Summary
In this CHRO Space episode Emma Blaney, global HR and CSR director at Euromonitor International, explains how the organisation designed and implemented a global hybrid working model built around five clear pillars.
Emma shares why Euromonitor chose to go beyond standard hybrid policies, how the five pillars balance flexibility with productivity, and what the organisation learned by trialling new ways of working before making them permanent.
The conversation explores core hours, meeting-free Fridays, working from anywhere, global consistency, and the cultural and wellbeing challenges that emerged during remote working, particularly for new starters and managers.
Emma also outlines three practical lessons for HR leaders implementing hybrid working, including why involving employees directly, avoiding assumptions, and being willing to test and adapt policies are critical to making hybrid work sustainable.
14-minute watch
What do you do when you have been ahead of the game in terms of offering employees work-life balance and flexible working only to find the global COVID-19 pandemic forcing your competitors to catch up? Why, you must reinvent your model again to keep ahead of that curve and ensure you are the employer of choice in your sector.
In this video Blaney shares her tips for setting up a hybrid working policy, why meeting-free Fridays is her personal favourite of the five pillars that underpin the policy – and reveals which pillar has become the most popular with employees.
About Emma Blaney
Emma Blaney is the global HR and CSR director at Euromonitor International, a leading independent provider of strategic market research. Emma is responsible for the people agenda for 1,500 employees based in 15 Countries across the globe.
Blaney and her team focus on attracting, developing and retaining key talent in an increasingly competitive market. As a member of the global leadership team Blaney and her colleagues create and imbed initiatives to improve employee engagement.
Over the last 16 months a key focus has been supporting employees through the pandemic alongside identifying initiatives to ensure that Euromonitor continues to adopt market leading flexible working practices.
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Transcript
Why Euromonitor redesigned its hybrid working model
So at Euromonitor we've adopted five pillars towards our new hybrid working model. We've always been ahead of the curve in terms of work-life balance and flexibility. However, the pandemic meant that some of our competitors werestarting to catch up with this a little. So it was really important as a business that we continue to be ahead of competition and doing things which were actually moving forwards rather than just doing the same as others.
The five pillars behind Euromonitor’s approach to hybrid work
We have five pillars within our new policy. The first one is that all employees, regardless of role, can work from home two or three days a week. We truly believe that having that balance between home and in the office is a better balance because we can divide the types of activities which are more conducive to the environment which we're in.
How core hours, flexibility and focus time support productivity
The second pillar is around adoption of our core hours. We've always had core hours of 10am til 4pm, which means people have been able to choose their working hours outside of that. We've reduced that to 11am till 3pm. Quite a lotof that thinking was because significantly more employees were working from home and many of those employees are parents and the ability to be able to finish at 3pm makes a significant difference in terms of them being able to balance their work with their parenting responsibilities. What that means is that we will only put internal meetings in betweenthose core hours of 11am to 3pm.
Those are the only hours which we need people to be available and people can do their other hours in the day at any time of the day which best suits them. We all have a preferred working mode. I personally work much better very early in the morning and then I have a slump later. Other people have the reverse of that. So people can choose to work at times which work better for them either personally or simply due to when we have our varying energy levels in theday.
The third pillar we have is Summer Fridays. So for two months of the year it means we're all able to kick off early on a Friday. We always place it according to the main school holiday of the location.
So the Northern hemisphere is that July/August time of the year, and our Southern hemisphere offices are taking advantage of that between December and February, depending on when their school holidays hit. It is an opportunityfor people to really be able to start their weekends early and just be able to feel as though they have a little bit moretime to refresh and extend their weekends.
Our fourth pillar, which I have to say is my personal favourite (we trialled it during the pandemic and it was so successful it's now a permanent policy), is meeting-free Fridays. What this means is we will not have any internal meetings on Fridays. People still get in contact with clients, we still speak to our customers, however, internal meetings don't take place on Fridays. The way in which this works is we very much drive it from the top, so the leadership team are absolutely spearheading this as an initiative. And again, it was just in response to the fact that when we all moved to working from home a lot more, we found that we were spending disproportionate amounts of time in meetings.
