A people-first approach to hybrid remote work (2/3)
By: Blake Harper
Tags: Human Resources, Future Of Work, Remote Work, People Management, Employee Experience

Many leaders have been pleasantly surprised at the way people have continued to work effectively — indeed, sometimes more effectively — during one of the most disruptive periods in recent history. Many have also heard through surveys that significant proportions of their employee population want to continue working remotely full time or at least a few days a week. Some are eyeing the possibility of smaller footprints and reduced real estate expenses. Others are keen to access broader talent pools. Undoubtedly several are deeply invested in retaining (or stealing!) top performers who may come to expect highly-flexible remote working arrangements from their future employers.

But a majority want to maintain some in-office presence post-pandemic for employees to either use optionally or on a required basis, periodically. Some cite a desire to retain opportunities for new employees to develop social capital; others cite a desire for deep collaborative potential. Some cite economic and social obligations to local communities in which they operate; others still see this as reason to encourage employees to move back to their hometowns.

Fig. 1: A potential list of key drivers and constraints to shape an organization’s unique mixed remote model

Whatever the reasons, it’s important for organizational leaders to first get clear on why they want their teams to adopt hybrid-remote working styles in the future. Ideally, this question would not be answered in isolation, but as part of a comprehensive strategy to re-design the future of work for an organization — including questions about how organizations can be designed around customers rather than around functions; or how future workforce planning will tap into the increasing shift towards automated, contracted, and gig work; or what kinds of leaders and leadership mindsets are needed to become truly agile and adaptable. HR can lead the business through these questions by showing how the answers must hang together.

Before picking a target, it’s also critical that leaders have ample and reliable data on employee attitudes towards both their current experience with remote work and their desired future experience. Unless internal surveys were designed to avoid common survey biases, there’s a chance that question wording, order, or response options may skew results. Surveys that ask simply about people’s experience working remotely might accidentally conflate people’s attitudes to working remotely during a pandemic with their attitudes towards working remotely when they don’t have to cope with the stress of kids at home, trying to stay healthy, and having limited social possibilities outside of work. Or, questions which ask how often people would like to work from home may get a different answer than those that ask how often people want work from an office, which may in turn get a different answer than questions which ask how often they would like to come into a particular office. After all, people may prefer to work remotely, but just outside their homes — from say, a co-working space or a café. Company pulse surveys are a handy tool, but they can be prone to statistical biases. For such high-stakes programs it may be worth consulting survey professionals.

But assuming reliable data about employee attitudes are available, and a clear strategic vision has been established, leaders tasked with designing and implementing hybrid programs can begin sorting through their options.

A director of remote programs who understands that her executive team is most interested in decreasing real estate expense and increasing productivity, but isn’t as interested in accessing broader talent markets may lean towards a model which maintains the same geographic distribution of employees but staggers their presence in the office to reduce overall occupancy by advocating for two or more “focus days” per week spent at home on core work while using the office for more interactive activities.

Alternatively, the head of talent strategies at a growth-focused tech company who has struggled to recruit and retain top talent may have heard from recruiters that candidates are asking more and more about the kind of remote flexibility the company will offer once the pandemic is over. He may have also found through pulse survey data that, consistent with his industry, roughly a third of his organization’s employees want the option to work remotely full-time in the future or have already moved away from office areas with no intent to return. These considerations might incline him towards a geographically-distributed model where prior real estate costs are transferred to regional hubs, co-working spaces, and into home offices.

Once leaders get clear on the reasons why they might go in for a mixed model, their design teams can begin working out the details. While it’s obvious that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach along the continuum of hybrid possibilities, distinguishing three locations along the spectrum can help focus the conversation. Call them remote-fine, remote-friendly, and remote-first.

Fig. 2: The hybrid-remote spectrum with stylized examples showing possible features of each hybrid variety. Actual features will vary as organizations find the features that fit their needs.

Remote-fine

While the offices of a remote-fine organization may look slightly different when employees return after the pandemic with, for example, spaces reconfigured for larger group collaboration activities, the overall feel of office life will not be that different. Important decisions will still be made in passing between meetings, ideas will be hatched over spontaneous team lunches or happy hours, face time with the boss will lead to more career opportunities, and executives will maintain their corner offices. A remote-fine organization is one which permits part or full-time remote work for certain roles or seniority levels, but does not make significant conscious efforts to modify in-office ways of working in order to accommodate and include those working remotely.

