March 30, 2026 • 21 mins
With the word ‘crisis’ now comes talk about working from home.
As oil prices rise and the cost of petrol surges towards $4 a litre, it’s been flagged as a potential voluntary measure in contingency plans.
There’s been no direct government endorsement or mandate for working from home, but it’s been recognised as a possible fuel-saving step if the crisis worsens, alongside prioritising essential sectors.
Today on The Front Page, University of Otago business school associate professor Paula O’Kane is with us to take us through different ways of working, and what businesses could do to help out their employees.
Follow The Front Page on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can read more about this and other stories in the New Zealand Herald, online at nzherald.co.nz, or tune in to news bulletins across the NZME network.
Host: Chelsea Daniels
Editor/Producer: Richard Martin
Producer: Jane Yee
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Kielta.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a
daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald with the
word crisis now comes talk about working from home as
oil prices rise and the cost of petrol surges towards
four dollars a leader. It's been flagged as a potential
(00:27):
voluntary measure in contingency plans. There's been no direct government
endorsement or mandate for working from home, but it's been
recognized as a possible fuel saving step if the crisis worsens,
alongside prioritizing essential sectors. Today on the front Page, University
of Otago Business School Associate Professor Paula O'Kane is with
(00:49):
us to take us through different ways of working and
what businesses could do to help out their employees. POLLA,
how has the current fuel crisis directly prompted organizations? And
I suppose the government agencies to reconsider or expand working
(01:10):
from home policies.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
I suppose yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
So I think what's happened is that we've seen fuel
go up in price, and so that puts a burden
onto people in terms of getting turned from work. And
also we have a fuel crisis in terms that we
might not actually have enough fuel in the future to
be able to service the basic needs of the country.
So we're seeing a lot of rhetoric around, well, should
people be working from home so that they're not using fuel?
(01:33):
And I guess whenever I started to hear all of
that and we saw it coming right, I was like, oh,
for goodness sake, you know, we had this big conversation
after COVID. When COVID happened, we saw it as this
big social experiment to see if people could work from home,
and we proved people could work from home. But then
over the years since then, organizations have retracted. The government's
retracted right and it said, hey, bring people back to
(01:54):
Wellington public sectors. Employees need to be back in their offices.
And now we've had this other shock and we're asking
people potentially or we might start to ask people potentially
to work from home again. And so I don't think
we thought that through very well, and we haven't really
embraced some of the learning from COVID in terms of
what's happening in our environment and how we've actually got
to be prepared for that, but also how society has
(02:17):
changed right, So we work in much different ways. Our
lives are quite different. They're more complex, kinds of a
lot more going on. People have a lot more things
happening in their lives, and to be able to have
that flexibility to work from home sometimes actually reduces a
lot of stress on people.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Why do you think a lot of companies reverted quite
quickly post COVID to the back in the office agenda.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
It's fair to say a lot of companies didn't. So
there are definitely a lot of companies that have kept
the working from home agenda there that have supported their
employees to work from home and have been quite positive
about it. But they also have a lot that have
been quite negative about it. And what I can see
is it's a little bit about presenteeism. So if you're
not in the office and you're not being seen, it's
harder to know what you're doing. And when we look
(02:59):
at the research into productivity from working from home, because
I think that's what everybody gets back to, right, how
productive are people working from home regardless of everything else.
That that's what it comes down to. And we see
the organizations say, well, we don't have the innovation because
people aren't together and they aren't making the social connections. Actually,
there's not a lot of evidence out there to support
any of that. Any of the evidence of the research
(03:20):
that certainly I've seen has been supportive of working from home.
We're looking about two thirds of people, and most surveys
say that they're actually more productive when they're working from
home because they've got time to concentrate. And a lot
of this isn't working from home five days a week,
this is one or two days a week. This is
enabling people to have that concentrated time. So I think
(03:41):
those productivity arguments are not backed up in the research.
And there's only one study that I have seen that
as used objective measures of productivity, so actual outcome or
output based measures, and that one has seen an increase
in productivity for the people who are working from home
a number of days a week. That other measures are
quite subjective, so there is self report and to sort
of clarify what they're like. But also that leaders find
(04:03):
it hard to work from home. So it's a bit
of research come out just in the last few weeks
in the New Zealand context. And because leaders find it
harder because they put a lot of communication in their
day to day job, they want to connect with people.
They have to connect with people to get their job done.
