The COVID-19 pandemic changed a whole heck of a lot about the way we work.  BC (Before Covid) flexible forms of work were creeping towards acceptance at not much more than a snail’s pace.  Remote work guru Nick Bloom believes that, based on previous rates of advancement, we have experienced 40 years of remote work progression as a result of the so-called ‘great working from home experiment’.

Remote work became our new normal – not just during the pandemic but after it too.  Companies responded to that overwhelming employee demand for remote work.  Many of them implemented hybrid working policies and arrangements, often on an informal or non-contractual basis.  Many of those polices and arrangements were drafted when we were all still working around restrictions, and they were only tested in anger when we returned (kind of) to the office. 

It is now time to review those ways of working, those policies.  It is important to assess how hybrid is going for every stakeholder in the game.  This is how we learn and evolve, and ensure that hybrid is delivering on its potential.

There are a number of areas to consider.  For example:

• Is the particular form of hybrid (such as the amount of time spent in the office v home, or the amount of structure contained within the approach) optimal?  Is it delivering against the organisation’s overall goals for hybrid work implementation?
• How satisfied are employees with hybrid work?  Is it helping them to feel engaged, motivated and well? What challenges and difficulties are they experiencing, and how can this be overcome?
• What are the costs or cost savings of hybrid work and how it has been implemented?  If there are any inefficiencies, how can these be addressed? 
• How is hybrid work influencing key organisational concerns such as performance and productivity, communication and collaboration? Is there room for improvement – and if so, what does this look like?
• How is hybrid work influencing each aspect of the employment lifecycle?

For those organisations who are yet to undertake a review, here is my advice on what it should entail.

• An employee survey.  Ask people what is good and less good about hybrid work and the way that it is being implemented in your organisation.  Give them space for some open questions, not just Likert scales and yes / no answers.  Ensure that you can differentiate between managers and non-manager in the answers.  What themes and insights emerge?  Most important of all – seek out suggestions for improvement.
• Focus groups.  Go deeper than the employee survey to gain rich insight and nuance.  Consider talking to specific groups to understand their experience, such as working parents, disabled employees or carers.  Ask for ideas about improvement here, too. 
• Talk to trade unions if you recognise them.  What are their perspectives about your implementation?  What are their members saying to them?  If you don’t recognise a trade union or don’t have any formal employee representation, do you have internal support or networking groups that might also have a useful input into a review?
• Senior leaders and people managers.  In particular, explore how they find leading and managing a hybrid team in practice.  What do they find easy and difficult, and what would help them to improve?  How do they perceive hybrid work to be influencing communication and collaboration in their teams, as well as productivity and performance?
• Look at your people data and processes, where available.  How is hybrid work influencing your employment lifecycle, including recruitment, induction, training and performance management.  Is hybrid helping you recruit?  Is it influencing absence levels, employee engagement scores, wellbeing measures, or performance management appraisal scores? Have any employee relations issues arisen, and if so, why might this be?
• Again, if you have it, look at the data around your space utilisation.  When are people coming into the office? What are they doing there?  If you don’t have easy to access data, these are questions you can include in your employee survey.

Hybrid work is still new at scale, and good practice is only just beginning to emerge. It will take time for research to provide us with more information about making hybrid optimal.  Taking a continuous improvement approach is key – this is what will allow each organisation to find their own optimal version of hybrid, stay agile and make informed decisions.   These steps can help you to answer the question ‘how is hybrid work, working for us?’.