Management Perspectives

With the hope of the pandemic ending and a sense of normalcy returning to life, many business leaders have now turned their focus to what that ‘new normal’ will look like when it comes to how we work. A lot of leaders have learned that it is possible to achieve much more remotely than they might have previously imagined, but at the same time very few are ready to ditch the office entirely. The general consensus seems to be that work will become a hybrid of remote and office work, and of course this is going to bring a number of new challenges with it.

It seems to have escaped a lot of people’s attention that most workplaces were already operating in a kind of hybrid way even before the pandemic. Working from home had been an acceptable practice in nearly every business even before the enforcement of it, it is just that it was usually considered to be the lesser experience. The office was considered to be the primary place where work would get done, with working from home being an optional extra—in fact, almost a perk. The change we are going to see now is that remote working will become a more intrinsic part of our working practices.

I think of this transition as similar to the ‘mobile first’ development movement that happened around 2010. Before this, websites were designed and built with the primary focus being the desktop, and once this was done, another—usually lesser—experience was built for mobile. ‘Mobile first’ recognised that phones were going to be the dominant way people viewed websites, so it shifted the approach to building the mobile experience first, then the desktop. When it comes to remote working, this is exactly what we are going to have to do—focus on the remote experience first, and then the office one.

I have heard of several different plans for how to approach this, and whilst I do not think a silver bullet has emerged yet—and will be unlikely to for some time—there are certainly a few obvious pitfalls that I can see a lot of businesses walking into. When creating a hybrid workplace, I believe it will be difficult to design a system that allows us to get the best of both the worlds. It will be all too easy to have an office and allow remote working, hoping to get the fully immersive cultural benefits of the office, and the flexibility and time-efficiency of remote working, only for each of the approaches to end up cancelling out the benefits of the other. We need to make sure that the negatives of one way of working do not directly impact the other, rendering both options ‘worse than’ if either were implemented on its own.

My current thinking on this is actually very unusual, given my professional history and management philosophy. Considering that I wrote a book advocating for less hands in management and a reactive way of working that does not apply set boundaries to people, it feels strange to say that, in this case, I believe that if we are going to implement hybrid workplaces, we will need to set very clear parameters and guidelines to ensure that the systems fit together. It will be no good if someone decides to come into the office on two days of the week in order to speak to specific colleagues, if those specific colleagues then choose different days of the week to do the same. It will also not be as simple as we might imagine.

We cannot, for example, simply tell people they work from home half the time and then halve our office space, because the bell curve of attendance will see our office being under- or over-utilised most of the time. It would be great if people could work from anywhere, but I believe it will be necessary to have extremely clear guidelines for how that works and for those guidelines to be followed.

One example of a policy I have seen being planned numerous times, now that companies are starting to bring people back into the office, is to tell people that they only have to be in the office two or three days a week—and allow each person to choose which days those will be. I think this has all the hallmarks of a ‘worst of both worlds’ policy. If we want to allow everyone to work from home for three days a week, that is fine in principle, but I think we will have to specify which days. If the point of coming to office is to have access to one another, to build a culture, or to achieve anything else that you believe is only achievable with everyone actually together in one building, then you need to make sure everyone actually is together.

If I were to implement a ‘two days a week in the office’ policy, I would make those days Thursday and Friday for everyone, and not just leave it to people to decide when and where. This is one of the only examples I can think of where letting individuals act entirely independently will almost certainly lead to bad outcomes. I think successful hybrid strategies will take a lot of collaborative decision making, which is what will make them so challenging.

What I think will underpin any successful strategy is ensuring we have a clear understanding of why we have office space, and why we allow remote work. Are we retaining remote work because people want it, or to save money? Are we bringing people into the office to build culture, or to monitor their work. We need to understand this ourselves before making arbitrary decisions that seek to just enable both kinds of working without thinking about what we are trying to get out of it, and we need to clearly communicate those reasons to everyone.

Hybrid working can be implemented, but it is not going to be as simple as just offering people both options and seeing what happens. Leaders are going to have to really decide what kind of company they want, because how we approach this decision is going to have a big impact on that.