Then they see it from that point of view and
so want people in the office to make their jobs easier,
or because they think that they're being less productive when
(04:24):
they're working from home.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
What examples have you seen, I suppose of businesses in
New Zealand doing it well.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
All businesses not doing it so well.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
From what I have seen, a lot of businesses do
do it well. That you need to be having those
conversations with your employees. So there's not this one size
fits all model and a third set. It's also not
just about working from home. It's about flexible work. It's
about where people work. So that could be at home,
it could be in hubs closer to home so they
don't have to travel so much, but they still get
social connection. It's about the times that people work, they
(04:54):
are is that people work, and also the tasks that
people do. So if you are wanting to work little
bit more from home, say for example, you're a teacher,
right you're on the frontline with students, but if you
look at what you could do, you have planning days,
you have times that you need to take to do
other parts of your job, and if you enable some
of that to work from home, then people do get
(05:15):
that concentrated time. So sometimes we need to think much
more creatively through what we're doing to enable people to
have some of that flexibility built into their lives. A
lot of the tech companies are pretty good at it.
They're quite aware of the technology that is used to
enable working from home. They have and they often have
those bigger budgets so they can have much more immersive
work spaces where whenever you're in a different venue, you
(05:37):
can actually connect in much better with people. Rather than
you and I on zoom right, they could be in
sort more interactive rooms with more interactive technology if we
need to do that, have that collaboration space.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
I decided to.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Reach out to a whole bunch of companies in New Zealand. Right,
so big businesses from New Zealand's insurance, telecom and banking sectors.
Those are the ones I focused on. Thirteen of them
eleven actually have come back to me by by recording
of this. All of them cited working from home or
flexible working arrangements, so they've obviously got different policies for
(06:09):
different employees. You know, some of the A and Z
banking staff, for example a customer facing so.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
They can't work from home.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
But the sounds like they're not reworking any of their
policies or mandating anything. They're all keeping an eye on things,
keeping an eye on what the government says. When companies
talk about flexible working arrangements, do you think that it's
become a bit of a buzz phrase in this day
and age and the real You know, realistically, if an
(06:38):
employee goes to their manager and asks them about flexible
working arrangements, what is the likelihood of them actually being
able to fulfill that prophecy.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
So I think it is more likely than you would think,
because when you think about flexible work, it is a
much bigger picture, right. So we've got the time flexibility,
the police flexibility, and even the task flexibility, different tasks
that you might do that might allow you to your
job in a different way. I think the challenge in
all of it is having a manager who can think
beyond the obvious, who can look at how we can
(07:09):
reorganize work to make it work using the technology. So
there's technology out there that can help scheduling that we
can allow people to self schedule. Particularly when you look
at frontline roles. If you look at hospitality, you look
at health, you look at teaching, you could actually empower
people to work together to roster so that people get
the flexibility that they need to actually support their lives.
(07:32):
So I don't think it's a buzzword. I think it
is an absolute necessity in the world that we live
in now. I think that complexity of the world that
we live in the fact that families have two parents
who go out to work often, we don't have the
village around us anymore. We don't have that network of
people that can help us. We also have a much
higher expectation of things that we should be doing with
our children. We have caring responsibilities. You look at the
(07:55):
younger generation, they want to be able to go out
surfing if the surf it's good, and maybe we can
work for flexibility around that. Their expectations are really high.
I think we need a full skill, actual change in
culture that it becomes a real norm rather than that
it is something that we offer it as an extra.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Yeah. Interesting, actually enough.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Two Degrees's response was a standout to me. Actually, a
spokesperson said that employees have alternatives to driving through something
called work ride and Extraordinary. So work ride lets you
buy an e bike, a bike or a scooter with
no upfront costs, then pay it off through pre tax
payroll deductions, and then Extraordinary lets you take pre tax
(08:38):
income to pay for your commute across New Zealand's public
transport networks.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Have you heard of these initiatives?
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Not those specifically, but I certainly know of those types
of initiatives. So there've been a bit in other countries
for years and years, particularly the biked work schemes where
the companies can clean back both the GSD and you
pay it before tax, your bait gets to half your price.
That's encouraging people to use that form of transport. Talked
about happiness budgets in the past, allowing people to use
a certain amount of money for things that will make
(09:04):
their life easier, which is a good impact on their jobs.
So these are the technological solutions to those and so
those are certainly things that can help with people's well being.
