Working from home could harm women’s careers because they are less likely to come into the office than their male colleagues, the boss of Britain’s biggest building society has warned.
Debbie Crosbie, the chief executive of Nationwide, said the fact more women have taken advantage of flexible working – as they tend to juggle work and childcare – could cost them in terms of progression to more senior roles.
Nationwide, which has more than 17 million customers and 18,000 employees, 60% of whom are female, brought in a “work anywhere” policy for staff who did not work in branches during the pandemic. The policy changed a year ago and now requires staff to come in to the office at least two days a week.
Crosbie told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday: “One of the only good things that came out of the pandemic was the fact that people got much more comfortable with working flexibly, working from home. And I do think that’s very useful.
“My watch out, though, is that what we find, certainly at Nationwide, is that men are more likely to come into the office than women, and we just need to be really careful that we don’t prevent women from accessing the development-watching. I benefited enormously from watching some really excellent leaders and how they navigated challenging problems.”
Crosbie, who took the helm at Nationwide in June 2022 after previously running TSB Bank, recalled working early in her career for Lynne Peacock, then chief executive of Clydesdale Bank, whom she described as a “very inspiring female CEO”.
She considers herself lucky that she was already an executive when she had her daughter at the age of 32, “and it allowed me to get the opportunity to make different decisions. I got a great lot of support from business leaders who let me work part time for a few years.”
Crosbie said women nowadays are having children later, often in their late 30s, which is the time when people usually advance to more senior executive positions.
Last week, thousands of civil servants voted to strike after the Land Registry, which records the ownership of land and property across England and Wales, ordered them back to the office for three days a week.
The move came after a string of back-to-office mandates from large corporates in recent months, including Amazon and Asda. There has also been a rise in working on the go. Increasing numbers of professionals are using their daily commute or business trips to carry out some work, logging in from airports and railway stations across the UK, research suggests.
The Office for National Statistics found that hybrid working was the standard pattern for more than a quarter (28%) of working adults in Great Britain in the autumn. One of the most frequently reported business reasons was “improved staff wellbeing”.
