Our Chief People Officer, Dean Corbett, spoke to Unleash about Avado’s hybrid working policies and plans.
We all know that the issues around work-life balance don’t magically disappear after the UK’s National Work Life Week comes to a close, even if that much-publicized week in October is a good exercise in galvanizing decision–makers’ resolve for change, and raising awareness in the process.
Avado, the online training and apprenticeships company, know it’s a long-term, global issue, but are using the industry’s renewed interest thanks to the flurry of recent promotional activity as a jump-off to plan for the future. Dean Corbett, Avado’s Chief People Officer, sets out his stall:
After so much change to the way we work, National Work Life Week is a great opportunity for businesses to evaluate their working practices and work directly with their people to make the changes needed to foster the best possible working environment.”
Involving the end-user, to use a rather clinical term to describe the employee, is definitely the way forward. Corbett also underlines the importance of both data and learning to inform this slowly coalescing people strategy.
Hybrid working can be successful if people and all aspects of their lives are put at the forefront.
Generally, everyone has different expectations, ambitions and needs, so in responding to the increased ask for more flexible, remote or hybrid working, businesses need to build models that accommodate what people want and need to both perform at their best today and realize their potential for tomorrow.
The same applies to how we deploy learning in this way of working; once the chosen model is in place, we need to help our people make the shift in ways of working, and ensure People teams have a long-term, robust and future-proof learning and development (L&D) plan in place.
This should also be linked directly or indirectly to businesses’ KPIs and/or other hard measures of success.”
Budgets and planning
The COVID-19 pandemic inevitably forced many companies to review their budgets and make cuts in areas that while sensible in the short term, have ended up harming them down the road. Doing away with training and people development budgets is not a future-proof strategy for success, it turns out.
“It was clear [from our research] that businesses who invested in their people in 2020 fared better than their counterparts who did away with training budgets altogether…my advice would be for businesses to continually evaluate and iterate their people development and ways of working more generally to assess whether they are truly fit for purpose – now and for the future.”