Making remote working better after Covid

If you go by the news reports in the UK, a confused picture is emerging about work trends. While many employers are seeking a return to something approaching the pre-Covid status quo or at the very least reducing working from home, there are also reports that employers are downsizing their estate due to increased remote working. It seems as if we are still in a period of flux and everyone is still trying to find their feet.

Meanwhile, Ireland is seeking to chart a different course, with its government investing in work on local community hubs in a bid both to capitalise on the wider benefits of remote and hybrid working while also addressing some of the challenges it throws up.

Stephen Carolin is National Hub Network Programme Manager at the Western Development Commission, a regional development agency which works for the Irish Government. In 2019 he and a colleague started to develop a virtual network of all the community hubs in the western region, from Donegal to Derry, Ireland’s so-called Atlantic Economic Corridor. At the time there was no information about the hubs, for instance, how many there were and how they were doing. Carolin admits that at the beginning it was thought that there were 40 or 50 hubs. They found that there were in fact 114. He and his colleague classified them into different types in order to understand them better.

The project found a wide variety of hubs. Some were doing well economically, benefiting from various funding programmes, while others were treading water and needed more sustainable business models. “It was a bit of a Wild West,” says Carolin. 

By bringing the hubs together in one network the idea was that the smaller ones could learn from larger hubs and the larger ones might be encouraged to extend out of the cities where they tended to be based into more rural areas. Experts point to levelling up rural areas as one of the wider benefits of community hubs. Other benefits include addressing the digital divide by ensuring everyone has access to good broadband, promoting community activities and business development, cutting the carbon footprint associated with community and addressing the loneliness linked with remote working.

Through the network Carolin and his colleague set up roundtables with stakeholders and hub managers, facilitated by external consultants, and pulled together a strategic plan to address areas such as infrastructure, including digital infrastructure, knowledge sharing and promotion and marketing. 

A national initiative

The Irish government changed in early 2020 and the new Minister for Rural and Community Development, Heather Humphreys, decided to roll the initiative out nationally. Several government departments, from enterprise to rural and community development and art and sport are now involved.

The initiative is now targeting 400 community hubs and bringing them together on the Connected Hubs platform where they can advertise what they do and the facilities they have and share their experiences. So far 319 have joined the platform. 

Carolin says the project is unique in Europe and possibly internationally. “There are other co-working networks, but not any that I know of that bring them all together to scale and learn from each other,” he says. 

The network is branching out into the education space shortly, with tertiary level courses being run through the network platform. Hub managers have already been trained in social media marketing as part of a digital technology pilot programme. Some hubs also have artists in residence to promote local artists. The possibilities are broad and innovation is encouraged through fortnightly sessions with hub managers. 

A national hub strategy is due to go before the Irish Cabinet in November and, if successful, the initiative could win more funding. It will be backed up by a soon-to-be-published economic impact assessment which will cover areas such as carbon emission reductions. Carolin notes that such an assessment has only become possible since Covid. A community impact assessment is also being prepared on hubs in rural areas.

In addition, large employers are being courted. The hubs could help them to recruit from a wider talent pool, providing a third option between head office and home. Carolin says the network is also launching a marketplace in the next two months which will give companies the ability to sell products such as Zoom licences to businesses at special rates. 

He agrees that Covid has been a major factor in propelling the hubs forward and says the possibilities are enormous, for instance, for people with caring responsibilities. 

Co-working hubs in rural areas

Dr Ann O’Brien is a post doctoral researcher in business information systems at the University of Galway. She has been researching the fall-out from Covid in Ireland. Over the last year she has been talking to people who have been using co-working hubs in rural areas to ascertain their social and community impact. The qualitative research she has conducted and which will be published in a co-authored paper shortly is in part a response to the increase in people moving to the countryside during the pandemic to save on housing costs. Dr O’Brien’s work aims to find out what is happening on the ground in the Western Development region and to discover if there are ways to make remote working work better.

She found a range of people using hubs, from start-up businesses to established ones working internationally. Some of the people in the hubs had worked remotely long before the pandemic and had identified challenges such as isolation and lack of structure which hubs helped to address.  Some were young people who wanted the structure that working from their parents’ homes didn’t offer during the pandemic. Others used hubs to socialise one or two days a week. 

Community hubs are very diverse – some are enterprise-oriented with a certain cachet and a world class digital infrastructure while others are tiny, operating in former high street banks or supermarkets. Some have childcare facilities built in. Some specialise in helping disadvantaged groups. For Dr O’Brien the most successful rural hubs have identified local need and work closely with their local council. Often they draw on hub champions, who include an existing pool of remote workers  who are seen as a resource because of their knowledge of the challenges of this kind of working. 

Dr O’Brien says large employers are seeking to find the best mix between remote working and working in an HQ, but challenges remain. These include private and security if employees are hot desking with others from different organisations. Some hubs are trying to get around that by reconfiguring the space they offer, but they need to be flexible enough to adapt to changing needs.

Dr O’Brien says that one thing became very clear in her research: the need for leaders with vision. 

Innovation

The focus of the work in Ireland around community hubs is an interesting one in the light of post-Covid developments. And there is interest across Europe.  The aim is not to run away from the Covid experience, but to innovate and find new ways of working that connect several different policy challenges. 

This is supported by other initiatives, including the organisation Grow Remote, a grassroots non-profit organisation which provides educational resources to people seeking to work remotely or to manage remote workers. For parents it could open up new possibilities, particularly for those who want to be closer to their children and often face having to give up their career and take up a low paid local job which doesn’t draw on their skills. It’s certainly something to watch.

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