How to get hybrid right (and make it stick)

Despite what some business leaders and government ministers want to believe, it seems pretty clear that hybrid working is here to stay. According to ONS data, 38% of working adults reported having worked at home at some point over the past seven days in Spring 2022, and 84% of those who had to work from home during the pandemic were planning to continue to work on a hybrid basis.

And it’s becoming a deal breaker for employees, with 47% of UK office workers – and 60% of those aged 25-34 – saying they would be prepared to quit their current job and look for new opportunities if flex isn’t provided by their employer.

Leaders want to do hybrid well – but don’t always know how

But there’s a science to doing hybrid working well. It’s not just a case of dishing out a laptop and telling people they can work from home a few days a week. And there’s a danger that ways of working developed in haste during the pandemic are still in place, and being left to drift, rather than being actively redesigned to suit the post-Covid landscape.

From our work with clients across all sectors, it’s clear that there’s a willingness to get behind hybrid working, and a determination to do it well. But what’s less clear is how to do so.

We recently explored this in depth with our research, Beyond the hype of hybrid, which dug into the challenges that companies have experienced, and the ways they are working to tackle them. As part of this project, we’ve identified three core actions that employers who want to get hybrid right – and make it stick – should take.

Three core actions to help you get hybrid right

1. Upskill Leaders & Managers

Managing hybrid teams, and negotiating and implementing hybrid patterns, is not instinctive. So make sure your managers, and your leadership team, understand why it’s important and how to do it successfully. This includes:

• Clarifying the ways in which hybrid working benefits the organisation, so the effort it takes feels worthwhile.
• Reviewing your management development offer, to see whether it is fit for purpose in a hybrid world. This should include how to build a team culture around trust and accountability, and avoiding proximity bias.
• Using a team-based approach to designing and developing hybrid patterns, in which the impact of individual preferences on the whole team is considered. This means not everyone will get everything they want, all the time, and managers need to know how to navigate that.

You’ll also need to build in a feedback loop to understand how managing a hybrid team is affecting your managers’ own workload and productivity. It needs to work for them, too.  

2. Enable connection and cultural cohesion

Hybrid working is only possible because of advances in tech; but tech alone won’t make it stick. Companies who want to succeed at hybrid working need to take deliberate action to keep their employees connected, and provide opportunities for collaboration.

This includes:

• Revaluating what the office is for. Don’t just do this on a top-down basis; get input from your teams about how they would want to use their in-office time. If people are coming in to sit at their desks with their headphones on all day, you’re not doing it right.
• Making it worth people’s while to come in (and not just by offering free coffee). Redesign your space to suit collaboration, and create time and opportunities for people to connect, both formally and informally. Encourage them to plan their workloads so they’re carrying out the right task in the right place.
• Using tech to make virtual collaboration as seamless as possible, and develop processes to help people share work and ideas when they’re not together.
• Understanding why some people might be resistant to returning to the office, and working with them to design a solution.

As one of our panelists at a recent event noted, “People crave the crackle you get in the air in a meeting.” Finding ways to bring that crackle to life in your workplace will really help make hybrid working stick.

3. Ensure fairness and inclusion

Hybrid working, done well, can actually boost inclusion. For some key groups, being able to work from home at least some of the time can be a gamechanger. And it can also support the recruitment of a more diverse, less geographically restricted workforce.

But there are a number of issues, legal and otherwise, that need to be considered to ensure that your arrangements are fair and inclusive. For example:

• The risk of proximity bias, through which people who are less frequently present in the office become marginalised, and miss out on opportunities. Take time to update your ED & I policies to reflect any potential biases, and brief managers on how to handle them.
• The need to harmonise approaches across the organisation, and to offer alternative flexible working arrangements to employees whose roles can’t be carried out remotely. Innovative approaches to scheduling can help with this, particularly for frontline roles.
• The approach you’ll take regarding renumeration for employees who are based in different locations. The growth in remote working has led many companies to recruit from a wider area, and some employees to move further afield, so this is an evolving issue. It’s too complex to answer here, but we certainly don’t recommend cutting remote workers’ pay.

The legal and HR ramifications of hybrid working are many and varied, and you’ll certainly need to invest some time exploring the impact on issues such as benefits and rewards. You’ll also need to decide whether to make your hybrid arrangements informal or contractual. 

Gathering the data to inform your approach

Hybrid working is still relatively new, and many organisations have been trialing different approaches as they go along. So it’s a good time to start gathering the data to track how it is working in reality.

This doesn’t mean monitoring attendance for the sake of it, or leaving passive-aggressive notes on empty desks. It’s about collecting information about who is using your office space, and how they’re using it, to ensure that your approach is productive and inclusive.

You should combine your data collection with inclusive listening activities, via groups or surveys, to capture experiences as well as numbers. You could also consider getting input from new starters, who will have a preconception-free view of how well your hybrid-working arrangements are working in practice.

It’s our expectation that the next couple of years will see companies refining and embedding their hybrid working arrangements, and using them as a foundation on which to build more inclusive, more productive, and happier workplaces. Working practices will continue to evolve, but by taking the actions set out here, you’ll be well placed to get hybrid right, and make it stick.

Published July 2022