While some companies have opted for a full remote experience, others are still figuring it out and thinking through a hybrid setup. Since covid has blown up the traditional work model, it has allowed companies to think about a more improved format that will allow people to rearrange their lives and work preferences for greater fulfillment and productivity.
One complexity that companies are dealing with is how much time people should be in the office. In a linked interview, David Rock from the NeuroLeadership Institute mentioned how split worker preferences are:
· 1/3 of people love to be in the office because they are most productive and happier and do not have distractions or a lack of structure, which they can experience at home. It is also energizing for extroverts to be around people who get their energy from all the interactions.
· 1/3 of people prefer to be at home, especially caretakers, who tend to be mostly women, and some racial groups who talked about experiencing greater comfort working from home. They can organize their schedule that supports their parental and lifestyle preferences. It is also less depleting for introverts who can get quickly drained by being around people constantly.
· 1/3 of people are happy to mix it up, go into the office part of the time to be around people and collaborate, and stay home part of the time for deep work and more flexibility.
Executives are also split on this topic, which some believe is more emotionally charged than layoffs. Tim Cook of Apple, Elon Musk of Tesla, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, Reed Hastings of Netflix, and David Solomon of Goldman Sachs are just some Fortune 500 CEOs who have loudly demanded their employees return to the worksite. They view physical attendance as paramount, especially given their real estate investment. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, David Ek of Spotify, Parag Agrawal of Twitter, Jack Dorsey of Square, and Mark Benioff of Salesforce have endorsed more of a work-from-anywhere policy. And some trust their teams to make the best decisions. Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy told employees, “instead of specifying that people work a baseline of three days a week in the office, we're going to leave this decision up to individual teams." Sundar Pichai of Google said, "I think people and teams are going to figure this out.” They take more of a local approach empowering teams to do what makes the most sense for accomplishing business objectives and satisfying individual preferences.
The Future Of Work Is A Hybrid Setup
A McKinsey article highlight’s that many organizations will be seeking to combine the benefits of remote and onsite working, but many currently lack a strategy for the future of work. The key is figuring out the right model that will work for your culture, having a definite strategy and not trying to be all things to everyone. When you define your culture, and tell others who you are and what it means to work here, people can make informed decisions that best suit their needs.
Companies are in this rare moment to reimagine how work can be done better. Before determining your hybrid strategy, here are some points you may want to consider:
1. Define the kind of company and culture you want to have. People are still thinking about the right way to do hybrid and there is no one correct answer as it depends on the needs of the people and the company. How is your organization being regenerative, where it invests in its people so that every year, they get even better, rather than exploitative, where they try to extract as much as they can from people as they drive toward profits.
2. Set your goals linked to the business outcomes and then give flexibility. Once you know the company’s purpose and business outcomes, you can be flexible in achieving those ends. Rather than return to the old ways of doing things or bad habits that were not working, it is a real opportunity to explore what will be best for your team and company in this current period. Granting employees the flexibility they yearn, will allow the company to benefit from higher productivity, engagement, and loyalty. People benefit because they can organize their life according to what is important to them. At GitLab, they optimize for results rather than activities or the number of hours worked
3. Survey your people and co-create. What do your employees want? How are you using their voices to restructure the workday and week? How much flexibility do they have in deciding how they work, when, where, and who they work with? Where do their preferences and interests come into play? You can give an anonymous survey to truly understand their predilections, and then you can use that data to balance it with the organization’s needs. How can they be set up for success, do their job well, and simultaneously make sure the business is serving the stakeholders and customers? Once you know this, you can collectively create the best policy for the work and your people. This decision should not be made by one person or just the executive team in an office, and then it gets imposed onto others, there has to be an account for the diverse perspectives and a collaboration to determine the best course of action. You can run an innovation tournament and crowd-source the best ideas. They can submit various models to meet the conditions of promoting worker benefits, attracting top talent, and meeting the needs of the business and its many stakeholders.
4. View the office as a tool to advance teamwork. This will help you be more intentional about your in-person time. One of the keys to making this a success is to think about batching or arranging time together to maximize the team’s advantage in the office as face-to-face coordination helps.
In an interview with Adam Grant, CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella said, “stop thinking about remote work like a switch but instead a dial to turn up or down on synchronous and asynchronous work depending on the type of team you have and the kinds of projects you are doing. If your project is more like a relay race, you need more time together like an assembly line with multiple people are involved or a media shop where one draft needs to be handled by many people…a writer, editor, and designer. The person passing the baton needs to be in sync with the person receiving it. When excellence depends on repeatedly passing the ball, you want to spend several days in the week together and coordinate your time.”
5. Designate Anchor & Deep Work Days. Some companies choose 2 or 3 days a week for anchor days. If you are going to the office, it is nice to spend time on intense collaboration and innovation. When people know they are coming in for ideation or creative work or working on a specific task or problem together where they are whiteboarding and solutioning, it can deepen cohesion and engender great feelings as people can feel good creating and connecting. It is also a buzzing energy to align around a goal. They can be used for important internal meetings, 2–3-year strategy planning work, or with key customers to give them facetime to build more trust rapidly. Finally, an opportunity to have lunch, connect, and foster great culture and build community. If an entire team has few dependencies, they can even decide to meet at WeWorks on the same day to work in community. When people are co-located, there is magic and spontaneity in the informal interactions where people of different expertise and experience exchange ideas for great creativity. Those casual collisions drive learning and innovation and can brighten people’s days and make them feel more connected.
