Work It Podcast: For flexi-work to succeed, leaders need to walk the talk

Employers now have to consider staff requests around flexible work arrangements. But what are reasonable requests and can managers avoid bias in decision making?

Mukul Anand, head of HR in HSBC Singapore, talks about how companies can better serve their staff’s needs.

Jump to these key moments:

• 3:46 Flexi-work becoming mainstream
• 8:06 Reasonable vs unreasonable requests
• 12:19 Leaders as role models for flexi-work
• 16:24 Job sharing
• 23:46 AMA: Am I victim of workplace bullying?

Here's an excerpt from the conversation: 

Tiffany Ang:

I want to talk a bit about this flexible working communications toolkit. I mean, that term jumped out to me. What exactly is in this toolkit and how do you get everyone to be on board with it? 

Mukul Anand:

I think the key there is that when people came back to work after COVID, we never underestimated the challenge which managers may have had to decide where they should allow what because we were trying to find the right balance, what works for our employees, but also what works for our customers and other colleagues.

So when I decide about hybrid what works for me, that cannot be the only way I look at hybrid what works for me, I also have to keep in mind what works for people around me. And what works for my customers, because the customer behavior, also during COVID, everyone was interacting over zoom calls, but then maybe the customers want to meet the bankers face to face.

So that is where we have given tools to managers, where they use that to determine what is the right balance to achieve in certain roles, and it also gives them confidence that they will not be alleged that you are biased, or you are doing something else for someone else and something else for me. So it's important for them to have some consistent kind of guidelines. 

Tiffany:

I mean, that's the tricky thing, right? What is a reasonable or unreasonable request? 

Mukul:

So I talked about outcome focus. That's really important, that if you're able to get the right outcome for the client and for the bank, then we can be very flexible in terms of the arrangement or how you want to approach certain things.

What we need to be aware that in multinational organisations like HSBC, we have a lot of international clients, so the interaction with clients, anyway happens through various channels. Sometimes you fly down to meet the clients. Sometimes you do it over Zoom or telephone or email etc. So I think that is something which has always existed in a multinational organisation.

But we do encourage our employees to also think about their colleagues. And we try to categorise certain roles. There are certain roles wherein flexible working is not achievable to the same extent as most of the other roles, right? You look at trading jobs. You look at jobs which are in branches, which are dependent on physical interaction.

So in those kind of roles, I think the requirement is different, but employees do have a choice that if they want to adopt a certain kind of work pattern and only that works for them, then they look at roles which actually support that kind of work pattern.