Many of us have embraced the benefits of the hybrid life as part of the ‘new normal’. Of course some jobs can’t be done remotely, and some personality types do not thrive in a home office. But most office-based organisations can and should be hybrid. Giving employees flexibility in how and where they do their jobs is good for business, and makes the workplace more accessible for neurodiverse people (like me!).
Co-location has benefits - creativity and networking being oft-cited as ‘better in-person’. Many companies are introducing mandatory office days as managers want to ‘return’ to ‘normal’. But they’re missing an opportunity. Office days are a deeply unimaginative default solution to a problem defined without nuance. They are unpopular and counter-productive, and don’t actually solve the problems they’re supposed to. Too often they simply create an oppressive hellscape of noisy colleagues on back-to-back video calls.
The old office isn’t coming back (thankfully), but it’s not enough to be ‘hybrid by default’ - we need to be ‘hybrid by design’. This means actively and intentionally finding cadences, rituals and tools that work. What’s needed is a critical eye on how to design the ‘best of both worlds’ - but they first need to understand what problem they’re really solving. Define the brief, to define what type of organisation you actually need, and then design it.
As ever, we must start with the users. Who are they (or rather, how might we define the user groups), what do they need, and what are their goals? For example:
A creative team might need a way to spontaneously drop into meetings and easily share craft skills and know-how
A policy team needs to take account of a broad range of expertise and perspectives as it draws up decisions (and do so efficiently)
A leader needs a way to monitor teams’ KPIs so they have an idea of progress, and understand how to support employees
At an enterprise level, there’s a requirement for solutions to be compatible with existing systems and ways of working
Note that the above is worded to be solution-agnostic. With these, you can then develop a “hybrid by design” setup that coherently serves the needs of a whole organisation, not just its leaders. It also helps avoid the cardinal sin of ‘tech for tech’s sake’.
We’ve seen strides in the humanisation of remote work, with excellent tools like Slack and Mural/Miro, which allow for more visual, human and ‘natural’ ways of interacting. As with anything, there are ways of using these more or less well. Aside from these, here are a few things from my recent experience that I think organisations could use (or use better) to be hybrid-by-design:
Online ‘live’ documents - Word, powerpoint and excel - “Underused? Surely not” - Yes! Have you any idea how many meetings and emails could be avoided by better use of these tools? Asynchronous document review is so powerful, but requires active participation.
Team ‘culture’ meetings. “What? A meeting?!” - Culture needs a space to live, and if it’s not in an office it should be somewhere else. Leaders need to own this, by being present and perhaps shaping and permission-giving, but the members make the team. An organisation lives or dies by its culture. (If you lead a team and you’re rolling your eyes at this one, I have news for you.)
‘Office simulators’ - a really interesting emerging category. Gather.town is a good example. It reduces the need for formal meetings and allows for more natural water-cooler style interaction. Proof that effective tech solutions can still low-res, and that an actually useful ‘metaverse’ might not be one that doesn’t simply try to look the same as reality.
What have you found effective in your hybrid working world?