Eliza McClure considers herself lucky she can strike a better balance between work and family life thanks to remote and hybrid working.
“I feel you get to work like you don‘t have a family, then parent like you don’t have a full-time job,” the Co Donegal-based woman says.
McClure and her partner moved to Ireland from Australia in 2016. She had worked as a compliance manager in the Australian further education sector. She now lives in Inishowen with her husband and two children.
Initially she struggled to find a role to which she could fully apply her skill set. She spent a few years juggling entry-level roles with some remote work for her former employer on the other side of the world.
RM Block
These days, she works for local engineering firm NorthFox Technologies, which provides technical services on data centre and renewable energy projects, many of these abroad, and she is back working in the area of compliance.
She got the job having searched only for remote roles. It has allowed her to use her experience, mix her time between home and a local hub and have a level of flexibility when it comes to the hours she works.
“It has been really good for me,” she tells The Irish Times on a day when there is a storm warning for the locality and she is at home with the children.
“I know there are some remote-based roles in customer service or something like that where you would have to be online and locked in ... but we are a bit more flexible with NorthFox. I can pick the kids up at 3.30pm, then go back to work later. I consider myself lucky that way.”
Getting to this point has involved challenges. She recalls the loneliness of working remotely for her Australian employer when all her colleagues were asleep. This was at a time when she really wanted to “integrate into life over here in Ireland a bit more” and might otherwise have made connections through her job.
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There are a still a few issues, including that the national broadband roll-out has reached the end of her road but not yet her house.
However, overall she is happy with the arrangement and could not imagine being back in the office full-time.
She is not alone in her thinking. While the number of hybrid workers being pressured into returning full-time to the office is not huge, there have been high-profile cases. Some US firms and Ireland’s two biggest retail banks are among companies looking to move the dial at least.
At University College Dublin (UCD) there has been some resistance to a move to require attendance on site for at least three days a week.
A UCD school manager, Claire Nolan, finds herself worrying about how the new rules, which Siptu is contesting, will affect her and her team.
As an example, she says a member of staff who lives two hours away would likely leave if forced into three four-hour round trips a week despite the nuts and bolts of their role not really requiring them to be at the university’s Belfield campus.
In her own case, she is concerned that the year-round nature of the mandate will cause her problems when it comes to caring for her 13-year-old son during summer.
She is a lone parent, and he has additional needs, so traditional summer camps are not available, she says. The rest of the year, she has no issue with being on site more than the mandate requires because that is the nature of her work, dealing face-to-face with students and others.
Where is the logic, she asks, in insisting she comes in when the students are away?
“I’m a school manager, I’m on campus five days a week, and that’s appropriate.”
A little more common sense would be nice, she suggests, saying she remains hopeful a solution can be found.
Legislation around the issue of remote working makes it clear that big decisions are for the employer to take.
Newry-based Enrique Sosa has worked with German business technology firm SAP for 19 years and says there has always been a large element of flexibility to the working arrangements. As he has caring responsibilities for his wife, he needed particular accommodations when the firm aimed to switch from remote to hybrid working at the end of the pandemic.
He says he spoke to his line manager and came to an arrangement that involves him travelling to the Citywest offices in Dublin once a week instead of twice, as long as that is all that is required.
“They are very flexible and down to earth as an employer, so they are prepared to work out what is best for the company but also works for the individual,” he says. “For my part, I say to my manager, ‘You want me to go to the office for a meeting? To do some mentoring? No problem.’ I’m happy to show them the commitment because in return they allow me to do much my work [at a hub] in Dundalk.”
Chloe Ní Mháille, who works for the social inclusion organisation Community Work Ireland from home or her local hub in Louisburgh, Co Mayo, sees the pros and cons of remote working.
She worked for six years on the Aran Islands and was involved in setting up a working hub. “It was huge that people had the opportunity to do all sorts of work remotely that they didn’t have to rely on tourism,” she says.
“It’s an opportunity, and people are moving west from Dublin or over from London ... It’s good, although as a young person who would like to buy somewhere to live the price of houses in the area has also gone up because of the extra demand.”
At a December meet-up in Skerries, Co Dublin, organised by Grow Remote, which promotes remote working, Nasim Muabbat says he came to Ireland two years ago with his wife, whose father is Irish. They moved because she had long Covid and “LA was getting a little crazy”, he says, adding: “It’s nice to be somewhere without guns.”
Muabbat runs a tech company centred around the provision of vehicle-charging points in public spaces. Since the pandemic he also freelances for clients in the United States, China and elsewhere while helping to care for his family.
When his company was larger he ran a team of remote workers, so he is aware of the challenges it can present. But, he insists, none of these should cause an employer to behave like a “dinosaur” company.
“If an employer wanted me to work in their office because they wanted to see me work, I would be really annoyed.
“If you want the result give me a trial. I can guarantee you that I will already deliver, because you trusted me. I don’t want to lose this lifestyle. I will overdeliver because I know this is a privilege,” he said.
Also at the event in Skerries is Sunny Saikia, who manages a business development sales team for a London-based global company that organises healthcare conferences across Europe, Asia and the US. He moved to Ireland nearly three years ago.
“There are always challenges,” he says of remote working. However, he says, he has never had to challenge a team member over productivity.
“I think you enhance your productivity by not having to do that travelling, coping with the problems that come up, trains that get cancelled. Although I do think if you are a new worker or starting in a field, you have to learn, and that’s where there can be challenges that are harder to overcome with remote working,” he says.
Dónal Kearney of Grow Remote says the trends around remote working continue to be misrepresented.
When a billionaire or other high-profile employer speaks about remote work, this is “always going to get headlines”, he says.
However, the data on office, hybrid and home working is “pretty consistent”, he says.
The most recent Central Statistics Office labour force survey, which was published last November suggested 30,000 more people were working from home some of the time than had been doing so a year earlier.
Another at the Skerries event is Conor Sweetman, who works remotely in human resources for a large insurer. His role has allowed him to move from Dublin city centre to Lusk, Co Dublin, close to where he grew up.
“I would like to work in a hybrid environment now or at least get into a team where I’m kind of around more people, because I’ve been working remote now for six years and I do feel I’m lacking that kind of social connection,” he says.
“I went in for a retirement do in October for this guy in his mid-60s and all sorts of people came out of the woodwork: old customers and people he had worked with over the course of his career ... I’d like that kind of retirement do myself, because I was at a virtual retirement do a while ago too and her last day of work was closing her laptop.”