They're things that people value whenever they are working, and
for the organizations, they're really targeted to make life easier
for people. So they're absolutely fantastic, and I think a
bit more government support around things like that to really
(09:27):
have them embedded across New Zealand organizations rather than be
these standout examples. Right, So two degrees absolutely, I was
actually before you. I was looking at it yesterday anyway
in relation to something else. And they have a lot
of just small parts around the flexible work policy which
are really interesting. They've got long weekend policies that they
try to enable people to leave at two pm on
a Friday. If it's a long weekend where possible, they've
(09:50):
got summer working time it's a little bit shorter, and
those are quite quite cool things to do and they
do attract people. But I think we can think a
little bit more creatively away from this traditional workplace. The
traditional workplace came about in the sort of the turn
of the nineteenth into the twentieth century. Life has changed
horrendously since that, particularly in the last sort of ten
(10:12):
to fifteen years. But even whenever we saw a lot
more females entering the workplace, but that offices and work
were designed around men, right, Imagine if they're actually designed
around families, it would be quite a different organization of work,
and I think that's where we're really lacking. Need organize
work differently.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Yeah, how do we I suppose, if it's not government
mandated or government subsidized, how do we get to a
place in a culture where these examples are not seen
as going above and beyond for your employee.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
So, but if they become the norm, then that actually
has everybody doing it a little bit of government and mandating.
And I'm a bit scared of using that word, but
perhaps maybe it's not mandating, but it is incentivizing so
things that organizations can do that can make work life
better for everyone by incentify things like the bike to
work scheme where you get your bike before tax. Right,
(11:03):
that's an incentive together a bike and hopefully also to
use your bike and return. So I think that incentivizing
those good behaviors and santilizing organizations to undertake those and
also really to do a little bit more research into
the impacts of those for those organizations and to compare
them against potentially organizations that aren't offering such things. You
could see really where the impact was and when they
(11:25):
do get normalized, say when maybe f I don't.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Know when, No, let's say when.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
When they do get normalized, then I think we can
end up with a much better working environment for everybody,
and then that has flow on effects right to the
wider society if we have people in working environments that
are more positive.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Yeah, I saw also a genesis came back to me.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
It's that it subsidizes public transport costs by fifty percent
for employees in their Auckland and Hamilton offices through Auckland
Transport And why could they transport?
Speaker 1 (11:58):
That's something that's that they can do as well.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Have you heard of any other initiatives that might work
well here, because, like you said, everywhere around the world
that has been doing this for I don't know decades now,
haven't they.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Yeah. Absolutely, I mean we've certainly seen those bike for
work schemes and the public transport those are quite common
Germany very much so, huge amounts of public transport subsidization
for people. We've also seen things like the government actually
trying to support rural communities. So we've seen this in
Ireland where they are really supporting working from home so
that we rejuvenate your rural communities and that they don't
(12:30):
say the hospitality businesses, so the retail businesses get a
bit more of the pie there that self organization of
work has talked about an awful lot. And whenever we
empower people and give them more of that autonomy and
more of that control over their day to day work,
that those are seen worldwide as qualities of high quality jobs.
So really giving people options to do things like that
(12:57):
working from home?
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Will you rule it out because it screws the cafes
in the cities, isn't it when we do this, Well,
it's not up to me.
Speaker 4 (13:07):
Actually, employers around the country will decide what works for
them and their workforces, and employees will negotiate with their
own bosses about what suits them. I've heard anecdotally that
many employers are already being pretty pragmatic about it, working
with their workers to say, well, actually, okay, if you
work from home a little bit more, that's okay with me.
(13:31):
I've had to read through the government's phase system again
and nowhere does it mention working from home or mandating
anything for that matter.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Do you think that that is intentional? Do we have
some PTSD COVID situation going potentially?
Speaker 3 (13:46):
I mean I sort of read level too that that
sort of insinuettes that is a possibility, but it certainly
isn't mum Dad as necessary. I think it will be
difficult to Mandy unless you're actually going to the lockdown
scenario because is it one day? Is it two days?
You actually need to encourage organizations to think about it,
and potentially we wore the behavior that does it rather
(14:08):
than mandate it, because if you mandate it, you have
to start to put perimeters around it, and those perimeters
could be really really tricky to work out.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
How can organizations adopt a kind of more balanced, forward
thinking workforce plan to kind of handle this instability like
fuel shortages or a pandemic, or geopolitical tensions, things like that,
because they're going to be popping up more and more
often in future.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Absolutely, yeah, I mean we've got to create that resilient
workforce that can jump. And it probably is a little
bit around working from home and making sure that the
technology is in place, that we look at people's health
and safety when they're working from home. There's certainly a
push around that to make sure that that's in place.
But also we've got to build the work dace culture.
So you know, at that COVID lockdown, we picked up
(14:53):
our desks in our chairs and we went home with them.
You know, it was quite a different scenario. Now we've
actually learned well we should have learned from that, but
by taking away some of those working from home opportunities
over the last few years, we're losing that organizational learning.
