"Design your systems for the 99%, not the 1%"
That's the advice of Hannah Jones, Head of People and Culture at Radar Healthcare.
When designing your hybrid strategy, it can be easy to find yourself focusing on the negatives rather than focusing on the majority of your people who will thrive with the flexibility.
"I have seen companies reluctant to adapt to the change in hybrid working due to focusing on that 1% of people who may abuse the flexibility, rather than focusing on creating a culture based on trust that will, in turn, benefit the 99%, along with the company on the whole with their recruitment and retention efforts".
Radar Healthcare is a health tech company with 90 employees based in the UK with a head office in Leeds. Many of the team live within commuting distance to the office, but they have recently begun to recruit talent from further afield due to the success of their hybrid model.
The company moved to flexible hybrid after the pandemic. Employees are free to choose when they come into the office. There are no guardrails or restrictions on how often they should come in, but it is always encouraged.
"I've worked in the People team at a few different companies, but the impact I've seen at Radar Healthcare by implementing a trust-based flexible culture is amazing."
"Everyone knows they are trusted. If they have an appointment during the day, they'll put in the hours at another time. Everyone really appreciates the autonomy and flexibility".
But flexible hybrid is still a work in progress for them.
"Relationships between teams and as a wider business, that's where you really need to focus your efforts on internal communication if you don't have the ease of being able to walk across the office to ask a question. We are working really hard on ways to support this at the moment as we continue to grow".
They have implemented "Brew Breaks" twice a week that connects employees from different teams for a cup of coffee. They also have monthly All Hands and department spotlights to showcase what each team have been working on, a social media-style HR platform for regular employee-led updates, alongside Summer and Christmas parties and quarterly workshop days for the whole company.
In the early days, that wasn't the only problem.
"Facetime is still really important to us, and transparency is really helpful when it comes to encouraging our teams to come in and make use of our wonderful office facilities. We used to have a problem with commute regret. Employees spending time commuting to turn up to an empty office. That can really dissuade office attendance."
"So we started using Officely so everyone can see who is working where each day, right in Slack. It's made a huge difference. And means people can now be intentional about their office use, we've definitely seen an increase in office use since adding it to our tech stack".
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