Ms Joanne Mangan:

I reiterate our thanks to Senator Currie for her support. She was advocating for remote work long before I joined Grow Remote. I am very disappointed she was not able to be with us today. There are many employer concerns, with good reason. We have worked in offices for over a hundred years and never got that perfect. Therefore, we cannot expect the new model of remote working to work perfectly after two years, particularly when we were implementing it in the middle of an emergency. The remote working over the past two years is not how we envisage remote working in the future. One of the most important aspects of making remote working work is careful, deliberate planning on the part of companies, with support and guidance to help them along the journey.

How can these challenges be addressed? One of the most important aspects involves what we are doing today: bringing a company like Glofox into the public arena and hearing about how it is addressing some of the challenges. Glofox and some of the other companies we talked to will hold their hands up and say they do not have all the answers yet, which means we are in a period of experimentation and transformation. The more open companies are about this, the better. Last September, Grow Remote founded an alliance called the Remote Alliance and brought together some of the companies that are in the process of transformation, including eBay, ESB, Vodafone and Liberty Insurance. The purpose was to hear from them about how they are addressing the challenges and to share solutions publicly. That is what we need to be doing over the next year or two, or even longer, as companies start testing. Really, we are still testing this model, particularly the hybrid model. It did not really exist before, or not in any systemic, procedural way. Where it existed, it may have been a one-off. We need to support companies with some of the supports I have talked about today. We need to ensure companies are given platforms and opportunities to share through organisations such as Grow Remote so that we can build a library of case studies and references and so companies can follow guidelines, playbooks and how-to guides on how to make the changes. The most important thing is to give companies an opportunity to share publicly how they are addressing these challenges.