The Rise of Hybrid Work in FinTech: What HR Leaders Need to Know

Across the globe, workplaces have undergone a dramatic transformation since the pandemic. Among the changes, remote and hybrid work have emerged as viable work models for many industries, including FinTech.

While sectors like finance and technology have historically relied on in-person collaboration, the shift to remote work during covid forced companies to rethink their operational strategies. And it worked, more or less.

But now, HR leaders have been dealt a tricky hand. With technology and workplace attitudes changing quickly, they’ve been left to navigate the churning waters between employee expectations and productivity goals.

The Hybrid Work Shift: A New Reality

Five years after the pandemic began, it’s clear that a substantial portion of work has become and will remain remote. However, there has also been a great deal of pushback – some of it fair, some overextending the business’s hand. What’s come out of this is an emphasis on the hybrid approach to work, which incorporates the best of both worlds.

Recent decisions by major financial institutions to enforce stricter return-to-office rules have reinvigorated the ongoing debate about how to strike the right balance between flexibility and oversight. On the one hand, companies like JPMorgan Chase have mandated that employees return to the office five days a week starting in March 2025, citing the benefits of in-person mentoring and collaboration.

On a more moderate approach, Starling Bank has set their requirements for hybrid employees to spend at least 10 days per month in the office. However, although this shift towards greater in-person hours is trending, it has added fuel to ongoing discussions about work-life balance, as employees voice their concerns about commuting and other issues at work. Let’s turn to the benefits and challenges hybrid work faces so we can better measure the results.

The Benefits and Challenges of Hybrid Work

Hybrid Work Benefits

Focusing on FinTech, hybrid work offers multiple advantages:

• Talent Attraction and Retention: The demand for highly skilled professionals in the field is quite high. Flexible work policies are now a key differentiator in recruitment and employee retention, as in-demand employees look for greater amounts of remote hours.
• Increased Productivity: Many employees report being more productive when working remotely, particularly when tasks require deep focus. Remote work can actually be seen as a win-win for both employees and employers. A Gallup study also found that hybrid work leads to higher engagement and well-being.
• Cost Savings: The shift to hybrid offers significant opportunities for cost savings with a company’s real estate. While many organizations currently face challenges with under-used office space due to the dramatic turn to remote work, in the long run, companies using hybrid work will need less space overall. When companies can downsize their physical footprint, they can reallocate resources to other initiatives.
• Expanded Talent Pools: The move toward remote and hybrid work models has also fundamentally transformed recruitment opportunities. Organizations can now strategically tap into diverse talent pools across different regions and time zones, breaking free from traditional geographic limitations at a reasonable cost. This flexibility particularly benefits companies seeking specialized skills – a software firm in London, for instance, could easily collaborate with a UI/UX expert in Warsaw, Poland. Even for more local talent, it makes the commute easier, making roles more attractive to candidates who might have previously dismissed the opportunity due to location constraints.

Hybrid Work Challenges

Despite its advantages, hybrid work does have obstacles:

• Team Cohesion: Maintaining a strong company culture and fostering collaboration can be difficult when employees are spread across multiple locations. Of course, that’s part of what the in-person part of hybrid work is meant to handle.
• Security and Compliance: Fintech firms handle sensitive data that typically requires strict security protocols. A recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office has called for cybersecurity to be increased across the private firms that handle sensitive information, especially those using more remote work.
• Performance Measurement: Traditional productivity metrics don’t always map well onto remote work, so companies may have to rethink how they measure productivity to ensure fairness and accuracy in hybrid environments.

Key Considerations for HR Leaders

Now, we can turn to how HR Leaders can grapple with these benefits and challenges in a way that makes hybrid work then work for their company. Here are five distinct ways to accomplish this:

1. Establishing Clear Work Policies

A new Stanford University study highlights the importance of well-defined hybrid work policies. It found that employees working from home two days a week were as productive, more promotable, and less likely to quit than their fully in-office peers. It turns out, such a model has more benefits than drawbacks in most cases.

2. Investing in Technology

Hybrid work is not only a trend at the moment but one that’s likely to continue. Foundry’s “Future of Work” study indicates that 71% of companies plan to make remote or hybrid work policies permanent, which will also lead to increased investments in IT infrastructure.

3. Redefining Performance Metrics

Leaders wanting to succeed in this new environment should prepare for trade-offs in their management style. An article in the MIT Sloan Management Review discusses the need to shift from traditional time-based productivity metrics to outcome-driven evaluations when using a hybrid approach. Remote work challenges traditional notions of working hours and many biases about how hard-working someone is based on the amount of time you see them in the office. Great managers will have to make their new expectations clear and rethink how productivity is measured to deal with this change in how their teams work.

4. Prioritizing Employee Well-Being

There’s also a recent Gallup poll on hybrid office expectations and experiences. Most salient among the responses is the finding that hybrid work promotes a better work-life balance and more efficient use of time. It emphasizes flexible work arrangements are causing this increase, not something else.

5. Improving Team Cohesion

Many managers aren’t prepared for the different management styles that are needed for hybrid work and maintaining a strong connection between coworkers. New research from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research points out that the transition to hybrid work can be a minefield with certain managers stuck in their old way of doing things. It turns out that hybrid work requires some careful planning to ensure equal treatment between in-office and remote workers, which is critical for maintaining team cohesion.

Looking Ahead: The Future of Hybrid Work in Finance & Tech

It is fairly obvious by now that the hybrid work model is here to stay, but we expect that it will continue to evolve as technology advances and workplace expectations shift. Emerging trends, such as AI-driven collaboration tools, the expansion of virtual offices, and the potential of virtual reality or augmented reality may or may not play a large role in future workplaces.

HR leaders must stay ahead of these changes by continuously adapting their strategies to whatever comes their way, without overzealously changing everything all the time. In the case of hybrid work, it’s about prioritizing the right balance between business objectives and employee well-being.

If you want to discuss HR trends and challenges in Poland with our team, you can talk to the specialists at Verita HR who are all kept up-to-date on the most important topics and trends to affect the Polish and global job markets.

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