We're spending disproportionate amounts of times on Teams calls and it’s quite difficult and it's quite relentless to be working in that environment five days a week. So we felt it was important on a Friday that people could go to theirworkplace and have a free day in which they could really think about spending time on longer-term projects, projects which need a little bit more concentration without this constant interruption and need to attend calls on an ongoingbasis.
And then the fifth pillar of our new flexible working, we call it working from anywhere, which means we allow employees to work from anywhere in the world for 15 days a year. So it means that people who have friends and familyoverseas are able to spend more time with those friends or family. Alternatively, people are simply able to extend a holiday, spend longer in that location and just work some days from there. Because of the restrictions on travel at the moment people aren't extending business trips.
However, we would hope and expect that in the future, when people go on business trips to interesting locations, it will give them the opportunity to extend their time in those locations without having to use all annual leave for thatadditional time when they're overseas. It's probably been the most popular of the new benefits across the employee group as a whole and it's already been extensively used by a number of people.
How we started our move to hybrid working
So we started with our employee engagement survey. It's a survey, which we run on an annual basis anyway and whatwe were able to identify was that actually in the area of work-life balance, where we had always come out very well, itslipped a little because people were comparing our offering to the offering of others. And it was almost our pre COVID offering with the post COVID offering of other organisations, which really made us focus on, okay, we need to stay ahead of the game here. What can we do to make sure that we continue to be seen as a market leader in terms of work-life balance?
What we then did is we engaged one of our own consulting groups. We have a consulting arm to our business who arenormally looking at consumer trends. So we got on board one of our quite senior people within our consulting group who then engaged with 15 individual, on-the-ground analysts, one in each of our locations, who gathered intelligence and gathered data, a combination of whatour competitors were doing, but also what the market was talking about. So we had a report given to us through our consulting group, which spoke about the types of benefits which were being looked at across businesses, which weresimilar to us in our locations.
What was quite important to us though, is that we had a single offering for all our staff, regardless of location. So whilst it was quite an education for some people in our APAC offices to try and understand what these Summer Fridays were, for example, whereas in the Chicago office it was a very known benefit that they knew many of their friends or their colleagues or in previous workplaces they had been able to enjoy.
So some of it was about trying to adopt benefits which were already known in one location but adopting it across our whole global workforce. What we tend to find is a lot of employees who work for us speak about enjoying working for us because we're a global business and because they're treated as a global employee and they're not just segregated into how their location would normally work, it's a real attraction for them.
So as I say, once we had the consulting group pull together a very detailed report we looked at how we could continue to be best in class. So examples that came out of that consulting exercise, we were trying to take the gold standard ofeach of those. Of course, as a leadership team, we still had to really think about, okay, practically, how does this work for the business?
Will there be any impact on productivity? Will there be any downtime? How do we manage that process? But with the five pillars, which we came out with, we're confident that productivity will improve because employees are so engaged and they're so excited by these opportunities that they want them to work.
Why testing policies matters more than getting them perfect
The other thing which we did as well, which we always do, is we put everything on trial. So we always try things out. We're very, very transparent with employees. We told them we were doing Summer Fridays for the first time this year, and it was a trial. And therefore at the end of the summer period, when it had concluded to be a success, we then said,okay, it worked, we're going to put this in permanently now.
The employees knew as we were going through that it was a trial. So it was almost that kind of 'try before you buy' type concept of we make sure things work first and it also then gives you the ability to be a little bit more bravebecause of the fact that you do have this right to review and analyse and then look at how we can make changes.
Really great examples are the way that our different offices are looking at the working from home opportunities. Someof our offices are saying we need you in two days a week and it's these two days, others are saying come in eight days a month, you can choose your days. They're trialling different ways of working. And we would always engage with employees to make sure that anything which becomes a permanent arrangement is something that they agree was the best solution.