So we actually need to enable people to work in
different places and spaces and to have the setups to
do it, have the technology to do it, have the
(15:15):
culture to do it, have the organization to do it.
Leaders need to be really skilled in communicating. That comes
up hugely in the research that we've done. But they've
also got to be sort of think about how they
measure productivity and move it away from that input based productivity.
So if you're in the office workingly ours, then you're
(15:35):
seeing to be productive, but actually you and I could
work at CMRS and you could do ten times as
much as me and we can be sitting beside each other,
so it's not a real measure of productivity. A measure
productivity is actually what you achieve. But what we see
is that managers find it really hard to set good
output based goals which we can then measure people against.
So addressing some of that culture, addressing some of those
(15:57):
leadership skills that people have some of that goal setting
or KPI setting or whatever we call it in different organizations,
so that as we shift between some of these shocks
that we get and we have to potentially work from
home where we have to organize ourselves differently, that we
have those tools and players to be able to do it.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
We were having this discussion in the newsroom, right but
I'm prepping for this episode, and my producer cannot believe
that companies aren't proactively implementing work from home type of
scenarios in order to alleviate pressure on employees but also
the country as a whole. I'm more cynical, asking you know,
(16:34):
and saying, why would they if there's no direct benefit
to themselves or shareholders?
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Where do you see it?
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Oh? So I'm probably with your producer. I think we
need to be getting ready for it. I think it
could happen even if we're not Monday at it to
work from home. We might be taught we have only
got a certain amount of fuel and we can't actually
get to work. So that in itself, why not a mandy.
If you can't get to work, you can't get to work,
so you've got to be prepared for it. I was
listening to a story about teachers in rural Northland. I
(17:01):
think it was where they just can't afford to drive
the big distances to work. So the skills have already
had to reorganize so that potentially they only have to
come in three or four days a week because it
feels too expensive for them and it's not going to
help their own personal situation. So this is already we
have to be prepared, and I don't personally think it's
going to get any better in the next little while.
(17:22):
So I think organizations are mad at them and not
to be prepared for getting having people at home a
day or two a week in order for them to
actually keep functioning.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
She's going to be incredibly happy with that answer. We're
going to have to cut that unfortunately.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Do you think that there is I suppose I'm going
back to this man dating situation, but do you think
that there is actually any chance that the government will
men date working from home? A Given it's the parameters,
it's going to be incredibly difficult and be the COVID
response and how hard this government went on the last
government over everything it did during the pandemic, I mean,
(18:03):
can it.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
I don't think that we haven't seen the detail of
level three and four as far as I'm aware, but
I will imagine if you're getting to whatever level four is,
there is probably going to be a mandate around non
essential jobs that can be worked from home should be
work from home. But up until that point, I think
you've got to put the onus on the employers to
think about the good of the society in order to
encourage their employees to work from home to reduce that
(18:26):
fuel consumption. And I understand the reluctance to mandate it
because I don't think it's a clean mandate like it
previously was with COVID. It was a pretty clear and
to some extent it covered pretty much everybody. Those who
weren't covered were pretty clear to see in terms of
our retail and in terms of our health workers. And
that's a different conversation about the fairness of all of that,
(18:48):
I understand. But until we're at those really really high
levels where there literally isn't fuel and in which case
you probably don't need to mandate it then anyway, because
we can literally get to work, right.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
Yeah, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
I suppose for HR leaders or CEOs that might be
listening to this episode, what are kind of some immediate
steps that you would suggest that they can take in
terms of perhaps working from home policies or making sure
that employees are resilient in future kind of scenarios.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Yeah, so I think we've got to really get their
readiness into this. So that readiness involves sitting down, getting
teams to sit down and look at what can work
for each individual team. So if we were forced into
the position where we had to have a day or
two working for more or even back to fill working
from home, how would that operate within us? How would
we have our communication? What technologies do we have on this?
