"We're reinventing what it means to work": Very Group CIO on post-pandemic changes
“You could plop 50,000 new technologists into the UK tech market tomorrow and they would all get a job by Monday,” says Very Group CIO Matt Grest
For two years, the Monday morning commute has been a distant memory. In the middle of the pandemic, people began to question why their bosses suddenly seemed keen to go back to the office five days a week - after all, many of us had been working from home effectively for months. What even was the point of the office anymore?
Now that the worst effects of the pandemic seem to be behind us, companies are cautiously returning to the office - with some significant changes in place, for the most part.
"We're not mandating to people, 'Your office days are Monday and Thursday' or anything like that," says Very Group CIO Matt Grest. "[You should] design your week around your office work and your home work, so when you come in it's about collaboration, workshops, team meetings, the face-to-face stuff; and then if you need to get your head down and plough through some work, you're best doing that at home - but it's up to you."
The future is likely to be a collaborative space, while home is where you work when you want to focus on productivity. This doesn't only apply to the retail sector; we're seeing similar trends across industries, from gambling to gardening.
As Grest puts it, "There's certainly no point battling through traffic in the morning to arrive at the office and sit there all day with your headphones on doing Teams calls with people, right?"
That doesn't work for everyone - some industries, like hospitality, must be face-to-face, and roles like Very Group's warehouse workers must be on-site. But for those who can theoretically work from anywhere, it's about giving them a choice rather than a top-down decree forcing them back to the office.
"We're not certainly not going to mandate that," says Grest. "It's really all about people taking responsibility for their own work patterns."
The morning stand-up is now over video
This style of work has required some changes. There's more trust and independence across Very Group, as well as more organisation and communication.
"From a delivery point of view, we have tried to operate an agile methodology within tribes, generally around two-week sprints, so teams are organised around the work. Generally, people know what they've got to do that day, so we're quite organised. Teams have continued having their morning stand-ups, they just do it now over video...but everyone in the technology team will be on Slack all day, every day, in the channels they need to be or in the one-to-one conversation."
Comms have been key over the last two years, and Grest says the time and effort spent on infrastructure and processes paid off: the company had one of its most successful years ever in 2021.
Businesses who lacked that focus on communication, on the other hand, are finding it much harder to readjust now, and may even be struggling to convince people to come back to the office at all.
"It was very easy over the last two years for people almost to go into a silo a little bit. We were all sat at home. You could see the stuff that you were responsible for and you had your immediate colleagues, and people just did their very, very best at what they could do and what they could control.
"That's one of the things now, as we're coming out of lockdown, it's reinventing what it means to work in an organisation - about the culture, about communication, about reasons to work for a company now."
Turn up the dial on communicating with staff
The office still has a draw beyond collaborative work, Grest acknowledges, and the culture and social aspect are a big part of that. It wasn't that long ago that some of us were in the office five days a week: we'd make friends, and even meet partners, through work. That's a lot more difficult now, and all the Zoom bingo in the world won't replace it.
"A good organisation today just really does need to turn up the dial on communicating with staff and helping people remain connected, when maybe for the majority of your time, you're sat in your house working. It's just a different world right now.
"Previously, from a recruitment point of view, you'd hire people that live 45 minutes, an hour maximum, from your office, because that's just how it was: people would come into the office every day. We're changing that approach, in terms of looking pan-UK now for hiring people... I think it's something that that you have to do, because essentially, we've all become just a rectangle on the screen over the course of the last two years. You don't need to live down the road to be that rectangle on the screen, you can live on the other side of the country."
From Lincoln to London
The new normal has totally changed recruitment. Suddenly, people don't have to live in London to get the best career opportunities and wages. In fact, they don't have to live near a city at all: you can work equally as well from Oldham as you can from Old Street.
"We're seeing that with people not feeling that London is this big magnet anymore, that you have to go down to London to seek your fame and fortune. You can choose a place to live that's more aligned to your lifestyle, dial in on your video call every day and maybe travel into the office once a week or once a fortnight. It's a new world that we're going into, and we're all feeling our way."
The ability to recruit across the UK is good news for Very Group, which is eight months into a three-and-a-half-year technology transformation. The biggest challenge isn't the work itself, though: it's finding the talent.
"[Because of the pandemic] all organisations now are either doing a digital transformation or their second digital transformation and investing in the technology, which is presenting an extremely high demand that's exceeding the supply on the tech market."
Very is investing heavily in talent creation programmes to address this, specifically targeting new starters and returners. Considering the tech transformation underway at the company, "we know we're going to need that constant pipeline of new, eager people at the start of their careers."
When the alarm goes off, we want people to get out of bed with a spring in their step
A transformation project of this scale offers exciting, interesting work that teaches essential skills and looks great on a CV; it can be a key element in attracting and retaining talent. Grest believes this is an essential factor in recruitment.
"The work's got to be interesting, right? When the alarm goes off first thing in the morning, we want people to get out of bed with a spring in their step, looking forward to coming in or going into their home office - knowing what they're going to be working on, knowing that it's a learning and development opportunity for them, knowing how that's going to contribute to the strategic aims of the business."
Also key to attracting skilled employees are the issues of pay and professional development. The coming years could see industry pay becoming much more standardised across the country, now that knowledge work can realistically be done from anywhere: London salaries with a Lincolnshire cost of living. That's great news for employees, but it means that companies based outside the Southeast could go through a painful period of adjustment. Again, fostering your own talent could provide some relief if that does turn out to be the case.
"[Hiring] is about being creative and progressive, because this talent challenge, it's just not going to go away. You can't bury your head in the sand and hope that by next year it'll subside - it just won't, anytime soon, so I think creating your own talent is the right thing to do...
"You could plop 50,000 new technologists into the UK tech market tomorrow and they would all get a job by Monday; such is the demand. I think that's the challenge for all of us, we're all busy with the day job, trying to deliver, but that talent challenge is not going to go away."
The pandemic has changed recruitment and retention; workers are not willingly going to go back to the office five days a week any time soon. The most successful companies of the next decade will be the ones who accept and embrace this fact; and for those who don't...well, did you hear about the hiring crisis?