Future of Work Masterclass - Human connection in a remote world

Future of Work Masterclass

Join us for a series where we gather the latest insights, trends and knowledge about the future of work from our expert boxxers.

Tech is changing the way we work across the globe.  It’s becoming more and more embedded in our working lives by the day.  It's time to embrace tech – in a way that works for you and your people.  That’s the key for us, at boxxe.

At the height of the pandemic (the first part of 2020), around 49% of workers in the UK said they had worked from home in the previous seven days.  They said it wouldn’t last – we had no choice, after all.  But it was only a temporary measure, right?

As of May 2023, that figure now stands at 39%.  This is considerably higher than pre-pandemic conditions, and according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), it consistently sits around the 25-40% range, “indicating that homeworking is resilient to pressures such as the end of restrictions and increases in the cost of living.” 

Remote working is here to stay.

boxxe is a hybrid working company and committed to staying that way – we’ve experienced so many benefits that come from combining powerful tech with awesome human beings, from recruitment and workplace efficiency to wellbeing and CPD.

Flexible, remote working has opened up so many more opportunities for women, caregivers and those with disabilities to name a few – helping to support EDI efforts.  From a recruitment perspective, it’s great to be able to say, ‘Look, we know being able to plan for the future is important, and we are happy and confident to say please do! Because we’re not pivoting – regardless of what happens in the market, we are a remote-first company.’ 

And you have flexibility in your role because we know life has a funny way of always sneaking up on us.  We’re trying to take the stigma away from taking time out of the day to do the school run, go to the doctors, or even just pop downstairs because the postman’s knocking at the door!  We have our core working hours and set deliverables, and as long as you can do that, we’re here to support you.  It’s understanding that not everyone fits into the 9-5 model and that many people require more flexible working.  That’s a very attractive prospect to a lot of candidates (not just women) and it’s one of the reasons why we’ve retained so many great staff members.  Better yet, it’s enabling more women to get involved in the tech industry, which is really important to us. 

Working remotely has required some major shifts in leadership styles, especially where flexible working is concerned.  Managers have had to shift their mindsets, to make sure they’re measuring the performance of the team against their output – not whether they’ve been sitting at the desk all day.  Nurturing trust and encouraging communication within a team plays a huge role in the effectiveness of that; for example, it’s okay to work late at night if that’s when your brain is firing on all cylinders, but you’ve got to communicate that there’s no expectations for the rest of the team to conform to those hours.  At boxxe, we work on a basis of mutual trust – I’ll work when I work, and you do the same, and together we’ll get the job done, to the best of our abilities.  We value output over time spent at desk.

Where would we be without Microsoft Teams?  It’s key to keeping our boxxe community engaged and thriving.  Apart from all of our day to day meetings, every couple of months we have two company-wide sessions.  The first, a company update on what’s going on, milestones we’ve achieved or if there’s any initiatives rolling out…  And the second, an Exec Q&A where anyone can come and ask the executive team any kind of questions about the business, finances or the future.  It’s an open-door kind of policy!

Mental wellbeing is something we’re really passionate about, but a displaced workforce can make it difficult to get a sense of how people are really doing – there’s no water cooler chats, or mid-work tea breaks.  So, our challenge has been to come up with valuable alternatives.  One way we do that is with overcommunication around wellbeing.  Not in an ‘overload you with information’ sense, but a regular reminder of where you can get support, our mental health first-aiders, and the Wellness Action Plans we use from Mind…  It’s all there, but it’s important that we actively remind people. 

Another way we build wellbeing support is again, through those in leadership roles – we encourage them to take ownership of checking in with their team, strengthening relationships so it’s easier to spot if something’s not quite right. 

We’ve also rolled out a really cool initiative, which we trialled during Mental Health Awareness Week this year.  We gave everyone a wellbeing hour and got them to shout about it.  People were posting pictures of what they got up to – from walking their dogs, to having an extended lunch break and even meeting up for a motorcycle ride.  It’s a great way to get a little more insight into each other's lives, and also start to make some connections outside of our working interests.  In fact, we’ve had a few mini boxxe communities crop up from this as people have begun to connect over similar interests or simply realise they’re in the same locality for a coffee shop catch up.

Even though we’re now running this initiative every month, the premise is not actually new – our flexible policy has always allowed for wellbeing hours!  The problem is, in many work environments, there’s often a difference between saying ‘it’s okay to take an hour’ and actually doing so.  We want to show our boxxers they have ‘permission’ to do so – and that we actively encourage it!

Doing these little things doesn’t cost us an awful lot, but it makes a huge difference to our boxxers.  For us, tech is the most useful when we put our people, customers, partners and the planet at the heart of it.  You need people to bring tech to life… and in a remote world, you need tech to bring everyone together to achieve that.  You can’t really have one without the other – which is exactly why we work so hard to nurture a collaborative, connected and creative digital environment.