(19:45):
What's your setup at home? Like, what support do you
need from the organization? What technology do you need? How
can we work together? We saw a lot of social
activities during COVID happening online, so what do we need
to do to create that cohesion? And there's not a
one size fits of for that. You've got lots of
different types of teams out They're operating in lots of
(20:05):
different ways. Some will already be doing working from home
a few days a week, and so they will be
much more prepared. Others will not, and they need to
think about how they can keep up that interaction and
that communication, which we don't know is essential, but it
can actually be achieved through the technological tools that we
have right there.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
I'll tell you what, It's going to be difficult getting
this desk and these screens into my small flat, but
we'll try.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Thank you so much for joining us, paula problem.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You
can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage
at ziherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is
hosted and produced by me Chelsea Daniels.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Caine.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Dicky is our studio operator, Richard Martin, our producer and editor,
and our executive producer.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Is Jane Ye.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Follow the Front Page on the iHeart app or wherever
you get your podcast pasts, and join us next.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Time for another look beyond the headlines.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
M HM
Kielta.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a
daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald with the
word crisis now comes talk about working from home as
oil prices rise and the cost of petrol surges towards
four dollars a leader. It's been flagged as a potential
(00:27):
voluntary measure in contingency plans. There's been no direct government
endorsement or mandate for working from home, but it's been
recognized as a possible fuel saving step if the crisis worsens,
alongside prioritizing essential sectors. Today on the front Page, University
of Otago Business School Associate Professor Paula O'Kane is with
(00:49):
us to take us through different ways of working and
what businesses could do to help out their employees. POLLA,
how has the current fuel crisis directly prompted organizations? And
I suppose the government agencies to reconsider or expand working
(01:10):
from home policies.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
I suppose yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
So I think what's happened is that we've seen fuel
go up in price, and so that puts a burden
onto people in terms of getting turned from work. And
also we have a fuel crisis in terms that we
might not actually have enough fuel in the future to
be able to service the basic needs of the country.
So we're seeing a lot of rhetoric around, well, should
people be working from home so that they're not using fuel?
(01:33):
And I guess whenever I started to hear all of
that and we saw it coming right, I was like, oh,
for goodness sake, you know, we had this big conversation
after COVID. When COVID happened, we saw it as this
big social experiment to see if people could work from home,
and we proved people could work from home. But then
over the years since then, organizations have retracted. The government's
retracted right and it said, hey, bring people back to
(01:54):
Wellington public sectors. Employees need to be back in their offices.
And now we've had this other shock and we're asking
people potentially or we might start to ask people potentially
to work from home again. And so I don't think
we thought that through very well, and we haven't really
embraced some of the learning from COVID in terms of
what's happening in our environment and how we've actually got
to be prepared for that, but also how society has
(02:17):
changed right, So we work in much different ways. Our
lives are quite different. They're more complex, kinds of a
lot more going on. People have a lot more things
happening in their lives, and to be able to have
that flexibility to work from home sometimes actually reduces a
lot of stress on people.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Why do you think a lot of companies reverted quite
quickly post COVID to the back in the office agenda.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
It's fair to say a lot of companies didn't. So
there are definitely a lot of companies that have kept
the working from home agenda there that have supported their
employees to work from home and have been quite positive
about it. But they also have a lot that have
been quite negative about it. And what I can see
is it's a little bit about presenteeism. So if you're
not in the office and you're not being seen, it's
harder to know what you're doing. And when we look
(02:59):
at the research into productivity from working from home, because
I think that's what everybody gets back to, right, how
productive are people working from home regardless of everything else.
That that's what it comes down to. And we see
the organizations say, well, we don't have the innovation because
people aren't together and they aren't making the social connections. Actually,
there's not a lot of evidence out there to support
any of that. Any of the evidence of the research
(03:20):
that certainly I've seen has been supportive of working from home.
We're looking about two thirds of people, and most surveys
say that they're actually more productive when they're working from
home because they've got time to concentrate. And a lot
of this isn't working from home five days a week,
this is one or two days a week. This is
enabling people to have that concentrated time. So I think
(03:41):
those productivity arguments are not backed up in the research.
And there's only one study that I have seen that
as used objective measures of productivity, so actual outcome or
output based measures, and that one has seen an increase
in productivity for the people who are working from home
a number of days a week. That other measures are
quite subjective, so there is self report and to sort
of clarify what they're like. But also that leaders find
(04:03):
it hard to work from home. So it's a bit
of research come out just in the last few weeks
in the New Zealand context. And because leaders find it
harder because they put a lot of communication in their
day to day job, they want to connect with people.
They have to connect with people to get their job done.
Then they see it from that point of view and
so want people in the office to make their jobs easier,
or because they think that they're being less productive when
(04:24):
they're working from home.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
What examples have you seen, I suppose of businesses in
New Zealand doing it well.
