Has hybrid working made tech more diverse?
The pandemic has disproved long-standing objections to remote working. But is it increasing diversity in the tech industry?
Hybrid working is now standard working practice across many organisations, with certain sectors, technology among them, continuing the journey to a more flexible working environment: an environment that began, in some cases, before the pandemic. The long months of remote-only working helped organisations resolve some lingering technical barriers with a huge acceleration in the deployment of cloud applications, better connectivity and smarter cyber security.
More importantly, the pandemic also burned away long-standing cultural objections to more flexible working. Indeed, some organisations and individuals expressed a belief that hybrid working could increase the diversity of technology, with opportunities being opened up to individuals who would have struggled to make it into an office five days a week. Employees who are also parents benefit from a more flexible working day. More home working opens up technology roles to the disabled and neurodiverse, to people who don't live in London or along the M4 corridor, or who have limited access to transport.
Is hybrid working creating greater diversity in technology? Melissa Werry, head of technology at RSPB, is optimistic.
"Hybrid working for us has really opened up the pool of talent from which we can recruit. Prior to the pandemic we had very few people working from home and therefore only recruited people within our geographical area. This has all changed and we have people working for us living miles away from our base in Bedfordshire. This, coupled with our hybrid ways of working, has worked well and we have got some new talent into the organisation that just wouldn't have been feasible as an option previously."
A product manager working for a cyber security specialist shares this optimism. She says her employers have doubled the size of the organisation over the last six months, with many roles being filled by people from different ethnicities, by women and also by individuals like herself who live rurally. She doubts whether she would have been seriously considered for her job in the pre-hybrid era. However, she does raise one problem that has occurred within her technical team: if everyone is working remotely, one company feels much the same as another.
"A more recent hire left after a brief time. They didn't feel really knitted into the company. If you don't feel integral to the company, you don't appreciate the difference between working for this company as opposed to another company down the road. The longer-standing employees feel that there's definitely a difference. Technical people are spread further apart than sales teams and I think it's harder for them to really feel like part of the team and they have experienced higher attrition as a result."
A related concern that has been expressed over hybrid working and its impact on diversity is that it will lead to a two-tier system that could end up resulting in a less diverse workforce, particularly towards the top end of organisations. For example, late last year, Catherine Mann, policy maker at Bank of England, raised her concerns that women would be left behind by hybrid working as their male colleagues return to the office.
Does this really apply to the technology sector? The upper echelons of technology are still predominantly the realm of white men. It's genuinely difficult to see how greater levels of remote working could make boardrooms less diverse than they already are. Furthermore, as Computing set out last year, the problem in this scenario isn't the hybrid working. It's a much wider cultural issue.
Corporate culture is paramount in determining whether an organisation has willingly embraced the opportunities for greater diversity, or has been reluctantly dragged there by the pandemic and the tightest labour market in decades. If it's the latter, the lack of genuine support for remote working will make building a diverse organisation more difficult.
However, with the right culture in place, hybrid working has an enormous amount of potential to increase the diversity of technology organisations, despite some of the challenges of ensuring that geographically remote employees are heard and included. Melissa Werry acknowledges that these challenges exist and sets out some of the ways that her organisation overcomes them.
"I guess what I have learnt as a leader in terms inclusivity is that it's harder work than when you are all in one physical space, and the importance of constantly finding ways to engage so everyone feels part of a team. This is especially true for new starters, who have a very different experience from the times where you would have had a walk round the office and introduction to everyone.
"For my direct reports we meet weekly, we then have one-to-ones monthly and days out booked to our wonderful reserves network to see what else goes on in the organisation. I also meet quarterly with everyone in the Tech Service Department over Teams, and we have a regular social call on a Friday where we chat about plans for what we are doing at the weekend. This all helps everyone feel connected."
Attrition rates in technology are high, and there's a great deal riding on the extent to which hybrid working affects diversity. Tech can and should be leading the way in showing that hybrid working can bring about the diverse and inclusive workplaces that younger employees, in particular, value so highly.
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