HMRC Chief People Officer Esther Wallington joined a panel discussion with FDA General Secretary Dave Penman to take members’ questions and discuss the future work of the department, covering returning to workplaces and increased flexible working.

During the session, which was part of the ARC (FDA’s section for members in HMRC) AGM, Wallington reflected that she thought her department was “in a really good position when we went into the lockdown”, due to the fact it had already “spent quite a lot of time thinking about smarter ways of working” and “understanding how we could introduce more choice into how and where people do their work across the organisation”.

“We had the advantage of really high-quality technology so a lot of us had mobile devices already that we could use when we moved to work from home and we were quickly able to get the network capacity up so that we could carry on working effectively. And I think all of that stood us in really good stead as we went into working in these quite unusual ways,” she explained.

Penman agreed with her assessment, telling members that he thought HMRC was “one of the best if not the best performing organisation on this sort of thing”, praising the work the department had done pre-pandemic around flexible working and introducing the technology to facilitate this.

“They already had a culture that was embracing that kind of hybrid model of working,” he said. “All of that I think put them in a much stronger position when it came to transforming their organisation but, what we have to recognise, whether you were in a strong position or not it’s extraordinary how the civil service and HMRC in particular performed at that point. To go from essentially 95% office-based to 95% home-based, transforming an entire organisation, and then have to deal with the consequences of the health and economic emergency, and the particular role of HMRC, is just absolutely extraordinary.”

However, despite the “absolutely incredible things” HMRC has achieved since the pandemic started, Wallington said “we shouldn’t base everything, all of our decisions for the future, on how we’ve been working over the last year”. In her mind, because “it’s been such an unusual year”, it will make it difficult to “to understand what the long-term impact might be” for people working remotely.

“To some people it’s been a really really positive experience and to some individuals it’s been a really difficult experience and, of course, all the experience has been overlayed with the realities of a pandemic and how it’s affected us personally, things like home schooling. And so, trying to understand what this period tells us about a future period is actually quite difficult.”

The FDA General Secretary is also conscious that “that what we’re going to face going forward is going to be different”.

“It’s a very different world when you’ve got some people in the office and some people not,” he explained. “And it’s quite clear from most of the academic research that’s been done elsewhere, and the work that employers are doing with civil servants and the work that we’ve done, that lots of people want to embrace that hybrid working.”

Despite these challenges, he is “really optimistic” about this moving forward because, in Penman’s eyes, “there’s a real correlation there between what employees want, in terms of flexibility” and “what employers want and recognise is good”.

“I’ve talked about this being this ‘quiet industrial revolution’ and I think it really is,” he added. “We’re not just talking about HMRC or the civil service, we’re talking about millions and possibly tens of millions of workers transforming how they work in a way that, probably since the introduction of IT, we haven’t seen such a large revolution in working practices and that’s going to take time to get right because it’s going to be very different from the last 18 months.”

Wallington is very aware of this shift and thinks the key will be balancing “how we make best use of offices but also retain an element of that personal choice”, including those who prefer to work in offices with their teams.

“While we might all have personal choices, we also have a team and a customer and for as long as we have some members of our team who want to spend time in person with others, other team members should respect that and so expect to share some of their time in person with others,” she explained.

Ultimately, her view is that a lot of this will depend on leaders in HMRC making sure they are “making the right choices and making decisions based on the information that we’ve got in front of us”, to be as inclusive as possible to different staff needs.

“There’s lots of really positive things we can do to support inclusion and most of that is just about being really mindful and asking people what the experience is like as we step through this. Some things we won’t know until we start working in this way for quite a long period of time.”