Speaker 1 (04:30):
All businesses not doing it so well.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
From what I have seen, a lot of businesses do
do it well. That you need to be having those
conversations with your employees. So there's not this one size
fits all model and a third set. It's also not
just about working from home. It's about flexible work. It's
about where people work. So that could be at home,
it could be in hubs closer to home so they
don't have to travel so much, but they still get
social connection. It's about the times that people work, they
(04:54):
are is that people work, and also the tasks that
people do. So if you are wanting to work little
bit more from home, say for example, you're a teacher,
right you're on the frontline with students, but if you
look at what you could do, you have planning days,
you have times that you need to take to do
other parts of your job, and if you enable some
of that to work from home, then people do get
(05:15):
that concentrated time. So sometimes we need to think much
more creatively through what we're doing to enable people to
have some of that flexibility built into their lives. A
lot of the tech companies are pretty good at it.
They're quite aware of the technology that is used to
enable working from home. They have and they often have
those bigger budgets so they can have much more immersive
work spaces where whenever you're in a different venue, you
(05:37):
can actually connect in much better with people. Rather than
you and I on zoom right, they could be in
sort more interactive rooms with more interactive technology if we
need to do that, have that collaboration space.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
I decided to.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Reach out to a whole bunch of companies in New Zealand. Right,
so big businesses from New Zealand's insurance, telecom and banking sectors.
Those are the ones I focused on. Thirteen of them
eleven actually have come back to me by by recording
of this. All of them cited working from home or
flexible working arrangements, so they've obviously got different policies for
(06:09):
different employees. You know, some of the A and Z
banking staff, for example a customer facing so.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
They can't work from home.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
But the sounds like they're not reworking any of their
policies or mandating anything. They're all keeping an eye on things,
keeping an eye on what the government says. When companies
talk about flexible working arrangements, do you think that it's
become a bit of a buzz phrase in this day
and age and the real You know, realistically, if an
(06:38):
employee goes to their manager and asks them about flexible
working arrangements, what is the likelihood of them actually being
able to fulfill that prophecy.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
So I think it is more likely than you would think,
because when you think about flexible work, it is a
much bigger picture, right. So we've got the time flexibility,
the police flexibility, and even the task flexibility, different tasks
that you might do that might allow you to your
job in a different way. I think the challenge in
all of it is having a manager who can think
beyond the obvious, who can look at how we can
(07:09):
reorganize work to make it work using the technology. So
there's technology out there that can help scheduling that we
can allow people to self schedule. Particularly when you look
at frontline roles. If you look at hospitality, you look
at health, you look at teaching, you could actually empower
people to work together to roster so that people get
the flexibility that they need to actually support their lives.
(07:32):
So I don't think it's a buzzword. I think it
is an absolute necessity in the world that we live
in now. I think that complexity of the world that
we live in the fact that families have two parents
who go out to work often, we don't have the
village around us anymore. We don't have that network of
people that can help us. We also have a much
higher expectation of things that we should be doing with
our children. We have caring responsibilities. You look at the
(07:55):
younger generation, they want to be able to go out
surfing if the surf it's good, and maybe we can
work for flexibility around that. Their expectations are really high.
I think we need a full skill, actual change in
culture that it becomes a real norm rather than that
it is something that we offer it as an extra.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Yeah. Interesting, actually enough.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Two Degrees's response was a standout to me. Actually, a
spokesperson said that employees have alternatives to driving through something
called work ride and Extraordinary. So work ride lets you
buy an e bike, a bike or a scooter with
no upfront costs, then pay it off through pre tax
payroll deductions, and then Extraordinary lets you take pre tax
(08:38):
income to pay for your commute across New Zealand's public
transport networks.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Have you heard of these initiatives?
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Not those specifically, but I certainly know of those types
of initiatives. So there've been a bit in other countries
for years and years, particularly the biked work schemes where
the companies can clean back both the GSD and you
pay it before tax, your bait gets to half your price.
That's encouraging people to use that form of transport. Talked
about happiness budgets in the past, allowing people to use
a certain amount of money for things that will make
(09:04):
their life easier, which is a good impact on their jobs.
So these are the technological solutions to those and so
those are certainly things that can help with people's well being.
They're things that people value whenever they are working, and
for the organizations, they're really targeted to make life easier
for people. So they're absolutely fantastic, and I think a
bit more government support around things like that to really
(09:27):
have them embedded across New Zealand organizations rather than be
these standout examples. Right, So two degrees absolutely, I was
actually before you. I was looking at it yesterday anyway
in relation to something else. And they have a lot
of just small parts around the flexible work policy which
are really interesting. They've got long weekend policies that they
try to enable people to leave at two pm on
a Friday. If it's a long weekend where possible, they've
(09:50):
got summer working time it's a little bit shorter, and
those are quite quite cool things to do and they
do attract people. But I think we can think a
little bit more creatively away from this traditional workplace. The
traditional workplace came about in the sort of the turn
of the nineteenth into the twentieth century. Life has changed
horrendously since that, particularly in the last sort of ten
(10:12):
to fifteen years. But even whenever we saw a lot
more females entering the workplace, but that offices and work
were designed around men, right, Imagine if they're actually designed
around families, it would be quite a different organization of work,
and I think that's where we're really lacking. Need organize
work differently.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Yeah, how do we I suppose, if it's not government
mandated or government subsidized, how do we get to a
place in a culture where these examples are not seen
as going above and beyond for your employee.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
So, but if they become the norm, then that actually
has everybody doing it a little bit of government and mandating.
