What Ford, a 9-to-5 workweek pioneer, is learning about hybrid work | Daily News Byte

After several setbacks and delays due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Ford Motor Co. finally began welcoming its salaried workers back to its offices earlier this month.

It also comes at the same time as a significant shift in workplace policy from the company that helped establish the traditional five-day, 40-hour work week as the norm: the initiation of its new hybrid work model in which the non-site-dependent employees can work flexibly between a Ford campus location and remotely.

Perhaps Ford has reason to believe that many of its employees will return to the office when the plan is launched. The company polled 56,000 global employees working remotely in June 2020 about their post-pandemic work preferences and 95% said they wanted a mix of remote and in-office work, while 5% said they want to be in place.

However, Ford Chief People and Employee Experience Officer Kiersten Robinson said during a virtual CNBC Work event on Wednesday that the initial results were “quite surprising.”

“When we opened our doors on April 4 to our employees to welcome them back to the workplace — those who wanted to come in — the numbers that actually went back to work were lower than we expected,” Robinson said.

While the company is “very early in the experience,” according to Robinson, Ford is still seeing signs among the recruits that they can “do highly collaborative team-based brainstorming and strategic work together .”

Here are some of the key things Ford has observed since welcoming back workers.

Because Ford has many employees with jobs that don’t allow for remote or hybrid work, Robinson said the company is “absolutely clear that the nature of the work dictates where and how the work gets done.”

“Our manufacturing plants, you can only do that work in the facility and so our focus in those locations is to make sure the work environment is as pleasant and inviting as possible, and what some of the additional tools and amenities we can provide,” he said.

That led Ford to undergo an effort to evaluate how it could improve its manufacturing facilities, looking at ways to improve worker well-being, nutrition, and even natural light in the space — “conditions that really affect the your work experience,” Robinson said.

For knowledge workers, Ford asks departments to meet with their teams and create a plan about what they need to do in 90-days, asking about key work tasks, and if how and where is the best way to do that job.

“We measure sentiment, we measure the employee experience during those 90 days, but of course, we can measure output and whether or not employees feel like they’re with that agency and that choice, they’re going to be productive as they need to,” Robinson said.

Robinson said Ford has already remodeled 33% of its facilities in southeast Michigan to “make them more conducive to collaborative hybrid work,” and it has a roadmap to continue doing that in the coming year.

Ford assumes that about 50% of its employees are in the office on any given day, but Robinson said it will test that hypothesis further in the coming months.

Ford confirmed a small workforce cut on Wednesday when it reported earnings, a net loss of $3.1 billion in the first quarter, largely due to the loss of the value of a 12% stake in the EV start-up Rivian Automotive. With its pivot to EVs, 580 US salaried employees and agency workers, mostly in engineering, were let go as part of the Ford+ turnaround plan.

The company has no plans to reduce the number of facilities it has, but rather to make the spaces as conducive as possible for hybrid work, he said.

With workers now in the office, Ford is looking at how the spaces are actually being used.

“We have very clear data around traffic patterns, the days that are most popular and we use sensors in many of our facilities to measure what types of spaces are being used and for what purpose,” said Robinson.

“There’s no perfect answer to this, other than I don’t think we can go back to how we worked pre-pandemic,” he said. “I really hope that we all embrace this as an opportunity to really rethink and rethink the evolution of work and experiment and really invest in understanding employee feedback, employee sentiment and use that to continue to refine and change the appearance of the work.”