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Issue 01September 2026

Understand the work first

Why three days?

The month a question about office days turned into the biggest conversation on my feed – plus AI, HR, deleted roles and what September taught me about the work behind the policy.

23,000+
views of “Three Days in the Office?”
28
comments on that post alone
9
thought pieces published in September
1
question behind all of them

In this issue

September at a glance

  1. 01Are We About to Repeat the Same Mistakes With AI?
  2. 02Before You Delete the Role
  3. 03Speaking Truth to Power
  4. 04The HR Business Case Worked. The HR Model Didn’t.
  5. 05The TUC and flexible working
  6. 06Do You Need a CPO – or Do You Need CPO Experience?
  7. 07AI and HR: A Match Made in Heaven?
  8. 08Flexibility Isn’t a Gen Z Thing
  9. 09Three Days in the Office?

From me

Welcome to the first issue

In September I set myself a challenge: publish a thought piece every few days, and join the conversation on other people’s posts every weekday. I expected to learn something from the writing. I didn’t expect to learn quite so much from the replies.

Nine pieces went out this month – on AI, HR operating models, deleting roles, speaking truth to power and flexible working. The one I thought might be the quiet one, a short post asking why so many organisations have landed on three days in the office, has been seen more than 23,000 times. The comments underneath it were better than the post.

So this newsletter isn’t just a list of what I’ve written. Each month I want to bring together the best of what you said back – properly credited, in your words – alongside my own thinking and a few posts from other people that made me stop and think.

If you’re new here: I’m an interim transformation executive. For 30 years I’ve worked across nearly every HR discipline – outsourced, insourced, implemented technology, and inherited plenty that wasn’t working as intended. That has left me with one habit I can’t shake, and it runs through everything this month.

Whether it’s a system, an AI tool, an operating model or a hybrid policy, the principle is the same: understand the work first.

The thread running through September

When we design a system or bring in AI, we start by understanding the work: what tasks a role actually contains, which need judgement, which are repetitive, which could be automated and which need a human being. Yet when it comes to where and how people work, we often skip that step entirely and go straight to the policy.

That’s the question underneath this first issue. I hope you enjoy it – and I hope you’ll argue with it.

Juli

The big conversation · Work Before Structure, Part 2 of 4

Three Days in the Office? You’re Starting With the Wrong Question.

Three days in the office. Why three? Why not two, four or five? More importantly: what are we trying to achieve during those three days?

I find much of the return-to-office debate frustrating because I think we’re starting with the wrong question. We’re asking where the person should be. I’d rather start by asking what the work actually is – and where that work is best done.

I absolutely believe there is enormous value in people being together. Last year alone I was away from home 17 times, often running workshops across different countries to design processes and systems. We were putting things on walls, challenging assumptions, reading the room. The activity justified getting people together.

But that’s very different from travelling somewhere simply because Tuesday happens to be an office day. I’ve watched people commute into central London, at considerable cost in time and money, only to sit wearing headphones on Teams calls all day – sometimes with people who are actually in the same building. What business problem did the commute solve?

And none of this is new. When I worked at Canterbury City Council around 2010, we had data-entry and call-centre colleagues working remotely. We understood the work, measured the output and had clear expectations – productivity was expected to be around 10% above the office-based level. We measured the outcome rather than the chair.

15–20%

improvement in staff performance and productivity reported after Canterbury City Council trialled homeworking from 2006. Call Centre Helper case study

41% vs 16%

of employers say home/hybrid working improved productivity, versus those who say it reduced it. CIPD, 2025

⅓ lower

attrition for staff allowed two days at home a week, with no measurable drop in performance or promotion. Randomised trial of 1,612 employees, Nature

If we’re sophisticated enough to ask which activities require a human, surely we’re sophisticated enough to ask which activities require a building?
Read the full piece

You said · Work Before Structure, Part 2

“It’s just a longer journey to the same online meeting”

Twenty-eight comments, and hardly any of them simply said “agree”. Here are the ones that stayed with me – in your words, with my replies.

SP

Sue Page

Governance Officer

“When an old employer started to try to change wfh contracts to hybrid, I asked what the business reason was for this change, they couldn’t supply one other than ad hoc collaboration in the kitchen! Reading between the lines it was to justify the very expensive office they had rented with a long contract before covid.”

Juli replied

“Ad hoc collaboration in the kitchen” made me smile. It’s a more honest answer than most! The office lease is often the real driver, and it’s the one reason nobody writes down. That’s exactly why having to explain a refusal in writing matters: a long lease isn’t a reason the work needs to be in the building. If collaboration is the goal, it deserves to be designed, not left to chance by the kettle.

