How does a new recruit work around a hybrid working system?

It is “going to be tricky” for recent graduates to negotiate and navigate boundaries when they are new to a workplace, says careers psychologist Sinéad Brady. And some of this trickiness, she explains, stems from the fact that graduates may not yet be aware what their own boundaries are. “In order to negotiate a boundary, you have to know what your boundary actually is,” says Brady. Some boundaries are “straightforward and clear”, others less so. Once you know what your boundaries are, it’s easier to keep to them, although “it’s not 100 per cent or nothing”, she adds. “You have to look at it and go ‘okay, there’s going to be a bit of give and take here’.” It’s a message echoed , manager of the financial services recruitment team at Morgan McKinley in Dublin. Flexibility is a must, he says. “One of the biggest pieces of advice for any grad joining a new role is that you do need to be flexible. And flexible means working through the occasional lunchtime, having to stay late the odd night and doing things outside of the day-to-day norm. ’re flexible; you build credibility. “And what you would hope , a bit early for that gym class or letting you have the morning off for that dentist appointment without question.” However, it’s important that occasional flexibility doesn’t become a constant demand, Morris adds. “What I wouldn’t do is confuse being flexible with having a constant expectation on you. And that means a manager who expects you to stay late every night, work through every lunch.” If this constant pushing of boundaries is becoming an issue, it is important to communicate it, Brady says. “But not in a ‘demand’ sense”; rather, . “Course correct early rather than late,” says Brady. Before missing lunch and working late become normal, it’s hard to boundaries being crossed. For graduates entering the employment market, a still relatively new concept is that of hybrid working. And it can pose a different challenge to younger workers. Because I think what people miss is that a lot of early career development doesn’t even necessarily even happen from sitting at your desk. It happens from chatting with colleagues over lunch, over the water cooler. “Just picking up tips from hearing your manager on the phone speaking to a client [can be of benefit]. I think that’s what you really miss out on when you’re working from home.” “Having an office presence, making yourself known, builds towards your credibility,” says Morris.