When, in March 2020, Covid-19 hit, and firms instructed their staff to work from home, the expectation (of many) was that it wouldn’t be for long, and normality would resume soon.
But, as Maggie Driscoll, chief people and culture officer at cloud computing company, Blackbaud, recalls, “three weeks turned into three months, which turned into six months.” Suddenly, this was not the short stint of working from home that everyone expected.
But not only did things up-end for Blackbaud’s staff, the necessity to work from also happened to take place within Driscoll’s own first 90 days at the business.
When she applied and first interviewed for the job, the company was – like most in America – predominantly office-based, with around 2,600 staff globally.
And that was how she thought it would be.
“The first three weeks was all hands-on-deck, with lots of fast innovation around how we could continue to support customers,” she recalls.
“Performance and productivity was at an all-time high,” she adds. “At first wondered if it was a blip, because it was becoming clear that as time went on that we had to come to an important decision – whether or not to carry on this way of working, or request that everyone returns as soon as it was safe to do so.”
The decision Driscoll had to contend with, is one that has vexed many a CHRO in the last few years – with many more companies (even now), seemingly going for the nuclear option, of demanding staff return to the office, after attempts at a nice-nicely approach have failed.
“By November 2020, when we were still seeing spikes in Covid-19, we knew we had to seriously think about whether we should stay remote or not,” she says.
“At first I envisaged we would go hybrid, but as time passed, and we saw continued success from our people, we seriously started to question whether we needed to be in-person at all.”
Days-gone: When Blackbaud was office-based
The decision to go fully remote
To guide her decision-making, Driscoll says she created a workforce strategy team, and initially asked staff whether they wanted to come back to the office for five days or three days a week.
“At this point, we didn’t even ask if they wanted to be remote-only,” she says, “but the response from staff was loud and clear – that they had gotten used to being at home, in terms of helping them juggle their work and their everyday lives, and they wanted it to continue.”
Blackbaud did already have about 700 people who were remote some of the time, but what staff told Driscoll, was that if ‘everyone’ was remote, the playing field would be leveled, giving everyone an even platform from which to survive.
She says: “While many people talk about the dangers of ‘proximity bias’ occurring with remote teams [because these employees are not ‘seen’ in the office, and are therefore not given the same sort of opportunities as office-based staff], what we learned was that by everyone being remote, this possibility wouldn’t exist.”
The formal announcement to go fully-remote was made in November 2021, and while there staff can see make use of touch-point sessions, the reality is that nearly three years down the line, 95% of staff are now fully remote.
Has it worked?
“We obviously had some wellbeing considerations – but to counter this we enhanced our benefits platform, and according to our own employee survey [from March 2024], wellbeing was our third highest score – at more than 80%,” she says.
Last August, the firm launched ‘connection gatherings,’ where leaders commit to extending their visit to an office by an extra day to meet and interact with staff and there is also an expectation that staff do a days’ volunteering per year too.
“People who may not normally meet in the course of their everyday jobs are now encourage to meet face-to face at these events, and afterwards, they often start up new team pages, or groups, to stay in touch,” Discoll says.
The result is that around 45% of staff are now in at least one affinity group, and according to Driscoll, the company culture has actually improved, because she says she’s able to hire completely on “talent rather than Zip code,” which creates a higher performing and more collaborate business.
She says: “I do talk to other CHROs, and for many of them, a totally remote workforce doesn’t work. We accept that we are fortunate in that we are a SaaS company to start with – but if you’d have asked me when I first joined if we would ever have been remote only, I would have said no, so that’s an indication of just how far we come.”
She adds: “We’re in 2024 now, and people want flexibility. Companies are having to work out how they incorporate flexibility into their business models.”
RTO?
So would the company ever consider a return to office policy?
“Realistically, we wouldn’t,” she says, and when pressed about the strategies other companies are pursuing by enforcing an RTO, she has this to say:
“You have to ask whether companies that are wanting more enforced return to the office now kind of missed their window of opportunity a couple of years ago, when remote working wasn’t yet so deeply entrenched.”
She adds: “Of course, maybe we also have to ask whether companies aren’t as thriving as they once were, with people not physically coming in. So it’s a tough choice CHROs are having to make. It’s certainly one we really had to think long and hard about.”
She says: “There’s evidence out there that companies do perform better when their staff are remote; but there’s also data to say some do worse. So it’s not totally black and white.
“But what definitely muddies things, is when talent moves house, to be outside cities – simply because they were allowed to work remote. If these people are now being required to come back to the office, it’s creating conflict. These people made life decisions on a promise of being able to work remotely, and invariably they have to leave, as they can’t face doing the commute.”
How has ‘she’ adapted?
While Driscoll says fully remote works for Blackbaud – because the people they hire also want more project-based work, and are not looking for traditional organizations – a question that’s often missed is how ‘she’ herself has made the transition.
As we all know, most people get into HR because they are a ‘people’ person.
She was looking forward to being part of a business where people are all together, before things changed so suddenly. So can a people person really thrive when they only see folk on a screen?
“I was hard for me,” she admits.
“We have a computer system where I can see people’s can report their status, and if people have a green light next to their name, it means they’re free, and if I see that someone’s available, I’ll always call them for a chat!” she quips.
She adds: “I do thrive on human connections, but I have also adapted.”
“Yes, I don’t know if people are tall, or short, because I just see their face, and I often call it having my ‘funny moment’ when I do finally see someone for real and see the rest of them for the first time!
“But would we go back? No – not as it stands. Our business strategy still fits this, and our staff still want to maintain it – so that’s pretty conclusive!”