Marc Sumner – MD, Robertson Sumner
Are you seeing any rise in the number of vendors, distributors or channel partners tightening their ‘return to work’ policies, and have any implemented a five-day-office policy specifically?
Yes. 76% of companies want people to come back into the office more. That might not be full time but it’s certainly more.
The number-one thing candidates want at the moment is flexibility. And the number one thing companies want is people in the office more. So if it’s currently two days they want three, if it’s three days they want four, and if it’s four days they want five, and we’re slowing edging towards that.
When we were hiring for roles before, [hiring managers] would say to me ‘it doesn’t matter where the candidate works – they could be in the Lake District’. But noone’s saying that now. They’re asking whether the candidate can access the office, even if their policy is only two-to-three days in the office. To me, this is an indication that, after a period of time – perhaps a year or 18 months – we’ll see even more movement back to the office.
Are you seeing any dip in the percentage of remote roles you’re hiring?
100%. We’re not doing any remote roles at the moment. There are still quite a lot of companies wanting to hire hybrid but that’s because otherwise they can’t attact the talent.
In his note to employees, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote that the “advantages of being together in the office are significant”. Yet detractors of full-time office-based roles say it leads to ‘presenteeism’, lower productivity, lower staff retention and higher illness/stress. What’s your view?
If you’re not in the office, you should be out with customers. I’m a big fan of the office, but with flexibility. I do think more things happen in the office – collaboration happens more and there’s a massive advantage to that. That’s why companies are trying to push people back.
Labour is preparing to make flexble working the default option for working from day one on the job. How has this gone down with your clients?
Noone has even mentioned it. In tech, the number-one thing candidates want is flexibility. But that doesn’t mean not coming into the office. That means if they’ve got a doctor’s appointment they can work from home for the afternoon.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
