Remote work: 'What it's done for us is really open up our talent landscape'

With the pandemic largely in the rearview mirror, many organizations are working on returning to pre-COVID-19 norms, including bringing remote workers back into the office; there are some organizations, however, that have embraced remote and hybrid working models and made it a permanent part of their business model, claiming it has become an integral piece of talent recruitment and retention.

HRD spoke with Melissa Jones, CHRO of CSAA Insurance Group, about the work-from-home and hybrid work policy the 3,500-employee company has adopted. Eighty-seven percent of CSAAs employees are now permanently working from home.

“While I'd never wish the pandemic on the world again, it really did change the way we work, and expedite what we probably eventually would get to, really leading with employee choice,” Jones said.

Remote work part of human-first culture

Before the pandemic CSAA was office-based, with employees in 26 states centered around regional offices. Less than 15% of their workforce were full-time remote, Jones said. But the pandemic introduced a new model of work that the company has run with, with no plans to return.

“What it's done for us is really open up our talent landscape. So now we have employees in 42 states and the District of Columbia and we are able to source talent from much larger markets. So not only is it helpful from an attraction perspective of employee choice, but it gives us a larger area where we can source talent.”

According to data compiled by Forbes and BambooHR, the average employee turnover rate in the U.S. is 3.8% in 2023, with 2.5% of that number due to quitting. The data also revealed that 38% of employees who quit do so in the first year of employment, and a large portion of them said it was due to job characteristics and poor work-life balance.

Employee-led HR policies most effective for retention and recruitment

Through employee engagement surveys, Jones and her team have utilized strong feedback to guide retention and engagement strategies. Employees don’t want to commute to work only to participate in video meetings in an empty office, she said, so they find other ways to connect workers with each other.

“Clearly there's a benefit of coming together for specific purposes, coming together and just being in the office, like water cooler talk, right? Some of those things, we have to replicate with technology, and we're working every day on experimenting to see what are the good reasons to bring people into the office,” said Jones.

“Even things like a simple, ‘Hey, we're having a lunch, anyone who wants to come in and socialize,’ because we know that social connection is really important for employee well being as well.”

Dedicated remote focus time helps with work-life balance

A hugely successful strategy which Jones and her team implemented is a mandatory company-wide “focus time” every Wednesday between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. Pacific Time.

This strategy has been effective in addressing the “blurred lines” between work and life that occurred during the pandemic, and continues to be an issue for remote workers whose work and home spaces overlap.

“This was a pilot for a long time before we rolled it out as a regular norm for our organization,” said Jones. The expectation is that you're still working, but you get things done like training you have to do, or focus on development, or getting to those emails or other work that you can't because you're in meetings all day long. It's been wildly successful, and something we talk about both internally and then externally as we're recruiting talent.”