HCRG Care Group – revising perceptions of ‘in office’ roles
Our analysis revealed a huge appetite for remote working within the organisation. So we supported HCRG Care Group in developing a stronger understanding of the roles and activities compatible with hybrid working. This enabled the business’ management team to retain the processes that worked well during the pandemic.
The situation
HCRG Care Group is a private provider of community health and social services with 4,500 staff across 155 locations in the UK. From 2010 to 2021 the company was known as Virgin Care and was part of Virgin Group. The organisation was rebranded as HCRG Care Group in December 2021 following its acquisition by Twenty20 Capital.
Before the pandemic the majority of roles – particularly those of a clinical nature – were thought to be incompatible with remote working. However, the majority of staff worked well from home. As a result, the leadership team wanted to explore the possibility of offering their employees more flexibility.
There are a wide variety of professionals working at HCRG Care Group including school nurses, administrators, call centre staff, physiotherapists and occupational therapists. Senior leaders at the organisation wanted to assess the suitability and appetite of each of these populations for long-term remote working.
Our approach
We developed a bespoke discovery process, which included our online work and productivity profiler survey, as well as focus groups for different employee populations. We also conducted HR, IT and property infrastructure reviews to assess how ready HCRG Care Group was to implement long-term flexible and remote working in each of these respects.
This research gave us a profound understanding of HCRG’s people, processes, culture, values and employee experiences. Armed with these insights, we provided recommendations for how the organisation could evolve with the future of work to meet its business objectives.
One of our suggestions was to reduce the size of the company’s head office. The workplace had a population of 300 people, but we identified HCRG Care Group could reduce its floor space requirements by half by creating more collaborative work zones and switching to a hybrid work model.
