A people-first approach to hybrid remote work (1/3)
By: Blake Harper
Tags: Human Resources, Future Of Work, Remote Work, Leadership, Employee Experience

With a hopeful end to the COVID-19 pandemic in sight and a year of experience with scaled remote work, organizations across the world have started to rethink where and how their knowledge work will happen in the future. Leaders and employees who have been pleasantly surprised with their transition to remote work are asking how they can retain the best parts of this arrangement alongside co-located work in so-called “hybrid” workplaces.

But the question is far from settled when an organization announces its intent to go hybrid. Beside the big questions about how often and for what purpose employees are expected to be co-located, there are a host of subtler issues with potentially just as much of an impact on how people will feel about the new ways of working. These range from the expectations for hybrid meetings (if allowed at all), to norms about what project or team information to share and where; from questions about where managers will work and how they’ll equitably distribute opportunities based on location, to questions about how co-located colleagues can build culture and social capital without creating location-based knowledge silos.

Leaders cannot push these questions down to those building hybrid programs without first clarifying why it’s worth going in for a hybrid model in the first place. Does it matter more that we attract and retain talent who will come to regard location flexibility as a top benefit? Or is it more important that we optimize productivity and cost savings? Is the purpose of co-location primarily to build social capital, or do we think that certain kinds of co-located work yield better results than distributed alternatives? There’s unlikely to be a one-size-fits-all answer to these questions, but the model design must match its motives. This blog series distinguishes three representative hybrid models — what we might call “remote-fine”, “remote-friendly”, and “remote-first” — and then discusses how a people-first, employee experience-driven approach can inform how each model may be built to last.

Regardless of where an organization lands in the space of hybrid possibilities, employee experience will be a critical lens to adapt when deciding how hybrid remote work evolves an organization’s employee value proposition. Thinking seriously about the kinds of experiences employees should be having in a hybrid world — what they should think, feel, say, and do — will be crucial to ensuring that a hybrid model can not only bear its intended fruit, but be sustainable enough to continue doing so well into the future. Because if history is any guide, it is unlikely that organizations will naturally find their way into the right hybrid ways of working simply because they now have experienced both co-located and distributed work. Design approaches which focus exclusively on processes and roles to arrive at the right hybrid model may successfully predict what kind of work can best be done where, but they’ll fail to illuminate why people should want to do that work from one place rather than another. That’s why employee experience needs to be taken seriously.

it is unlikely that organizations will naturally find their way into the right hybrid ways of working simply because they now have experienced both co-located and distributed work

The stakes can feel high for these kind of enterprise people programs — and indeed they are — but leaders can take steps now to ensure that short-term hiccups don’t grow into long-term suspicions that undermine the viability of these new ways of working. Top talent may flee to competitors with more attractive models. Reduced footprints might have to expand again as employees feel pulled back towards their co-located colleagues (whether they like it or not). Productivity may slip as people find themselves stuck once again in commutes and inefficient meetings. Mitigating these risks will require carefully managing the change involved in adopting new ways of working. As ephemeral as something like employee experience can seem, those approaches that put people first (not just their work or their roles) will prove critical in the successful transition to sustainable hybrid models — a transition which should ideally begin before we bring ourselves (and our old habits) back into the office.

The challenge with different experiences

The world is about to change, again. Effective vaccines have come online and emergence from the pandemic appears to be on the horizon.¹ Organizations that have been able to successfully operate remotely during the pandemic are beginning to talk about moving towards a “mixed” or “hybrid” model of work when this is all over, and that seems sensible. Absent additional detail though, what that actually means is anyone’s guess. In the space of possible work arrangements, the intention to go hybrid really only eliminates two options: the fully remote and fully on-site ones. Without getting concrete, employees hoping to plan their futures and candidates evaluating offers won’t know what hybrid would mean for them.

But deciding what hybrid means for individual organizations is proving to be a challenge. That’s because when you stop to think about it, it’s not at all clear how people should work in these future hybrid arrangements. Beyond the obvious questions like how many days a week employees can work remotely or who would be able to go fully remote and whether compensation will change, there are a host of subtler questions that would-be hybrid organizations need to begin asking. For example:

Should teams hold hybrid meetings, or should all participants dial in separately regardless of where they’re joining from?

Where should the executive team work? Is there a purpose for having a designated HQ?

Should onboarding be the same for remote and partially-remote employees?

How should information-sharing, decision-making, and collaboration practices be evolved to build upon what’s been learned while working remotely?

How can proximity bias be reduced to ensure that differences in geographic proximity don’t create differences in career opportunity?

Will organizations commit to measuring promotion rates for those in hybrid or fully remote roles to identify and address disparities if they arise?

Will the decision to work remotely be recognized as an inevitable tradeoff between opportunity and flexibility?

And what will be communicated in the interim to employees who may be trying to plan their future locations?

For these and other reasons that these posts will explore, running a hybrid organization may prove to be more difficult than running either of the two non-hybrids. This may seem counterintuitive — surely it would be easier, best of both worlds, right? In reality though, it will be vastly different. People will need to learn new in-office mindsets and behaviors to ensure those who are not co-located on any given day feel included and empowered to do their best work without fear of missing out.

After all, people are quite sensitive to difference and the inequities it can create. The thing that all hybrid models have in common is their acceptance that where people work will be different, day to day, week to week, or month to month. Managing these differences in such a way that they do not create opportunity and experience inequities (or only create ones that are tolerable) will be the key balance to strike when running a hybrid remote organization. Those which fail to strike this balance will feel themselves pulled back towards either pole: with a vast majority either consistently co-located, or consistently virtual. Getting it right will mean putting people first.

One thing to remember

Do not assume that just because an organization has experience working remotely and on-site, it will learn its way into the right hybrid ways of working. If an employer wants to enable remote practices that will be sufficiently equitable and sustainable to win the war for talent, realize productivity gains, cost savings, and everything else in their hybrid remote business cases, they should plan for it to take just as much training and thoughtful design to transition into a hybrid model as it did to transition into a fully-remote one when the pandemic began. For businesses, for individuals, and for the communities in which they live and work, there is too much at stake to get this wrong.

[1] since publishing this post in early April, 2021 US health officials’ outlooks on the timeline towards herd immunity have shifted because of changes in the pace of vaccinations. As a result, organizations may have more time to plan their hybrid programs and may choose to incrementally phase their return to offices as we learn how long a functional end to the pandemic will take.