Without thoughtful design and execution, many organizations who intend to be remote-friendly may find that they more-closely resemble the remote-fine organization. Other organizations will intentionally decide to be remote-fine, weighing their tradeoffs and deciding that the changes required to be more remote-friendly would not outweigh the benefits.

For many people, working at or with a remote-fine organization will likely feel a lot like it did before the pandemic, only with more people than before might be working remotely at any given time.

Remote-friendly

Remote-friendly organizations will feel different. Teams with members working remotely may choose to prioritize virtual meetings where in-office participants join separately from quiet locations throughout the office so that everyone has the same meeting experience. Most rooms will have capacity for two or three people with a few larger rooms set aside for things like team on-sites, conferences, trainings, and in-person on-boarding. Managers will require employees to document any project-related information that gets discussed outside of scheduled meetings to keep everyone on the same page, and will discourage talking about projects in situations that not all team members can access like in-person lunches and happy hours. Managers will also intentionally limit their time spent in-office to avoid creating a “center of gravity” around wherever they happen to be physically present.

Long-term success for remote-friendly organizations will likely turn on their ability to move from a meeting-first culture to a writing-first culture — a transition many companies still have not made even after working remotely for a year; instead often transposing old ways of working into the virtual setting. A sample of guiding principles from a successful remote-first organization includes things like: “meetings are the last resort, not the first option” and “writing solidifies, chat dissolves.” Studying principles like these could shed light on just how remote-friendly an organization wants to be.

For the remote-friendly organization these mindset and behavior changes should also be constrained by the kind of employee experience an employer wants to create for co-located employees. If the proportion of employees working remotely at any given time is set to expand significantly, the in-office experience will have to change dramatically for remote-friendly organizations so that it does not become exclusive. Making sure that this in-office change is not for the worse will be just as essential as ensuring that the experience is inclusive for those who physically distant. Many larger technology employers seem eager to try and strike the balance that remote-friendly hybrid models demand: enabling social connection for those who happen to be co-located on a given day while not compromising inclusivity for those who are not.

Remote-first

Remote-first organizations will face less of a burden striking that balance because their rallying cry will be “digital by default.” The standing assumption in these companies will be that any given work process or task be done digitally unless the case can be made that the work must be done in person. Employees will be expected to act as if they were remote, even when they happen to be co-located. For example — sending a message in a chat channel rather than asking around the office floor, or spinning up a virtual whiteboard instead of a physical one. A writing-first culture will be even more critical to the remote-first organization. To cut down on the need for synchronous communication, the written memo could eclipse slide decks at these companies as a way to accelerate decision-making and issue-resolution.

employees will be expected to act as if they were remote, even when they happen to be co-located. For example — sending a message in a chat channel rather than asking around the office floor, or spinning up a virtual whiteboard instead of a physical one.

Remote-first companies may maintain some office space, but may quickly discover this space going unused except for planned events as employees find themselves with less reason to go in to the office because the expectation is that everything be done online. Many mid-sized technology companies have explicitly embraced the “remote-first” or “digital by default” labels. Expect working for, or with, a remote-first organization to feel a lot like working for a fully remote one — except that the option to socialize with co-located peers will be more readily available for those who want to seek it out. Semi-regular team meetups or company “on-sites” will be critical for employees in remote-first organizations to build the social capital they can bank on when working remotely.

On mixing and matching

A word of caution though for those organizations who anticipate adopting something like a “hybrid of hybrids” model. Consider the cross-functional work where these teams must intersect and the risk introduced by different ways of working and expectations. If IT is trying to be remote-first or at least remote-friendly, but their business partners have strong preferences for on-site work, this may create asymmetries in opportunity for those in IT willing to spend more time on site, thereby threatening the long term sustainability of IT’s remote-friendly model. Decisions about which models individual teams will adopt therefore should not be made in silos and over-arching governance structures must be in place to create equity.

Confronted with a spectrum of possibilities like this, the temptation is often to choose the middle path. Unfortunately though, being remote-friendly will take daily balancing acts, and ultimately may be the hardest to pull off. While by no means impossible, it will require leaders to invest in manager training and change management to ensure that mindsets and behaviors do not fall back into pre-pandemic patterns and create a resulting environment that is not inclusive of, or friendly to, scaled remote work.