EXCLUSIVE: “Where The Heart Is” – Howard Moore, Mobiquity; Laura Cole, Standard Chartered Bank and Jessie Danyi, Pleo in ‘The Paytech Magazine’

Working from home has touched all industries and sectors. Howard Moore from Mobiquity discusses the implications for payments with Standard Chartered Bank’s Laura Cole and Jessie Danyi from Pleo.

The work-from-home (WFH) movement is more than just a temporary side effect of the pandemic. It’s also a reflection of the transformative power of technology and the way the internet and mobile communication have been redefining work culture for many years. Indeed, tech was changing payment practices and roles long before COVID-19 accelerated digitisation and made remote working a necessity.

But now there is a new dimension to digital progress, spurred on by the pandemic and the development of the so-called ‘metaverse’, where everything is potentially digital, and detached from, though enabling, physical reality and experience. So, what might this mean for financial services, the world of payments and the army of employees who make them happen, in the near future? And will the latest technology and shifts in work practices bring risks as well as benefits?

As senior director of digital banking at digital consultancy Mobiquity, and a designer of immersive digital experiences, Howard Moore is well-qualified to comment on such trends and work culture.

“There is a human-centric perspective to everything we do at Mobiquity,” says Moore. “The challenge over the last two years, across all countries, has certainly been about people in a changing workplace. Everyone has had to work in restricted ways and obey government regulations. That has meant working fully remote, hybrid, or still fully within the workplace where essential.”

Laura Cole, head of HR for UK and Europe at Standard Chartered Bank, is equally committed to human-centred design. It’s a role she has recently taken on, with a particular focus on hybrid working and mapping employee journeys with the latest design techniques.

“I think the implementation of hybrid working has been a bit mixed across different geographies,” says Cole. “Government guidelines have varied, depending on the market concerned. Because Standard Chartered is in a lot of emerging markets, we’ve seen challenges such as internet speed for people working at home. There are also cultural differences that impact working from home as a concept.”

Cole says that in non-European markets, such as Asia, and particularly countries like Hong Kong and Singapore, people typically live in smaller accommodation, often as part of multi-generational  families, which presents additional challenges for would-be home workers. She adds that, in Hong Kong, people like going into the office because it allows them to escape the confines of home life. In her position as head of people at Pleo, which provides smart company cards for businesses across Europe, Jessie Danyi also has a strong focus on the workplace.

“Despite the terrible situation caused by the pandemic, we’ve had some refreshing developments with hybrid working,” says Danyi. “Pleo has always worked hybrid, so it’s been an easy step for some workers to go remote full-time, doing their normal thing, while others remain on-site. If you already have this type of culture, it’s easier to extend it. From what I’ve seen, people are comfortable working from home; they can stay close to their families and gain additional intimacy and quality of life. So, some good has come from a terrible situation.”

Now that COVID-19 restrictions are easing for many, will we see a return to the office? Cole believes it depends on the experience of enforced homeworking since 2020 and how company culture and hybrid models were evolving pre-pandemic.

“Many organisations had no experience of hybrid pre-pandemic,” says Cole. “Their culture was based on face-to-face working, four or five days a week. We’ve now had this universal experiment, thanks to COVID, but it’s not necessarily ingrained for some organisations, as the ‘presenteeism’ culture has deep roots in banking, which means it can be a challenge to depart from tradition. We need to make the workspace different, to reflect hybrid working.”

Cole says there is plenty of research on this topic and cites Lynda Gratton, from the London Business School, who says work needs to be more purposeful and that, for hybrid to be successful, firms must use space differently and encourage people to come into the office to collaborate and connect in ways that can’t be duplicated when working from home. That highlights the need, of course, to have the right technology, adds Cole.

“If you don’t have the right infrastructure, it will be a barrier to hybrid working. What’s happening now is that a lot of employees are saying that the technology actually works better at home because, for example, they might have better internet connections, and they can use different tools to the ones in the office.”

From a user perspective there are plusses, but the IT managers, particularly in sensitive areas like payments, there are critical issues around security. Work activities that take place outside a regular office environment, and thus beyond an organisation’s normal security infrastructure, are vulnerable to data breaches and cyberattacks. This has. been amply demonstrated during the pandemic, with cybercriminals taking full advantage of weaker security due to different work practices and routines.

“New technologies and work practices must not place an organisation and its customers at risk,” says Moore. “When we look at the banking sector, which is heavily regulated, there are plenty of security issues. Information access and transfer is more complex and challenging when people work remotely, or when they are in different locations in a hybrid setup.

“It’s a physical and integration challenge as well as a security one, as you must ensure that everyone is working in an environment that allows them to thrive.”

Like Cole, Moore says change is an intellectual challenge for banks. Despite the digital revolution, he says banks were still wedded to presenteeism in the early 2000s because managers wanted their staff in front of them, and this culture may persist even if times and technology have changed.

“Another consideration is meeting equity,” says Danyi. “By that I mean the difference when people are not all in the same room. We are used to having important meetings together, in one place, where people could look each other in the eye and pick up on body language. But now, if you have an important meeting, with people calling in from separate locations, it’s a different experience.

