At the end of 2024, I was flattered to be asked by the editor of The HR Director to write a feature on Employee Value Proposition (EVP).
It really got me thinking about how much had changed since the Covid-19 pandemic, not just in terms of employee workplace location, but also in terms of legislation, regulation, workplace complexity, and employee wellbeing and fitness for work.
Even though the first documented case of Covid-19 in the UK was in January 2020, it now (to me at least) seems like a bleak and distant memory. Perhaps because – as somebody who spends most of their time living alone – lockdown felt a lot more penal. It wasn’t the fact that I was now working from home (WFH), as this was pretty much standard practice for me and many members of the herd at Elephants Don’t Forget. No, for me, it was the removal of social interaction that hit me so hard.
Covid-19 was catalytic on many levels for lots of people. The most significant and obvious factor in the workplace was the millions of people who worked in offices who were all suddenly sent home to work. Initially, everybody pulled together and there was almost a communally shared sense of “we can do this” – and then I think reality set in.
Competence drives confidence, which increases wellbeing and personal sense of worth. Competent employees are happier and more fulfilled, more loyal and more productive.
In a relatively short space of time, most commercial organisations moved to a hybrid model. Since then, social media has been abuzz with literally tens of thousands of commentators going to seemingly enormous lengths to expose the virtues of hybrid working.
From what I have read, the vast majority of comments centre around the benefits to the employee, e.g., no commuting, greater convenience, more flexibility, etc., with the inevitable final line: “I am much more productive when I am working from home.”
So powerful was this lobby that, as recent as last year, one would be hard-pressed to find a traditional “office” job that wasn’t available with hybrid working as an option. I saw one commentator suggest it was an employee’s “human right to work from home.”
In H2 2024, we started to see some very high-profile brands announce unilaterally that employees must “return to the office five days per week – or lose your job” – what I frequently hear referred to as “presenteeism”.
Social media went nuts with commentators decrying the announcements. Curiously, none of the commentators that I could see ran businesses or were responsible for the running of businesses. What started as a trickle at the beginning of 2024 is already becoming a steady stream. And I predict it won’t be long before we see a sea change and hybrid disappears off the EVP of most firms.
If one cuts through the obvious vested interest lobby, it appears that these employers have concluded that operational performance and productivity is adversely affected by hybrid and WFH. However you phrase it, these employers are concluding that employees work harder and better when in the office.
However, don’t shoot the messenger! At Elephants Don’t Forget, we still have more than 75% of our workforce working from home and have no intention of changing that. But equally, we do have some job roles where they are only available to employees prepared to work 100% from the office.
The reason being is that we know that employees who do these very challenging roles perform better when they are in an office environment. They learn more; they learn better and faster; and they are less anxious and feel better supported to do their jobs. The latter points may indeed be a driver of the former.
Interestingly, whilst the workplace was being turned upside down by lockdown and its aftermath, the workplace also got a whole lot more complicated. In the financial services space, new regulation in the form of Consumer Duty has placed considerable strain on most firms as they grapple with what many believe is nothing short of a regulator-fuelled cultural revolution.
In addition, another characteristic of Covid-19 workplace migration was that many firms doubled down on their digital journeys and invested heavily in “digital-first” contact strategies. Regardless of whether you may be a fan of self-serve technology, it is a reality in many firms today. However, one of the unintended consequences has been that the workflow that remains is, by default, more complicated and “difficult” work, i.e., the work that the bots/self-serve solutions are simply unable to handle.
And – in what is clearly not a coincidence – over the past few years, we have seen a steady decline in customer satisfaction standards in the UK. The Institute of Customer Service’s (ICS) UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI), for example, reports that customer satisfaction (CSAT) levels remain at their lowest level since 2010.
In the ICS’s January 2025 UKCSI report, they found that, whilst customers are more likely to feel that organisations’ use of technology in customer service has improved in the last year, many customers are still uncertain or cautious about it.
What’s even more telling about the current CSAT landscape is that ‘poor staff competence’ remains the third leading driver of poor satisfaction in the UK – only ‘quality or reliability of goods and services’ and ‘late delivery or slow service’ retain the top two positions.
Customer feedback from the report also informs us of the factors that are separating exceptional organisations from poor performing ones, these include: product and service quality, helpful and competent staff, ease of dealing with an organisation, and speed of service and response. All of which are practical attributes that customers are attaching an especially high-stated importance as complexity of interactions increases.
