also remains to be seen. People are already coming back into the office more and establishing new ways of working, but it takes a while to re-adjust to.
A lot of our consulting clients have fundamentally changed the way that they staff their teams, with more external employees being brought in. Now we know that flexible working and collaboration from afar works, there’s no reason to go back, despite legislation such as IR35, which can create undue process and barriers to effectively working in this way.
Ultimately it’s really hard to predict the future — the two things that have had the most impact in recent years (global pandemic and the situation in Ukraine) no one could have predicted.
What advice would you offer to employers who want to future-proof their organizations?
Keep talking to your employees and understand what motivates them. With the proliferation of data, information and tools it can be easy to just focus on the numbers — employees are people first and the information and tools are there to help you work with them best.
At the moment it’s important to offer hybrid working and flexible hours — that’s a great way to retain staff, but that may change in the future. Four-day weeks and protected hours are becoming more commonplace and if firms are facing retention issues they can future proof their workforce by having the flexibility to bring in talent with specific expertise when they need to.
Of course pay will still be an important factor, but at COMATCH we’ve seen that flexibility and purpose are priorities too. If companies can build a good culture with aligned values, they’ll be able to attract and retain good people.
What do you predict will be the biggest gaps between what employers are willing to offer and what employees expect as we move forward? And what strategies would you offer about how to reconcile those gaps?
Hybrid working has changed things and we’ve already seen some sectors e.g. financial services mandate that people have to be back in the office five days a week, but after two years of flexible working this seems archaic and I think if a company is too rigid they’ll ultimately struggle to attract top talent.
Culture is not a company fruit basket and discounted gym membership. Companies need to look at how to create and maintain that sense of culture when people spend less time together. So, it’s not just about office perks like free lunch or drinks after work, but spending team time together by playing sport and doing group activities rather than just going to the pub.
People used to offer funky offices and perks like travel, but I don’t think any of that holds as much weight any more. Now, people want to be working for businesses that resonate with them, either from a passion perspective or because they believe the ethos of the company is on point.
We simultaneously joined a global experiment together last year called “Working From Home.” How will this experience influence the future of work?
It’s permanently changed it. Hybrid working is here to stay. If I think back, even for us as an organisation, working from home was not an option people would consider, but then it became a necessity to do that. Now, companies have seen it’s possible to work with people who aren’t living in the same country and at COMATCH we’ve seen that companies are comfortable using marketplaces to find the best staff for projects they couldn’t cover with internal people. In fact, the amount of projects that we staffed with consultants from our network increased by nearly 60% in 2021. Now we see Europe-based consultants regularly working with our US clients and remote working with the East coast works well — all you need to do is shift your day.
Given that, you can’t just go back to a scenario where people are expected to be in the office all day — although I know for some businesses this is the case. So I think this means that companies will have to get that balance — people want a mixture of being at home and in the office.
We’ve all read the headlines about how the pandemic reshaped the workforce. What societal changes do you foresee as necessary to support a future of work that works for everyone?
For me the biggest challenge around the workforce remains the unequal distribution of caring duties. We saw that played out during the pandemic with women taking on more of the caring and emotional burden and more of them stepping out of the workforce as a result.
The pandemic — with its extra responsibilities such as homeschooling — has set back gender equality by years. We would need to see a massive cultural and societal change around affordable childcare provision in the first instance and a more equal shouldering of caring duties like you see in the Nordics.
The one change I would like to see is to have access to affordable childcare. If there were creches and nurseries in people’s offices, how much difference would that make to working parents? I’ve had friends who’ve become parents during lockdown and they say: “I have no idea how you would manage to get up and drop the kids off and get to work and then leave ‘early’ to pick them up every day in the old world.” Those things put a lot of pressure on people — mostly women — and detract from what they need to focus on day to day in the workplace.
What is your greatest source of optimism about the future of work?The past couple of years have demonstrated that rapid change and improvement is always possible if the driving impetus is big enough. For me, the overriding feature is that if change is possible you can help people get the benefits from it. But if it had to be expedited by a major global disaster, is that a reason to be optimistic?
