A difficult balance: office/home/hybrid working

As 50D Partner, Emily Bagley-Duncan, discussed in her recent Blog we headed to Sheffield at the start of this year to do some planning for 2024/25. One of our agenda items was around the underused office space we now have, in the much discussed ‘post-Covid era’.

As 50D’s Head of Health and Wellbeing this is an action that I took away, because how we work and where we work isn’t just a financial decision.

The benefits of flexible/remote working are very well documented and are a key part of our offer to prospective employees. Who doesn’t want to spend less time/cost on commuting? Or enjoy the greater flexibility that working from home can give us to help manage other commitments outside work? In the 50D team, we have many parents of young families and we know that they really value being able to do the school run… and the many, many other tasks that parenthood demands.

But. We also recognise that our graduates and younger team members can miss out on a lot if there’s too much reliance on remote working. They miss out on informal learning and collaboration, camaraderie and building the social connections that help them develop their experience and careers.

It’s fair to say that our entire team have fully embraced our remote/hybrid working. We have three offices – London, Sheffield and Bristol, and across the three I’d say they are only used a couple of days a week on average. That’s great for the team, but it also means wasted space and money! So how do we get the balance right?

At our away day we discussed options around our office setup – should we shut some offices and move to hotdesking? Keep things as they are? Find someone else to share with?

After much debate, we’ve decided to focus our graduate recruitment in Sheffield for the foreseeable future, as this is the busiest office, and we want our young employees to get the best start to their careers. 

But this whole process has really made me stop and think about how many conversations like this must be happening across other SME’s in the UK,  and the potential knock-on effect for young people starting out in smaller organisations like ours.

I’m not sure we’ve got the right answer yet, but we’ll make sure we keep reviewing the situation, asking our team what works for them and do our best to be flexible. Ultimately it’s about providing an environment where everyone can do their best work.

Matt Wells
Head of Health and Wellbeing