“You must ensure the meeting is conducted on equal terms if people are not seated round the same table.

“So the question, now, is how do you create meeting equity? I think it’s about design. You must design for active participation so that the more introverted participants won’t feel even more distanced and separate because they are joining remotely. You must draw them in, make them active members of the conversation and gain their valuable input. Another thing to overcome is that if you don’t see people in person that often, and water-cooler conversations are no longer a given for everyone, it’s harder to know what’s going on and to have office transparency.”

“I agree about the importance of transparency,” says Moore. “Notwithstanding the other issues, this is what determines the success or failure of hybrid working. From a cultural and infrastructure perspective, transparency is critical and people will be quick to say what is and isn’t working. And when you talk about meeting equity, it can become very emotive if people are only experiencing things virtually, which then leads to the debate about the metaverse and the merits of digital realities.”

If digital connectivity makes hybrid possible, the next technology twist may well be the metaverse. Still more concept than reality, this could have a profound effect on the way people interact on every level, in and out of work. It includes technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, and could move work practices and payments deeper into the digital world. Imagine headset-wearing meeting participants – or players in a financial or payment transaction – being able to sit around a table with one another, in a 3D reality which feels almost as though they were all really there.

“Technology developments require behavioural adjustments,” says Danyi. “As humans, we’re all trying to connect and find meaning, but the way we’re used to connecting is changing. When we work with people digitally, we want the same trusted connections, but the etiquette may be different. For example, is it right to ask someone to activate their camera?”

When it comes to productivity, Cole says there is evidence that working at home brings gains, but they must be balanced with the negatives.

“We now have data that says hybrid approaches are good for productivity and flexibility,” says Cole. “A lot of our research, conducted internally over the last couple of years, underlines that employees like flexibility and that if you want to attract and retain great talent, you need to provide a flexible work environment. It’s not a nice-to-have anymore; it’s an expectation.”

Moore says that attracting high-calibre staff will be a big issue in 2022. “

We’re facing a war for talent in our sector,” he says. “It’s been a growing concern in banking for a while, as people are being drawn to cooler tech industries. With a hybrid work setup, we can widen the potential talent pool if we attract people through flexibility, through the hybrid approach, then we’ll have a great advantage in the war for talent this year.”

However, it will be difficult to compete against the United States, observes Danyi.

“If you consider starting salaries in Silicon Valley, you’re looking at between $100,000 and $120,000 a year. Those are unrealistic figures in Europe.“

Wherever staff are based, Cole admits that some functions and roles are not ideal for flexible working. For example, even with video technology, a branch teller would find it difficult to serve customers from home. Nonetheless, she says that most knowledge-based workers should be able to work flexibly, and organisations that don’t offer this option will struggle to attract and retain the best people.

“Research shows that employers are beginning to think about using office space differently,” says Cole. “Space may be reconfigured, rather than reduced, to encourage better connections and  collaboration for those times when hybrid workers are in the office. Moreover, some organisations are focussing on wellbeing, addressing the social elements of office life in the new work culture.”

Sustainability may not spring to mind as an immediate concern if people are working remotely, but if the war for talent means employees are recruited from all over the world, they would probably be required to travel for occasional physical meetings. That means more global travel and bigger carbon footprints. Equally, working from home would mean a big rise in energy consumption, given premises are often still powered, even when their staff aren’t there.

“From a sustainability angle, people may be commuting less day-to-day,” says Cole, “but it means they are using energy at home: heating, air-con and lighting are all adding to their carbon footprint. So, it’s going to be hard for organisations to measure the sustainability impact and find the right balance.”

This applies to office space as well, says Moore.

“I was in the City of London yesterday for a face-to-face meeting. I noticed there were a number of offices with lights on, but there was nobody in the open-plan space; so everything was running, using resources, while people were working remotely. From a sustainability viewpoint, that’s the worst of both worlds: people working at home draining energy, and near-empty offices draining energy.”

Moore adds that we are at a point where sustainability and hybrid working aren’t necessarily compatible, so we need to introduce sustainable goals to make the new work culture succeed environmentally as well as economically. He says those goals should be part of company values and be included in hybrid and remote working guidelines. Although hybrid working is now established, fully remote will probably never happen, says Cole.

“When we’ve done surveys, less than five per cent of people were in favour of working full-time at home,” she says. “Humans are wired for connection, and if you take the human connection away entirely, you create an emotional void as well as a physical gap. We need to meet our colleagues or business stakeholders face-to-face some of the time.”

Moore agrees that face-to-face communication must not be eliminated. While he thinks high-quality virtual connections in the metaverse could play a role one day, he says they are only ever a substitute for real human contact.

“We’ve been exploring the concept,” says Moore. “People are excited about the possibility of holding meetings in the metaverse. But what you’ll have is avatars in meeting rooms, not actual people. I’m more interested in augmented reality where participants can join a meeting on equal terms and the human element is retained.”

Pre-pandemic, no one in payments would have believed working from home for most staff was possible; it’s surely a small leap of imagination to see their avatars in the office!

This article was published in The Paytech Magazine #11, Page 26-27