I had conversations with clients in lockdown about how rather than taking a group of people to trial for 6 months if they could work from home, they had to adapt to it in three weeks! That’s something to be hopeful about: if things really need to change then they can. It doesn’t have to be long and bureaucratic processes.
Our collective mental health and wellbeing are now considered collateral as we consider the future of work. What innovative strategies do you see employers offering to help improve and optimize their employee’s mental health and wellbeing?
I’m not so sure about innovative strategies, but certainly it’s great to see that mental health is on people’s radars and more commonly spoken about. I have regular feedback sessions with my team to check in and see how they are feeling. Ultimately your mental health will always be more important than anything, so if that means letting someone down then let them down.
It seems like there’s a new headline every day. ‘The Great Resignation’. ‘The Great Reconfiguration’. And now the ‘Great Reevaluation’. What are the most important messages leaders need to hear from these headlines? How do company cultures need to evolve?
I think there’s a good degree of healthy media hype on this, but for me “reevaluation” is more on point. People are expecting more from their jobs than they used to and so what businesses provide to their employees needs to be aligned.
The last two years have made people pause and think about how they want to be spending their time, so it’s vital to find out what motivates people. For some, a job is about the money and affording a certain lifestyle, for others it’s a passion and for others it’s a little bit of both. Some people will value who they work with or whether they get to travel. It comes back to their purpose and values.
People are looking for their work to do a little bit more for them, especially if they’re going to be sitting in their spare room working. What they’re actually doing has to be more invigorating, and businesses have to be really clear on what their employees are looking for to create the right culture for them.
That requires a lot more input from leaders, spending time with their teams to try and understand their goals and motivations. Perhaps people want to take their dog for a walk at lunchtime, so can they do their calls on the phone rather than sitting at their desk? These are the kinds of things people pay attention to when they think about what their job means to them and what they want to get from it. For anyone working full time, they’re spending more time in their job than they do with family and friends, so of course they’ll think: “Is this how I want to spend my time?”
I think it’s interesting when you look at the four-day week trial, whether that can be effective and whether people are more focused and procrastinate less if it means that they can spend more time with their family or doing a hobby they enjoy.
Let’s get more specific. What are your “Top 5 Trends To Track In the Future of Work?” We have three:
- FREELANCE REVOLUTION McKinsey estimates 500 million freelancers working through platforms before 2030. Covid-19 didn’t create the freelance revolution, but it’s been quite an accelerant.
- DIGITAL WORKING Technology rapidly changing the working environment, anything from process automation and an associated workforce re-configuration to augmented reality creating a better hybrid working experience.
- JOB TRANSITIONS More people may need to transition to new jobs post-covid — expected concentration of job growth in high-wage occupations and decline in low-wage occupations, the scale and nature of workforce transitions will be challenging from a skills mix perspective.
I keep quotes on my desk and on scraps of paper to stay inspired. What’s your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? And how has this quote shaped your perspective?
That is a tough one — I think there are a lot of things that resonate with with me.
“You are enough” is one quote. There’s too much pressure these days on working mums, with the mental load of running the home, looking amazing and nailing their careers. The relationship you have with yourself is so important and that extends to self-care.
I also love this quote from Steven Bartlett (British entrepreneur): “Never forget that the ultimate goal is to be happy. Align your wealth, success, popularity and accomplishments to your ultimate goal” for me it helps to have this focus then all other decisions are easier when you align them with your ultimate north star.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He, she, or they might just see this if we tag them.
Steven Bartlett! I loved his podcasts way before he appeared on Dragons’ Den — so much of his philosophy resonates with me, plus <this> podcast on procrastination totally changed my views on multitasking and focus! I learned that people who are being distracted with emails and messages have their IQ lowered by ten points — compare this to five points for smoking a spliff and you realise how much of an impact it has!
Our readers often like to continue the conversation with our featured interviewees. How can they best connect with you and stay current on what you’re discovering?
You can find me on LinkedIn and on the upcoming podcast with Andrew Grill — The Actionable Futurist where we will be discussing the Future of Work.
Thank you for sharing your insights and predictions. We appreciate the gift of your time and wish you continued success and good health.