Hybrid working 'the way forward' at Kew Gardens

The organisation’s CIO Ian McKetty explains how Kew will manage the transition back to the office as pandemic restrictions continue to ease

The hybrid model, with staff dividing their working time between the office and home, is being adopted at Kew Gardens.

The organisation's CIO, Ian McKetty, explained that this is "the way forward."

"The hybrid model is the way forward," said McKetty. "Kew is a traditional place, and the feeling was for the first few months of the pandemic that we needed to get staff back. But over the next six months, the senior team all realised that the hybrid model can and does work."

He explained that remote working became more feasible once the senior team saw that staff were continuing to work properly.

"We didn't see any drop off in productivity, which we'd all been concerned about. We didn't see people becoming detached from the organisation, and they continued to care about their work. We saw that they're all adults, and really nothing changed besides the fact that we were no longer in the same building."

For Kew, this is likely to resolve into regular continued home working, alongside regular office days.

"So now we've all bought into working in a hybrid way. The rule of thumb is we'll do three days in the office and two at home, or similar. Though of course some people will need to be at work. Our gardeners can't really work from home."

McKetty explained that this way of working impacts the technology department, and gives him an opportunity to roll out some new solutions.

"I'm keen to exploit the opportunity. Our current telephony system is due for replacement. Pre-pandemic it was hard to get people to consider a world without their own deskphone. Now as they begin to do away with that and move to a Teams-based way of communicating, the idea of a softphone is easier to digest. We'll have a much more mature mobility model such that whatever device you're on, wherever you are, you're connected. You're not limited by the need to have a number that you can only answer at your desk."

He added that rolling out new solutions and getting buy-in for new strategies is much easier now that he has the organisation's trust. He previously told Computing about the organisation's 'collapsing infrastructure', which he was faced with when he first joined.

"We've now worked through all the issues we had when I took over, we're now on a very stable footing. Getting to that point was a real milestone.

"Senior colleagues began to believe in our vision far more over the pandemic. We had to move overnight from being completely on-site, to being remote. That whole transition was really smooth, because we'd been doing the work behind the scenes for two-and-a-half years. We switched to Teams, O365 and we'd already implemented a move to cloud services. Alongside that we sorted out the infrastructure.

"So that whole transition wasn't a problem. Services just worked."