Case Study Hybrid Working
As you would expect from the nature of our work, we have a diverse range of roles and working arrangements from people who spend all their time in our active facilities, through to those who do some lab/facility-based work and some office-based work, to others who are purely office-based (in pre-Covid times).
Adjusting to Covid lockdown arrangements has presented different challenges for different people. The lockdowns did highlight the potential benefits of homeworking: facility-based people reported that the reduction in facility-wide footfall was a positive in terms of helping to reduce any chances of workplace transmission and many (although not all) of our office-based people found positives in working from home. The result was an effective year of delivery for NNL to our customers, even in these trying times.
Like many businesses seeking to learn from this experience, we have decided to capitalise on these insights and so have developed an adaptable hybrid-working approach. This is aimed at giving (as far as is reasonably practicable within the context of their role) all our people the balance they prefer between being in our facilities/offices or at home. We want to ensure that they can combine these benefits in a way that works best for them in the context of their teams. We have set out a principles-based approach to considering the balance appropriate team-by-team, with the decision sitting with those who understand their roles best, whilst maintaining a high-level overview to ensure the offering is equitably embedded. We believe this will allow us to find a balance that delivers benefits through greater adaptability and agility; improved work-life balance; reduced distractions and thus increased productivity in delivering nuclear science to benefit society.
We are currently refurbishing some of our facilities to make them appropriate for these new ways of working as well as our increasing headcount. We know that one of the key reasons people wish to visit the office is to interact with their teams, so we are introducing more meeting spaces and allowing for desks to be grouped in teams whilst still enabling sharing of the space. These works will be completed in 2022 and our new hybrid-working arrangements will be enacted then, by which time we hope that Covid will be in abeyance. However, the safety of our people remains our top priority, so we will continue to take a cautious approach to returning to the workplace.
"The result was an effective year of delivery for NNL to our customers, even in these trying times."