DR

Darren Rowe

Product Manager, Bromcom

“I once had my commute extended by an office relocation, only to spend my day logging into systems elsewhere and communicating via phone, Teams and email… Sometimes it absolutely does [add value]. Sometimes it’s just a longer journey to the same online meeting.” “The real irony is that the organisation paid a relocation allowance for six months to help offset the additional travel costs.”
DK

Damon Krueger

Solution Innovator · HR Technology Evangelist

“I can be much more productive working from home as I don’t have to block out 2 hours on my calendar to get to / from the office… So I have to question if there is more value in WHAT I accomplish or WHERE I accomplish it.”
SS

Stuart Steele

Digital Lead Officer · AI for Business Value

“There are a couple of hidden passive reasons that are not obvious until you’re forced into it. The big one is your spend – if your employer takes an interest in the local economy then it’s in their interest to have you there. Parking, coffee shops, picking up your shopping on the way back. The occasional team lunch catch up.”

Juli replied

That’s an angle that rarely gets said out loud, and it’s a real one, especially for councils and town centres. But it’s a reason about the high street rather than the work. And people working from home spend locally too, just in a different place.

AO

Anton Oosthuizen

Program Manager · Business Analyst · Business Transformation

“It is 2026. I started in the workforce in 1981… Why are butts in seats still a performance measure, ANYWHERE? It’s been proven over and over again that remote workers do not clock watch… That is the rule. It has also been proven that you will find chance takers everywhere. That is the exception. Who still, in 2026, manage the rule instead of the exception?”

Juli replied

“Managing the rule instead of the exception” is a brilliant way of putting it. If the only way a manager can tell whether someone is working is by seeing them, that’s a gap in management, not in location. That’s exactly what Part 3 of the series is about.

CP

Chantal P.

Procurement Professional & Non-Executive Director

“Have you heard of the power of three? If people can choose which 3 days (as we do) then 3 days means you will always overlap on at least one day with other colleagues. Spending all day on Teams calls in the office probably means you are having too many meetings.”

Juli replied

That’s the most convincing reason for three I’ve heard! It’s a genuine design choice about overlap, which is exactly the kind of reasoning I’d want written down. And I agree on the meetings. If the office day is wall-to-wall Teams, the problem isn’t the location.

BG

Bernard Gore

Projects, Programmes, Portfolios, Risk, Planning

“I’m not sure the legislation change is necessarily a good thing – it will encourage employers who are fairly flexible to establish a fixed set of rules and apply them to everyone to make answering requests formally easier.”

Juli replied

A fair challenge, and a real risk. If employers respond by writing one fixed rule for everyone, we’ll have missed the point. The better answer is to explain the pattern role by role, based on the work.

JB

James Brown

HSE Consultant · Oil, Gas & Renewable Energy

“For some people with health conditions, disabilities or care commitments, remote working can be the difference between being able to work or not.”

Juli replied

Two angles that rarely make it into the RTO debate. Flexibility can be the difference between being in work or not – an inclusion question as much as a productivity one. And the commuting footprint is one many organisations quietly leave out of their net zero figures.

SQ

Sally Quantrill

Programme Lead, Infrastructure Services, Kyndryl

“Employers talk about support if you have an aging parent but not about aging partner.”

Juli replied

Ageing partners rarely get a mention. For me that’s the argument for making the reason irrelevant: once we judge why someone needs flexibility, we bring in subjectivity. Start with the work and design from there.

AH

Allan Hudson

Senior Consultant, AH Celtic Consultancy

“Working from the office is a generational thing… Covid opened a door to the future, we were forced to work from home where everybody discovered that there is an alternative model.”

Juli replied

I’m not sure it’s as generational as it looks. People using flexible and hybrid working actually skew older, often carers. I’m not a Boomer, but only just made it into Gen X. The divide is less about age and more about whether leaders measure the work or the attendance.

Work Before Structure · Part 1 of 4

Flexibility Isn’t a Gen Z Thing. It’s a Human Thing.

I keep hearing that Millennials and Gen Z “want flexibility”. I have two problems with this. I don’t particularly like the demonisation of generations. And flexibility isn’t something younger generations invented.

Years ago, when I worked at Motorola in Scotland, we had a twilight shift. It was staffed by some amazing teams, predominantly women, who chose those hours because they fitted around their lives and families. Nobody called it hybrid working. It was simply a sensible way of organising work.

The UK Family Resources Survey estimates 5.7 million people were informal carers in 2024–25 – and the age group most likely to provide care wasn’t Gen Z. It was 55–64-year-olds.

We’ve bundled together two different things: flexibility and working from home. A warehouse operative can’t unload a container from their kitchen table. But they might value predictable rotas, shift swaps, compressed hours or term-time arrangements. That makes this much more than a wellbeing conversation. It’s a talent conversation. A retention conversation. An inclusion conversation.