The key is to devise a plan that will work for most. If you allow everybody to pick individually and are on different schedules from their immediate and cross-functional teams, you miss the benefits of hybrid. It is not as productive to come into the office and do things they can easily do from home such as staring at a screen all day when they would have been more productive at home. The people who have a 2-hour commute and are forced to come in to do independent work that they could have done better at home will become resultful.
Another format I’ve seen is when managers set a number such as 30% of your time per month in the office, or designate certain weeks out of the month, such as the 1st and 3rd. Or, some managers select a day for drop-in office hours or the HR Team encourages all employees to do their onboarding in the office for the first two weeks. You can use the rhythm that works for you, but the idea is to have some frequency with each other. It is also essential to make the experience compelling, so people want to come in, for example, if leadership makes themselves more accessible, that could incentivize people to come in.
5. Designate quiet time. For the non-anchor days, you can select part of the time for deep work and reflection. In these interruption-free zones where there are no meetings, you have protected time to put your head down and complete your analytical and critical work, so you are not working after hours. It is also an intentional space to step back from the screen and do more creative and focused work. Research suggests that limiting meetings to the afternoons can give people time to get stuff done in the morning, progress on their tasks, and be more likely to focus on the afternoon meetings because they’re not multitasking.
Make asynchronous communication hours clear. When people are working remotely, what are the general times they should be logged on, this will allow them to arrange their time freely to best serve them, and have better work-life harmony. The asynchronous times would be the meeting free times. At Warner Media, they have No Meetings Friday, you can communicate via slack, but no calendar invites will come through that day. Being clear about the different kinds of time helps people avoid the triple peak where they are active in the morning, during the day, and in the evening, which will lead to burnout. There should not be the expectation of being accessible on weekends and late nights. And if you are the type who likes to work on nights and send emails, be clear that you do not expect a response. If you are a senior leader and send many messages before the weekend, it’s a good way to destroy somebody’s off time. You can establish the norm or expectation that you do not need a response in your email signature by writing something like this: I value working flexibly. I’m sending this message at a time that best suits me, but I don’t expect that you will read, respond to, or act on it outside of your regular working hours.”
6. Declare time off. Having synchronized holidays is a nice feeling because people will not be returning to a pile of work when nobody else is working. Having that time off for rejuvenation is so vital to the health of the employees. At Salesforce, they have wellness days, time for you to journal and sense make, do yoga, meditate, or do other things, which provides another opportunity for replenishment.
7. Be intentional about your off-site, whether quarterly, biyearly, or yearly. Whatever format you choose, it is nice to have off-sites, getting away from the office with a focus on bonding, relationship-building, connecting, and doing great, focused work that will advance the business and ensure alignment.
8. Give people a choice and define flexibility. Flexibility is the number one request that employees make, but it’s too narrowly focused on remote and hybrid work. It’s not enough to discuss where we should work, we need a broader conversation about what flexibility means. Some would say it is the freedom to choose their place of work, their purpose, the people they work with, and their priorities. This helps contribute to a regenerative organization because people are motivated by many different things, and if some want to spend time with their family, they should be able to.
· Place– Outside the 2-3 anchor days where people have to be in the office to achieve objectives better, you can offer options for people to decide if they want to work from home or go to the office. People with young kids or with long commutes may choose the former, while those who prefer to have a space outside their home for work or get to flex their extroverted nature might choose the latter.
· People – Wherever possible, it is helpful for people to choose the team they want to be on and the people they get to collaborate with to do their best work because it is in service of the business.
· Purpose & Priorities – Where possible, it is helpful for people to have autonomy in their work - freedom to explore new ideas and work on projects they want to work on. Allow them to take healthy risks as long as the company is not jeopardized. When the business is at risk, they should reach out to make a collective decision and not make that alone.
Undergirding the freedom option, that flexibility is not blindly granted but earned. If you present as a reliable and credible coworker, a good communicator, and meet all their deadlines and outcomes, of course, you should have these privileges. But if it is apparent that work is slipping through the cracks and there is a negative strain on the team because critical projects cannot move forward, then the freedom option needs to be considered because it is freedom in service of hitting outcomes and personal and team happiness, but not at the expense of objectives.
However you decide to build your hybrid culture, you can always run an experiment and try something for a quarter or two to gather data, work out the kinks, include your people’s voices, and see what works best and what adjustments need to be made. These complex problems cannot be solved by anyone but must include a team working together.
Quote of the day: “We like to give people the freedom to work where they want, safe in the knowledge that they have the drive and expertise to perform excellently, whether they are at their desk or in their kitchen. Yours truly has never worked out of an office, and never will.” — Richard Branson
Q: What is your strategy for hybrid work? Comment and share below; we would love to hear from you!
As a leadership development and executive coach, I work with leaders to create enjoyable remote work experiences for themselves and their teams, contact me to explore this topic further.