And I'm a bit scared of using that word, but
perhaps maybe it's not mandating, but it is incentivizing so
things that organizations can do that can make work life
better for everyone by incentify things like the bike to
work scheme where you get your bike before tax. Right,
(11:03):
that's an incentive together a bike and hopefully also to
use your bike and return. So I think that incentivizing
those good behaviors and santilizing organizations to undertake those and
also really to do a little bit more research into
the impacts of those for those organizations and to compare
them against potentially organizations that aren't offering such things. You
could see really where the impact was and when they
(11:25):
do get normalized, say when maybe f I don't.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Know when, No, let's say when.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
When they do get normalized, then I think we can
end up with a much better working environment for everybody,
and then that has flow on effects right to the
wider society if we have people in working environments that
are more positive.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Yeah, I saw also a genesis came back to me.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
It's that it subsidizes public transport costs by fifty percent
for employees in their Auckland and Hamilton offices through Auckland
Transport And why could they transport?
Speaker 1 (11:58):
That's something that's that they can do as well.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Have you heard of any other initiatives that might work
well here, because, like you said, everywhere around the world
that has been doing this for I don't know decades now,
haven't they.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Yeah. Absolutely, I mean we've certainly seen those bike for
work schemes and the public transport those are quite common
Germany very much so, huge amounts of public transport subsidization
for people. We've also seen things like the government actually
trying to support rural communities. So we've seen this in
Ireland where they are really supporting working from home so
that we rejuvenate your rural communities and that they don't
(12:30):
say the hospitality businesses, so the retail businesses get a
bit more of the pie there that self organization of
work has talked about an awful lot. And whenever we
empower people and give them more of that autonomy and
more of that control over their day to day work,
that those are seen worldwide as qualities of high quality jobs.
So really giving people options to do things like that
(12:57):
working from home?
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Will you rule it out because it screws the cafes
in the cities, isn't it when we do this, Well,
it's not up to me.
Speaker 4 (13:07):
Actually, employers around the country will decide what works for
them and their workforces, and employees will negotiate with their
own bosses about what suits them. I've heard anecdotally that
many employers are already being pretty pragmatic about it, working
with their workers to say, well, actually, okay, if you
work from home a little bit more, that's okay with me.
(13:31):
I've had to read through the government's phase system again
and nowhere does it mention working from home or mandating
anything for that matter.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Do you think that that is intentional? Do we have
some PTSD COVID situation going potentially?
Speaker 3 (13:46):
I mean I sort of read level too that that
sort of insinuettes that is a possibility, but it certainly
isn't mum Dad as necessary. I think it will be
difficult to Mandy unless you're actually going to the lockdown
scenario because is it one day? Is it two days?
You actually need to encourage organizations to think about it,
and potentially we wore the behavior that does it rather
(14:08):
than mandate it, because if you mandate it, you have
to start to put perimeters around it, and those perimeters
could be really really tricky to work out.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
How can organizations adopt a kind of more balanced, forward
thinking workforce plan to kind of handle this instability like
fuel shortages or a pandemic, or geopolitical tensions, things like that,
because they're going to be popping up more and more
often in future.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Absolutely, yeah, I mean we've got to create that resilient
workforce that can jump. And it probably is a little
bit around working from home and making sure that the
technology is in place, that we look at people's health
and safety when they're working from home. There's certainly a
push around that to make sure that that's in place.
But also we've got to build the work dace culture.
So you know, at that COVID lockdown, we picked up
(14:53):
our desks in our chairs and we went home with them.
You know, it was quite a different scenario. Now we've
actually learned well we should have learned from that, but
by taking away some of those working from home opportunities
over the last few years, we're losing that organizational learning.
So we actually need to enable people to work in
different places and spaces and to have the setups to
do it, have the technology to do it, have the
(15:15):
culture to do it, have the organization to do it.
Leaders need to be really skilled in communicating. That comes
up hugely in the research that we've done. But they've
also got to be sort of think about how they
measure productivity and move it away from that input based productivity.
