Jennifer Liston-Smith’s reflections on leadership, work-life blend and the meaning of work.
With fierce debate for and against working from home and whether it ruins careers, and talk of enforced home-working to conserve energy, it’s time for a clear-headed look at the evidence.
There was a backlash when British entrepreneur and Kardashian-whisperer Emma Grede declared that working from home was a career killer. She also suggested work-life balance is something employees should figure out for themselves, rather than expecting their employer to sort it. The advice was aimed particularly at women and they duly, and articulately, reacted.
Working the system as it stands
Grede, multi-millionaire co-founder and CEO of Good American and founding partner of clothing firm SKIMS, has been on tour, promoting her new book Start With Yourself. Subtitled A New Vision for Work and Life, it’s a new, “no-holds-barred version of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In”.
The issue taken by critics with both books is that they offer tips on how to succeed within the given system, rather than getting with a more radical message that the way forward is to challenge the patriarchal viewpoint which created these systems.
By advising women that they will not advance their careers while being out of sight and working from home, Grede is reinforcing proximity bias, long criticised as a force undermining those who choose, or need, to work differently.
Ignoring the evidence
Urging women, or anyone, to go all out for visibility also detracts from the evidence that hybrid working helps productivity, and career sustainability.
When Stanford Professor Nick Bloom published in the journal Nature in 2024, it might have looked like game over for advocates of return to office (RTO). He found that hybrid work improved wellbeing, engagement and productivity. It also correlated with solid promotion prospects.
Bloom studied over 1,600 workers at Chinese company Trip.com, one of the world’s largest online travel agencies. Findings included that “employees who work from home for two days a week are just as productive and as likely to be promoted as their fully office-based peers”.
In further good news for talent retention, “resignations fell by 33% among workers who shifted from working full-time in the office to a hybrid schedule. Women, non-managers, and employees with long commutes were the least likely to quit their jobs when their treks to the office were cut to three days a week. Trip.com estimates that reduced attrition saved the company millions of dollars.”
All these benefits and more are underlined by Cranfield Professor Clare Kelliher and Visiting Professor Sarah Jackson in their helpful submission of evidence to the House of Lords Home-based Working Committee.
Without wishing to get all quantum mechanics-y about it, perhaps both positions are true at the same time. Perhaps it’s right that the best, most productive, future-focused way of working is one with more choice. And at the same time, it may be accurate that a way to get ahead is to impress those in power by being visible, rather than single-handedly trying to change the system.
It may not feel like a choice
Research by the King’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership (GIWL) suggests that, contrary to the RTO narrative, “there has been a slow increase in average permitted work-from-home days – from less than one day per week in 2022 to about 1.3 days in 2024”.
As well as the productivity and engagement benefits, this sustained presence of hybrid working reflects the realisation that for many parents, carers and some other groups — such as disabled or neurodivergent people — remote work is not a lifestyle preference. It’s a way of staying in the workforce.
The GIWL study analysed over 1 million observations from the Labour Force Survey and 50,000 responses from the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes UK in the preceding two years. It emerged that many parents felt unable to commit to a full return to office. Among its other findings:
- At the end of 2024, 53 percent of fathers with school-age children said they would quit or look for a new job if summoned back full-time, from 38 percent in early 2022.
- Just one in three (33%) mothers with young children say they would comply with full-time office mandates.
Concerningly, “Black and minority ethnic workers showed higher rates of compliance with full-time return-to-office mandates, possibly reflecting job insecurity and workplace discrimination”.
And it might even become compulsory again
Aside from all the good commercial and wellbeing reasons for hybrid, might we be heading for a new version of lockdown, where working from home becomes compulsory in part?
The International Energy Agency has proposed steps to conserve energy given the conflict over the Strait of Hormuz. Already certain countries around the world are encouraging, or enforcing, at least one day of remote working where possible.
Building the culture in person
What we must not forget, of course, is that there’s a job to do. And there is a culture to sustain. When Miss Wilson lost her tribunal case against her employer, the Financial Conduct Authority, the tribunal agreed that as a senior manager, her request to work entirely from home might undermine her ability to be present for strategy meetings, departmental away days and to coach people one to one. And that was despite her excellent performance remotely.
Many employers cite collaboration, culture, client expectations and training as some of the drivers for in-person working, that some of those might suffer if work was fully remote.
That said, well-known professor of business psychology Tomos Chamorro-Premuzic tackles each of the potential drivers for RTO mandates and concludes that employers are ignoring the evidence and most aims can be achieved by a more distributed form of working.
Best practice: maturity and responsibility
So what does good look like?
Andy Lake, pioneer of smart working advice for employers for well over two decades, has developed a “route map to Smart Maturity”, set out in his latest book, Beyond Hybrid Working. This moves beyond the “unambitious compromise” of three-day in-office mandates, and urges a commitment to “dynamic flexibility, not set in stone”. Lake thinks in terms of the “extended workplace”, rather than one central office, and the rest being “remote”, with a focus on people, workplace design and technology.
Lizzie Penney and Alex Hirst reached similar conclusions when they came up with the term workstyle over a decade ago. It describes an approach to work based on deliverables with individual and team choice over how, when and where the work gets done. Everyone gets to “set, project and respect your autonomous workstyle”.
Again, Penney and Hirst speak of maturity, this time in the worker. Remote and flexible roles demand the skills of independence, “specifically being able to balance being dependable to others while also being responsible to yourself.”
Coming back to Sarah Jackson, she also emphasises that smarter ways of working depend on the ability to work collectively, to be aware of and accountable for our impact on others. Practically, this might mean enabling teams to select their own, collaborative office days and then freedom to deliver around that.
It certainly involves top-quality collaboration tools. And it requires spaces that accommodate all ways of working, including neurodiversity, with ways to signal that one is deep in focused work even in an open-plan space.
Working arrangements are no substitute for support
As well as enabling diverse ways of working, employers also need to keep considering practical support. On May 14, an HRreview webinar will look at research from Bright Horizons showing employees with access to practical work-life supports, such as childcare, fare better – right through from wellbeing to productivity.
Flexibility can sometimes equate to an always-on, just-get-it-done approach. It might even look like understanding on the surface but, unless an employer joins in with sorting out childcare, the implication might be: It’s OK, you can do it at 11pm.
Might dads be the heroes?
Working Families research shows that 50 percent of working fathers feel nervous asking for flexibility/time off from their employer for childcare and 28% worry it would make them look less committed.
But things are turning. With Equal Parenting Week along with prominent campaigns pressing for six weeks’ paid paternity leave, men are emerging as strong advocates for flexibility to accommodate family life.
Perhaps, in the end, it will be dads who bring down the patriarchy. Which is delicious considering the root of the word in the Greek for father. Working differently need not be a career killer if we all agree that it works.
Jennifer is a business psychologist, leadership coach, coaching supervisor and consultant to HR leaders.
As a UK pioneer of parent transition coaching, Jennifer set up, and for a decade led, the Coaching & Consultancy side of what became Bright Horizons Work+Family Solutions, advising employers in banking, professional services, STEM and wider sectors on programmes for working parents and carers and evaluating their impact and ROI, as well as developing coaches and coaching capability.
More recently she was Head of Thought Leadership with Bright Horizons and now serves as an independent consultant in this area.
- Jennifer Liston-Smith
- Jennifer Liston-Smith
- Jennifer Liston-Smith
- Jennifer Liston-Smith
