Hybrid work arrangements are often touted as the best of both worlds, but even they can present some challenges for employees.
That’s why financial services company Prudential Financial is trying to give its hybrid employees even more flexibility. The majority of the company’s roughly 13,000 US-based corporate employees work in one of its 145 offices two to three days a week. But in January 2024, the Newark, New Jersey-headquartered firm soft launched its Work from Anywhere (WFA) program, allowing these employees to work from any location for four weeks a year.
“We are a company and a culture of respect and inclusion, and this flexibility, specifically in ensuring that our employees were feeling supported as they were coming back to work, was really important to us,” Nya Patel, the company’s VP of culture and inclusion, told HR Brew.
The pilot program. In anticipation of its consistent hybrid work policy at the start of 2024, Patel said Prudential wanted to give its employees something in return, and landed on flexibility.
“We started this program as a pilot last year, as we thought about giving that flexibility to our employees,” Patel said.
When employees want to take advantage of the program, they discuss it with their managers in their one-on-one meetings. Patel said she hopes to eventually adopt a formal request process, like that which the company uses for PTO and volunteer days.
How it’s going. Some employees have tacked a WFA week onto their PTO to maximize flexibility. Patel said she’s done this herself: After traveling to Costa Rica last year to vacation and volunteer at an animal rescue, she used a WFA week to visit family in Texas on her way home to New Jersey.
Kate McKeon, a director of culture and inclusion at Prudential, utilized WFA in January alongside two of her colleagues, Sam O’Mara, a talent management manager, and Rosauri Rodriguez, an inclusive recruitment manager. The three, who are based on the East Coast, convened in San Diego, California for two weeks of coworking, during which they joined meetings by the beach and bonded over after-work walks with O’Mara’s dogs.
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“Being in a different setting and place allowed us to have more of those conversations of being creative and thinking about things differently that sometimes in your day-to-day [and] in meetings, and out getting things done, that you don’t necessarily have that time for,” McKeon told HR Brew. McKeon, like Patel, said she plans to take another WFA week around the same time as some PTO for a family beach trip.
What comes next. One year in, Patel said she’s excited about the program’s progress and potential.
“It was this test and learn, and we actually didn’t know how this was going to go, and having heard all of these exciting stories from our employees and creative ways in which people are using it now, this is the year where we really have to think about, how do we think a little bit bigger?” Patel said. “How do we get creative about it? How do we add a little bit more structure around it that helps support our employees even further?”
Patel’s advice for other HR pros starting a similar program: “It all comes down to your core values as a company,” she said. “If you believe that your employees need the flexibility to do their best work, which we do, I think that then everything is driven from that.”