28 May 2021

Report: Healthy Hybrid Working

As businesses start to adjust to another shift in working patterns, Vitality, in partnership with the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, have taken the opportunity to take stock of the health impacts of lockdown, review what lessons can be learnt and look at ways to help businesses reset their approach to health and wellbeing to create a new ‘healthy hybrid’ working environment.

Based on new research amongst homeworkers of their experiences during the third lockdown, wellbeing data from the Vitality Programme, interviews with CEOs and business leaders and extensive RSA analysis of key research relating to workplace trends, this report concludes with a 10-point Blueprint for Business. The Blueprint details key recommendations that can help set businesses on a path to addressing health and wellbeing in the workplace in a way that benefits their people, their business and ultimately, society.

Top 10 recommendations:

Establishing a ‘Healthy Hybrid’ culture requires driving inclusive engagement from the top-down.

1. Close the expectation gap with new mandates on health and wellbeing that are integrated into company risk registers and prioritised at board level.

2. Senior leaders must practise, reinforce, and normalise healthy hybrid behaviours.

3. Create ‘healthy hybrid’ feedback loops between employees and leaders.

Driving ‘Healthy Hybrid’ behaviour change through practical interventions

4. Promote inclusive productivity gains by assessing performance based on outcomes not hours.

5. Mandatory breaks and a ‘right to disconnect’ policies are needed to protect hybrid workers from burnout and level up inequalities.

6. New health and wellbeing policies must be inclusive across all work environments and focus on workers not workplaces.

7. Organisations should schedule 30 minutes a day for all employees to protect musculoskeletal health.

Sustaining ‘Healthy Hybrid’ values requires consistent reporting and accountability:

8. Effective and consistent wellbeing measurement is needed to sustain ‘healthy hybrid’ behaviours and culture.

9. Organisational structures must make it clear who is accountable for new health and wellbeing mandates, and this must be reflected in management training.

10. Organisations should track and publish data on hybrid workers’ pay and progression to prevent digital disadvantage.