After a number of setbacks and delays because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Ford Motor Co. lastly began to welcome its salaried workforce again to its workplaces earlier this month.

It additionally got here alongside a major shift in office coverage from the corporate that helped set up the normal five-day, 40-hour workweek because the norm: the beginning of its new hybrid work mannequin the place non-site-dependent staff may work flexibly between a Ford campus location and distant.

Ford maybe had purpose to imagine a lot of its staff would look to return to the workplace as soon as the plan rolled out. The firm polled 56,000 international staff who have been working remotely in June 2020 about their work preferences post-pandemic and 95% stated they wished a mixture of distant and in-office work, whereas 5% stated they wished to be onsite.

Nonetheless, Ford Chief Individuals and Worker Expertise Officer Kiersten Robinson stated throughout a CNBC Work digital occasion on Wednesday that the early outcomes “have been slightly stunning.”

“Once we opened our doorways on April 4 to our staff to welcome them again into the office – those who wished to come back in – the numbers that really have come again into work have been decrease than we anticipated,” Robinson stated.

Whereas the corporate is “very early within the expertise,” in keeping with Robinson, Ford continues to be seeing indicators amongst those who have come into work that they are in a position to “do extremely collaborative team-based brainstorming and strategic work collectively.”

Listed here are a few of the key issues Ford has noticed since welcoming again employees.

On condition that Ford has many staff which have jobs that do not permit for distant or hybrid work, Robinson stated that the corporate has been “actually clear that the character of labor informs the place and the way work will get achieved.”

“Our manufacturing vegetation, you possibly can solely do this work within the facility and so our focus in these areas is to guarantee that the work atmosphere is as conducive and welcoming as doable, and what are a few of the further instruments and facilities that we are able to present,” she stated.

That has led Ford to bear an effort to look at the way it can enhance manufacturing services, methods to enhance employee wellbeing, diet, and even pure gentle within the area – “circumstances that may actually affect your work expertise,” Robinson stated.

For information employees, Ford is asking departments to fulfill with their groups and create a plan round what they should do in a 90-day interval, asking questions on the important thing work duties, and the way and the place can be the perfect methods to try this work.

“We’re measuring sentiment, we’re measuring the worker expertise over these 90 days, however in fact, we’ll have the ability to measure the output and whether or not or not staff really feel as if with that company and with that selection, they’re as productive as they must be,” Robinson stated.

Robinson stated that Ford has already revamped 33% of its services in southeast Michigan to “make them extra conducive for collaborative hybrid work,” and that it has a roadmap to proceed to try this within the coming years.

Ford is assuming that roughly 50% of its staff can be within the workplace on any given day, however Robinson stated it’ll check that speculation extra clearly over the approaching months.

Ford confirmed a small workforce discount on Wednesday when it reported earnings, a web lack of $3.1 billion within the first quarter, largely due the loss in worth of a 12% stake in EV start-up Rivian Automotive. Because it pivots to EVs, 580 U.S. salaried staff and company employees, largely in engineering, have been let go as a part of the Ford+ turnaround plan.

The corporate has no plans to scale back the variety of services it has, however fairly make the areas as conducive as doable for hybrid work, she stated.

With employees now again within the workplace, Ford is holding a more in-depth eye on how the areas are literally getting used.

“We have got very clear knowledge round site visitors patterns, the times which are the preferred and we’re utilizing sensors in a lot of our services to even measure what sorts of areas are getting used and for what objective,” Robinson stated.

“There isn’t a good reply right here, apart from I do not suppose we are able to return to how we labored pre-pandemic,” she stated. “I actually hope that all of us embrace this as a possibility to essentially rethink and reimagine the evolution of labor and to experiment and actually spend money on understanding worker suggestions, staff’ sentiment and to make use of that to proceed to refine and reshape what work appears to be like like.”