So if you're in the office workingly ours, then you're
(15:35):
seeing to be productive, but actually you and I could
work at CMRS and you could do ten times as
much as me and we can be sitting beside each other,
so it's not a real measure of productivity. A measure
productivity is actually what you achieve. But what we see
is that managers find it really hard to set good
output based goals which we can then measure people against.
So addressing some of that culture, addressing some of those
(15:57):
leadership skills that people have some of that goal setting
or KPI setting or whatever we call it in different organizations,
so that as we shift between some of these shocks
that we get and we have to potentially work from
home where we have to organize ourselves differently, that we
have those tools and players to be able to do it.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
We were having this discussion in the newsroom, right but
I'm prepping for this episode, and my producer cannot believe
that companies aren't proactively implementing work from home type of
scenarios in order to alleviate pressure on employees but also
the country as a whole. I'm more cynical, asking you know,
(16:34):
and saying, why would they if there's no direct benefit
to themselves or shareholders?
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Where do you see it?
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Oh? So I'm probably with your producer. I think we
need to be getting ready for it. I think it
could happen even if we're not Monday at it to
work from home. We might be taught we have only
got a certain amount of fuel and we can't actually
get to work. So that in itself, why not a mandy.
If you can't get to work, you can't get to work,
so you've got to be prepared for it. I was
listening to a story about teachers in rural Northland. I
(17:01):
think it was where they just can't afford to drive
the big distances to work. So the skills have already
had to reorganize so that potentially they only have to
come in three or four days a week because it
feels too expensive for them and it's not going to
help their own personal situation. So this is already we
have to be prepared, and I don't personally think it's
going to get any better in the next little while.
(17:22):
So I think organizations are mad at them and not
to be prepared for getting having people at home a
day or two a week in order for them to
actually keep functioning.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
She's going to be incredibly happy with that answer. We're
going to have to cut that unfortunately.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Do you think that there is I suppose I'm going
back to this man dating situation, but do you think
that there is actually any chance that the government will
men date working from home? A Given it's the parameters,
it's going to be incredibly difficult and be the COVID
response and how hard this government went on the last
government over everything it did during the pandemic, I mean,
(18:03):
can it.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
I don't think that we haven't seen the detail of
level three and four as far as I'm aware, but
I will imagine if you're getting to whatever level four is,
there is probably going to be a mandate around non
essential jobs that can be worked from home should be
work from home. But up until that point, I think
you've got to put the onus on the employers to
think about the good of the society in order to
encourage their employees to work from home to reduce that
(18:26):
fuel consumption. And I understand the reluctance to mandate it
because I don't think it's a clean mandate like it
previously was with COVID. It was a pretty clear and
to some extent it covered pretty much everybody. Those who
weren't covered were pretty clear to see in terms of
our retail and in terms of our health workers. And
that's a different conversation about the fairness of all of that,
(18:48):
I understand. But until we're at those really really high
levels where there literally isn't fuel and in which case
you probably don't need to mandate it then anyway, because
we can literally get to work, right.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
Yeah, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
I suppose for HR leaders or CEOs that might be
listening to this episode, what are kind of some immediate
steps that you would suggest that they can take in
terms of perhaps working from home policies or making sure
that employees are resilient in future kind of scenarios.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Yeah, so I think we've got to really get their
readiness into this. So that readiness involves sitting down, getting
teams to sit down and look at what can work
for each individual team. So if we were forced into
the position where we had to have a day or
two working for more or even back to fill working
from home, how would that operate within us? How would
we have our communication? What technologies do we have on this?
(19:45):
What's your setup at home? Like, what support do you
need from the organization? What technology do you need? How
can we work together? We saw a lot of social
activities during COVID happening online, so what do we need
to do to create that cohesion? And there's not a
one size fits of for that. You've got lots of
different types of teams out They're operating in lots of
(20:05):
different ways. Some will already be doing working from home
a few days a week, and so they will be
much more prepared. Others will not, and they need to
think about how they can keep up that interaction and
that communication, which we don't know is essential, but it
can actually be achieved through the technological tools that we
have right there.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
I'll tell you what, It's going to be difficult getting
this desk and these screens into my small flat, but
we'll try.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Thank you so much for joining us, paula problem.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You
can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage
at ziherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is
hosted and produced by me Chelsea Daniels.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Caine.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Dicky is our studio operator, Richard Martin, our producer and editor,
and our executive producer.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Is Jane Ye.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Follow the Front Page on the iHeart app or wherever
you get your podcast pasts, and join us next.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
Time for another look beyond the headlines.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
M HM
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