Christine:  Brilliant, Seamus. I'm just mindful of the time. Let's jump to our Hub subscriber question. The question we have is . . . So, I picked out this question because we get it in many, many forms at Legal-Island, at different events. People are coming up and saying kind of the same thing. So, I think this question kind of sums it up.

Has anyone stopped hybrid working completely within their business and got everyone back to the office five days of the week? Were there any special considerations, processes, or timeframes?

Now, I have to say, Seamus, when I read the question and each time someone asks me a similar question, I always think, "Why do you want to do it?" That's really the crux of the issue, isn't it?

Seamus:  Yeah, that's it. And I suppose it's maybe in our working DNA that we all view the office as our place of work, and certainly maybe for business owners or managers within the business. It's moving away from that aspect of getting everybody back into the office. They're not productive at home. We need to get them back in.

In one of our recent podcasts, we did discuss a lot of this. I talked about it at the Annual Review back in November, and some of the statistics were hugely interesting. You've very different individuals and different individuals with different views as to how we work.

And if you look at Mr Rees-Mogg over in England and what his view was, and look at Elon Musk's view, it was that everybody had to get back to their place of work. Various individuals and characters that would be well known in the business world that seemed to be pushing for a return to work.

And yet whenever it was looked at and looked at productivity, looked at staff retention, and give consideration to better work-life balance, all of those positive steps keep a happier workforce. A happier workforce is more motivated.

You could go round and round and round in relation to how all this is playing out, but the three main things that I could think of and pick out where this . . . If you're in the office place, there's an access to support. There are people around, you can ask questions, you can learn from others by simply being in their vision, and that's harder to do remotely via Teams. And there's that element that there's a loss of support happening in relation to it.

That may be very arguable for anyone that is coming into a job new, or newly qualified if you're in professions, those sorts of things.

The office morale one . . . and Christine, it was really interesting to me that that was one of the aspects that you picked out in relation to your query, because there's this aspect of office morale. You need people back in the office because there are no personal relationships anymore. People don't see each other. They don't chat. They don't go for their tea break together and all of that, and that there's a loss in relation to office morale.

If you have a full workforce that allows employees to socialise and build relationships together, they can work as a team and communicate better. That's the argument around that.

And then others just are of the view that they simply believe that there's an increase in efficiency and productivity. If they're in the office full time and they are contributing, it's that visualisation. People can see you working and they know you're working. And we've talked about that before, about how that is really not how productivity should be looked at.

You could have somebody in a job doing 40 hours a week when in actual fact they can do it in 25 hours at home, and then look at what they can do and accomplish in their spare time, whether it's business development or whatever aspect it is.

Certainly a fair question is why somebody would want to do that. I think that that was the lesson that we learnt through the pandemic, that this is something that we can do and it's creating a better work-life balance for people.

Christine:  Yeah, we've actually got a comment in here, Seamus, saying, "Often it's a lack of trust or management skills by managers rather than any lack of productivity". And I think that if you're thinking, "We need everyone back in the office", you need to take a pause and think, "Why do we need it?" Maybe the managers need trained in how to manage people remotely better, or maybe you need some days in the office, but not every day. I think you really need to sit and break it down first.

I mean, shortly after the pandemic . . . I loved working from home, absolutely. Once I was allowed to go about my business again and see people as normal . . . I loved working from home, but now I have to say I'm one of the people that is falling out of love with it slightly because I miss my colleagues in the office. I actually love getting a day in the office, and I think you do get a lot of different type of work done.

I think the argument is if you're going into the office to sit and read emails, is that a good use of time? But if you're going into work to collaborate and meet people face to face, maybe that's a better use of time.

So, if you are in this scenario where you want to roll back the hybrid working or the remote working, first thing is why are you doing it, and whether those concerns are legitimate or could be fixed in a different way.

At the minute, we still have a massive recruitment and retention problem, which I suppose also feeds into it. At Legal-Island, we've had lots of new people, just like every other company, and it's the new people that are finding it difficult to work with the old hands a bit and they do need more face time. But if you're continuously going to lose people because you're going, "Right, everyone back to the office", it's kind of a vicious circle, isn't it, Seamus?

