Working from home: Fareham Borough Council staff say they want to keep on mixing office and home working life

Through six months of staff surveys, Fareham Borough Council has understood the majority of its staff would like to continue working from home.

Of the 233 respondents, some 25 per cent said they would like to work from home two days per week with 24 per cent preferring three days.

Twelve per cent said they would not like to work from home at all with 13 per cent they would choose to work from home full-time.

When asked how council staff feel about their current way of working since the pandemic some 62 per cent said ‘very good’.

Some 38 per cent of respondents said they feel significantly more productive as a result of hybrid working with four per cent saying they feel less productive.

A ‘better work-life balance’ was the main reason for preferring remote working with ‘more relaxed working’ in second place.

Turnstile data showed staff attendance is 64 per cent compared to the pre-pandemic period, with attendance increasing generally since January this year.

The council engaged with 12 local authorities, an NHS trust and eight private companies that adopted a hybrid working approach.

The organisations shared their experiences with the council highlighting ways of implementing a dispersed workforce effectively.

Forced team building, HR policies reflecting trust, hot desk ratios and considering the shift to remote working a ‘culture change’ were amongst the main themes.

The councils set out a vision of the way people work, describing a ‘flexible employer’ that offers arrangements that suit work and life commitments.

Andrew Wannell, deputy CEO of the council said: ‘We are talking to our managers separately to get their perspective and their perspective is generally positive.

‘From a staff absence point of view, our staff absences are lower than they were so we’re seeing people absent less.

‘In terms of metrics of whether services are performing better, it’s really too early to tell.’

More than a third of the UK’s office-based workforce is still working from home – at least sometimes – according to the Office for National Statistics. The ONS found that fewer than one in 10 say they want to return to their desks five days a week.