With this in mind, it will come as little surprise that the top 20 most improved organisations for CSAT in the UK – as referenced in the January 2025 report rankings table – focused on making improvements to:
- The competence and helpfulness of their employees.
- Getting ‘first time right’ right – causing fewer problems for customers.
- Improving the speed of complaint identification and resolution.
- Improving the accessibly of their contact services.
Scroll forwards four years (now entering the fifth year) since Covid-19 and we have a sector where regulation change and technology advancements has meant that the environment most employees are working in is much more complicated and stressful.
Add to this the fact that, until very recently, almost all employees will have had some sort of hybrid option, it means that the traditional help, support and learning opportunity from one’s peers is either missing entirely or, at the very least, diluted substantially.
And more recent insights into employee wellbeing and mental health gives us cause for concern. We have an estimated 875,000 workers suffering from work-related stress, depression or anxiety in the UK, resulting in 17.1 million working days lost. Poor mental wellbeing is also estimated to cost employers £45 billion annually through presenteeism, sickness, absence and staff turnover.
Additional research also illustrates that there is a widening generational divide in the workplace in relation to wellbeing and mental health, with 18-24-year-olds most likely to be absent through stress due to a high or increased workload, volume of tasks, and not being adequately supported to do their jobs.
There are also alarming signs of a breakdown in trust between employers and younger workers. The proportion of 18-24-year-olds who state they would feel comfortable opening up to a line manager about pressure and stress dropped sharply from 75% in 2024 to 56% in the past year. Fundamentally, a younger, more conscious generation of employees are throwing up their hands and leaving their employers because they simply can’t do the job they are employed to do.
It also appears to me that over the past four years, as employees have undergone perhaps the biggest macro disruption the workplace has seen since World War II, they have been slow to react – with the evidence suggesting that the reaction has been too little too late.
For sure, many firms were quick to provide employee wellbeing schemes in an effort to support their employees through what was obviously a very disruptive period of time. But many frustrated employers are reporting that, as good as these schemes are, employees aren’t using them. Probably because when an employee reaches the point where they really need help, they aren’t in the right head space to go seek it out!
My belief is that the widespread migration of roles that were 100% WFO to WFH (and hybrid) has been a key driver of increased employee wellness challenges, driven down productivity, and has been a major contributing factor as to why we have seen CSAT standards fall.
Employers likely underestimated the profound shift caused by this mass migration to WFH. This, combined with increased regulatory demands and growing complexity, necessitated significantly enhanced employee support and training. Yet, if you critically compare and contrast the Training & Competency (T&C) support a firm gave their employees in 2019 with the support they give them now, I suspect (in most cases) you will see very little material difference.
I am not talking about subject matters though. I am talking about the culture of the firm. Have they recognised just what they are asking of their employees? Have they critically assessed whether the training they provide is resulting in the required levels of employee in-role competence – and are they even measuring this datapoint? The answer in the vast majority of cases is ‘no’, they are not, and they are probably still engaged in a race to the bottom, lowest-cost, least-lost-time strategy.
Is it any wonder that employees are falling ill? Is it any wonder service standards are falling? Is it any wonder attrition is on the rise and recruitment is getting harder? Frankly, I am surprised at the resilience of most of the sector!
The tide has turned, and we are going back to the office; presenteeism is the new economic reality, regardless of whether employees who enjoy hybrid like it or not! But – and it is a very big but – this isn’t going to solve the legacy problems, like I believe some employers think. I do genuinely worry some employers are of the mindset “Get them back to the office and all will be well.”
However, it won’t all be well unless the employer makes a conscious and concerted effort to update their T&C approach BEFORE they drag employees back to the office.
In simple terms, employees need gentle, supportive, collaborative learning interventions – and continual assessment with no critical consequences. Employers need to measure in-role competence and adopt this as a transparent and welcome KPI. They need to provide wellbeing support and assessment in the flow of work, not at the point when the employee has a breakdown! Employers need to stop ticking boxes with regard to employee training, start measuring outcomes, and genuinely support their workforce.
Competence drives confidence, which increases wellbeing and personal sense of worth. Competent employees are happier and more fulfilled, more loyal and more productive.
Which is why, when asked by The HR Director, I said that the winning EVP of 2025 (and the rest of the decade) would centre around employee in-role competence improvement and meaningful, timely wellbeing assessment and support – not location, location, location.
