It’s hard sometimes to remember that hybrid working is a two-way affair.
We read an awful lot about what workers would like, the shortcoming of legislation notionally promoting a right to request flexible working and a right to request remote working. When employers make the news, it is more often because they want to expand office mandates, to get their workers back into the offer more often.
These might be seen as both sides’ “wish lists”.
What we hear far less about is the reality of how well or otherwise hybrid arrangements are working on the ground. Until now.
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Bank of Ireland on Monday told staff bluntly that not enough of them were meeting its basic requirement that they attend in office – either in Dublin or in one of 20 hubs across the State – for a minimum of two days a week or eight days a month.
Part of the bank’s problem, at least as the Financial Services Union sees it, is that initially it left hybrid arrangements down to local management and office mandates varied widely across the organisation.
However, even in those areas where there was a recognised two-day-a-week mandate, executives at the highest level of the bank have been warning staff for several years that many were falling far short of the minimum and that failure at least to meet that level of attendance would have consequences.
Now workers have been told that bonuses and future pay rises of those who fail to turn up are at risk and that they might even face the possibility of disciplinary action.
These are not “first step” threats and it is bound to inflame a dispute that has already been sent to the Workplace Relations Commission.
The bank is far from the only office environment where minimum attendance is considered optional by staff. That the practice has persisted more or less since the end of the pandemic in many workplaces can only be placed at the door of slack management.
Flexibility only works when it applies to both sides.
Cantillon, named after Irishman Richard Cantillon who was known as the “Father of Political Economy”, is a column in which Irish Times business journalists offer analysis and comment on business and economic issues of the day.