Seamus:  Yeah, absolutely. We were amused before we came on just trying to figure out where we were in relation to . . . You hear about all these generational positions and the expectations for different generations when it comes to work. I think that Gen Z is that 1997 to 2013, so they're coming into the workplace and their expectation is hugely different as to what it would have been 5 years ago, 10 years ago.

Are you going to have the ability to recruit the talent that you want to recruit if you're going to have a rigid policy that everybody has to be in the office all the time, that you can't work from home, and there's no hybrid in place to do that? I think that that is a greater concern.

I think people's expectations have absolutely changed, and we are going through a phase where we're having to really carefully consider the workplace that we have, how it's presented before a recruitment exercise, what people can see about your business, because they will go online and they will look at your website. They'll want to know.

I mean, we talked about this previously about what is the ethos of the office, what causes do they support, all that forward-looking stuff that people can see. But they'll want to know about what the culture is in the office itself. And if you're starting off a relationship where you're saying, "No, I need you in the office because I don't trust you to be at home", that's not a great way to start it off.

And I suppose the opposite argument is that there could be an inability to bring about a place of work that somebody really loves because they love coming to work and they love talking to their colleagues. They love meeting their colleagues. They like getting inspiration from their colleagues. All of those sorts of aspects are possibly lost in the working from home, which is why we're at that hybrid aspect.

But I think from recruitment and retention, people are always looking for better and for more. That's how it works. And I'm not saying that that's always about money, but when it comes to work, they want to be happy. They want to feel satisfied in relation to their work. But they don't want to be in a position where life is just all about work as well. So, that needs to be looked at.

And certainly, even within our office, we had to look at how attractive we were going through recruitment exercises. Why would somebody want to come and work in our place of work? What's good about it? You do have to give consideration to all of that.

And it will vary from industry to industry. There's no doubt about that. But it is a situation where people . . . I mean, if somebody can get a role working on a hybrid basis and they're travelling from Ballymena into Belfast every day and it's going to cut down on their costs and it's going to help their work-life balance and things like that, that's the job that they're going to look for. They're not going to want to take a job where they're based in the office from 9-to-5 every day.

Christine:  And so, for the people out there that are listening and saying, "Okay, we've considered all that. We know that the culture is suffering in the office. We know productivity is suffering. We absolutely have to start dialling it back", how would you go about it and not get yourself into hot water?

Seamus:  The main thing I suppose, talking about hot water, is taking the temperature in the office. I think that open communication with colleagues and how it's presented . . . I think if it's just simply, "Everybody's to be back into the office next week", that's just not going to work for people. There needs to be discussion about it.

If there is a requirement to start bringing people in more, I think that needs to be explained to employees as to why that is necessary. And again, working with employees around how that might look and how you can compromise in relation to maybe the days that they're going to be in the office and days that they're not.

But ultimately, there has to be a justification for it. If the justification is, "Well, look, I just don't know what you're doing at home", what you should be doing is looking at the productivity, looking at the markers of productivity. And if there are issues around that employee, discussing it with them, whether informally or whether you have to go down a more formal route where you're identifying performance issues. That's how it should be done properly and fairly.

And I suppose that consistent aspect, as well, is another important point. One of the things that seemed to really frustrate and annoy employees is where they're not treated fairly or the same as everybody else. They're coming up with concerns that, "This person gets away with more than I do", or, "I'm at home working and they're in the office. They're doing nothing but talking all day". It's all those arguments that come about.

But I think that you do need to be careful in and around looking at where there have been requests for flexible working, and that is part and parcel of the hybrid working agreement that is in place. Once you have that flexible working agreement in place, it is permanent. So if you're going to look to amend that, you need to be consulting with a number of staff about that and really get consent in relation to it.

And then the other side of it is always just watching out for people with protected characteristics and making sure that you are making reasonable adjustments.

And where you have made a reasonable adjustment that is working on a hybrid basis, that you're not pulling back from that and you're not then creating a difficulty in relation to potential less favourable treatment or something along those lines because of the person's disability. And that applies equally across the board.

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