The cultural and wellbeing gaps exposed by remote working
If we're starting to look at where we think some of the gaps are and maybe areas that we need to focus on more than maybe we used to in the past, the group of people really that first comes to mind are new starters. And something that the last 18 months has taught us is that people that are new to the business are finding it significantly more challenging to become integrated into the business. So we've had to think very carefully about how we can enhance many of ouronline induction programmes to try and address some of the gaps which used to be filled by simply being in the officetogether.
So there's truly a piece of work to be done around ensuring that new starters to the business understand who we are, understand our culture, understand what we're about, really buying into why this is a great place to work, which weused to be able to sell so easily through people simply being in our offices and feeling the atmosphere and speaking to people across multiple divisions. So that there's that kind of group of people where we have worked very hard on trying to enhance a lot about online induction to try and fill some of those gaps which used to be satisfied by people being inthe offices together.
The other area which we've spoken about as well is our mental health first aid champion network. We very quickly identified that when people are remote it's much easier for them to hide, I guess in a way, how they're feeling andmanagers are only identifying it at a much later stage than they would have done previously.
So as part of the training we've really had to build into managers is asking questions around, well, how are you? And itsounds like such a straightforward and simple question to ask but I think because we were in such a routine of having Teams calls and having conversations about product and about process, we forgot that the human element of being a manager is so important.
So a lot of the management training and also the work of our mental health first aiders is very much driven around ensuring that managers are asking those questions about how are you - no really, how are you? Really trying to focus on if there are things which are happening that we can maybe help support them or try and maybe just alleviate some of those pressures. When somebody is in the office and they're feeling pressurised from work it's very easy to pick up on that very quickly. It's very easy for a team around them to all jump in and help out.
When somebody is feeling slightly overwhelmed from work when then they're sitting at home that support network simply isn't there. So we need to be asking deeper questions to make sure that people are feeling that they have that same level of support.
Three steps to implementing hybrid working
In looking at the three steps to implementing hybrid, I think the first one has to be it's actually not about listening to employees it's about getting employees involved, because it's one thing to listen to employees but it's far more powerful to actually bring them in and get them truly involved in kind of driving the ideas around what matters to them. But ultimately what you're trying to do is you're really trying to ensure that you create a policy that fits your employee base the best way. And that isn't necessarily something that works for another organisation. It's somethingwhich is unique to you.
So get people in but get them involved, get them actively involved, ask them to do some work on it because that way they'll be far more, they will feel empowered, but also they then have a vested interest in making it work because it wastheir idea. The second piece would be really don't generalise.
A few times I've had people come up to me and they feel as though certain policies have been put in place just for certain groups of people. It's too easy to assume that it's the working parents that want to finish at three when they work from home and that's just not the case.
So really try not to generalise, try not to think about, well, this group of people will want this, make sure that whatever you're offering you offer it to everybody, which is exactly why we have a global policy and regardless of location, you will have the opportunity to be involved in all the five pillars of our working practices.
We haven't segregated different groups of people to benefit from different areas. And then finally, be brave. Don't be scared to try it, tell people you're trying it. Don't be scared to try something. Talk quite candidly about we're going to give Summer Fridays a go this year, we're going to measure it, we're going to see how it works and if it's a success then that will be what we do going forward. Because I think far too often we're too nervous to try something because wethink it's going to create a permanent change in our relationship. You just need to be honest with employees and say, we really think this will work. We really want it to work. We're going to try it and if it is a success, and this is how we're measuring it, then this will become permanent. And I think if you can just be a little bit brave in some of those ideas, what you would always find is employees want this to work and will do everything within their power to make itwork.
Working for an organisation, in which we're very privileged to have some very intelligent people working for us, people want to work for us, they will really try to do everything to make this flexibility work because they also want it. They can see it benefits the business. They can see it benefits them. They can see it benefits attracting new talent. They can see it benefits retaining talent and for all those reasons we need to just sometimes step outside of our comfort zone, be brave, try something new. Tell people it's a trial and then if it's successful then you can embed it into your normal way of working going forward.
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