Read Part 1 in full

Automation & AI · Governance

AI and HR: A Match Made in Heaven?

Three reports landed on my feed in one week, all making the same promise: agentic AI is finally going to give HR the seat at the table it’s always wanted. It sounds like a fairytale – but it could also be a pantomime, or potentially a horror.

I believe HR earns its seat at the table when the administration and BAU elements of the function work well and stop distracting the business. That’s what makes you credible. AI doesn’t do that on its own, any more than previous technology did.

Human intelligence isn’t one thing – it’s exactly why I champion diversity of thinking. Artificial intelligence is something completely different: software that predicts the most probable next output from the patterns in its data. Governing it draws on a different kind of intelligence altogether – technical, statistical, systems-literate. Being genuinely good at one doesn’t automatically transfer to the other.

Most organisations still haven’t governed their existing HRIS and ERP data, let alone the AI they’re thinking of putting on top of it. Bolting agentic AI onto that won’t fix it. It will make the mess faster, bigger and harder to see – with real GDPR risk attached.

Humans experience life; AI processes information about it.

6%

of UK HR professionals use advanced analytical techniques day to day. CIPD

Lowest

Digital agility is the lowest-scoring competency in the HR profession, across 13,000+ professionals. AIHR Future-Ready HR Skills research

My honest position: I don’t think generalist HR should own AI governance. Ownership belongs with whoever is already doing the specialised process, data and systems work – wherever that sits. I’m actually worried HR could be pushed into owning something it’s not ready for, just because the word “intelligence” happens to cross over from human to artificial.

Read the full piece

More from September

In case you missed them

10 Sep·Automation & AI

Are We About to Repeat the Same Mistakes With AI?

“Putting AI into a badly designed process doesn’t transform it. It may simply make a bad process happen faster. Not prompts. Not licences. Not numbers of agents. Outcomes.”

From my feed

Four posts that sharpened my thinking

Every weekday I try to add something to someone else’s conversation. These were the posts I kept coming back to – with what I added underneath.

EV

Erik van Vulpen

Founder, AIHR

Erik’s point: adding AI on its own delivered around a 5% productivity gain; redesigning the workflow delivered around 30%.

I added

The technology is the same; the difference is whether anyone redesigned the work. I’d push it one step further: the redesign has to include what happens to the time that’s released. If nobody plans for it from the start, even the 30% quietly disappears back into the organisation.

DG

David Green

Insight222

David on task-level workforce planning – and the line that stood out for me: “genuine capacity rather than theoretical savings”.

I added

Task-level insight is essential, but tasks sit inside processes that rarely belong to one function. Most “HR transactions” run through Payroll, Finance, Pensions, managers and providers. Map them end to end, including the data, the governance and the outputs.

KZ

Karen Zeigler

Human Score

Karen’s figure: 79% of organisations skip workflow redesign – and her argument that it comes down to control versus creativity.

I added

In most programmes I’ve been brought into, workflow redesign was in the original plan and then quietly squeezed out when timelines tightened. The redesign step needs protecting as a deliverable in its own right, with a named owner in the business rather than the project team.

LA

Liza Adams

AI Advisor & GTM Strategist

“AI will never have the A in RACI… AI can take on more responsibility but the accountability is still ours.”

I added

AI can absolutely be Responsible, but it can never truly be Accountable. As we automate more of our processes, that feels like an increasingly important line to draw. We can delegate the work, but not the accountability for the outcome.

Coming in October

What’s next

Work Before Structure, my four-part series on flexible and hybrid working, concludes – Part 3 is out now, and if you can’t wait, Part 4 is already on my website.

Out now

If You Can’t Manage Someone Remotely, Is Remote Working Really the Problem?

Read it

Read it early

Don’t Design the Job Yet. Design the Work.

Read it

October

AI job cuts and the cost of rehiring

October

The governance gap as employment law changes

October

The automation business case starts with the work

October

What a transformation health check should really tell you

One question to leave you with

Is there a decision in your organisation that everyone follows, but nobody has ever explained?
Tell me in the comments. I read every one – and the best ones shape the next issue.

Juli Oliver-Smith FCIPD · Interim transformation executive · The People Process · thepeopleprocess.co.uk

Comments are quoted from public replies on LinkedIn, lightly trimmed (marked …) with minor typos tidied, and credited with each person’s name and headline as shown on LinkedIn. Statistics are attributed to their original sources in the full articles.

That’s Issue 01.

This is the first of a monthly newsletter – a new issue will land in your inbox around the same time each month, bringing together the best of the conversation, the thinking behind it, and a few posts worth your time. Subscribe to make sure the next one reaches you.

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