Agile and Inclusive Work: The New Normal

The way in which we organise work has a massive impact on many people’s day-to-day lives. For decades, many workplaces have favoured quite traditional approaches to work, with people regularly working in the office, Monday to Friday between 9am and 5pm. While this works for some, for others the inflexibility in how and when they work creates significant barriers to entering or progressing in work. This has been felt more acutely by those with caring responsibilities, which more often than not are women. More flexible and agile work is therefore an important part of tackling inequality in the labour market.

The Covid-19 pandemic drastically changed the way many people work and live their lives, practically overnight. We’ve seen a significant shift to home-based working, and as a result many employers are now reconsidering how they structure and organise their workplaces. Many previously cited barriers to flexible and remote working have been overcome, or perhaps were merely an issue of perception.

As this seismic and permanent change in how we organise work takes place, we have to make sure that the way we work now and in the future is agile and inclusive, so that work makes a positive contribution to equality, and does not recreate and reenforce the inequality we currently see. This means work that offers flexibility, choice and autonomy, that is focused on outcomes not time and is agile and person-centred

In 2020, we held discussions with stakeholders exploring agile and inclusive work and how this relates to wellbeing, leadership and management and fair work. We considered what lessons the pandemic experience could teach us. Our report Agile and Inclusive Work: The New Normal, brings together the key findings from these discussions and offers a number of recommendations to take this agenda forward.

Discussions about agile and inclusive work will need to be dynamic and ongoing as we continue to learn and adapt and as new technology emerges. The findings from our report provide some foundations for these discussions. What is clear is that we must foreground equality, fairness and wellbeing as equality will not happen by accident. Only by pursuing equality and inclusion as a goal in itself will we ensure that this latest transformation in the world of work delivers fairly for us all.