Post pandemic, everyone was talking about hybrid.  A few notable exceptions aside, organisations responded to the overwhelming employee demand to retain some WFH by implementing hybrid working policies.  Remote work guru Nick Bloom estimates that we’ve had around 40 years of progress based on the pre-Covid WFH data. 

It has not however, been plain sailing.  Employees generally like hybrid, but there are tensions and frustrations under the surface.  There’s no single reason for this.  Sometimes, it’s about implementation. Sometimes, it’s about the policy and specific hybrid arrangements.  Also at play are personal preferences, organisational culture and managerial attitudes. 

I wrote a report for a client recently after completing a detailed review of their hybrid working arrangements and employee experiences.  One of the things I said, and it is equally true of many organisations, is that the differences of opinion about hybrid between some employees are irreconcilable.  For every manager or employee that thinks hybrid work is the best thing ever, there is someone who loathes it and wishes everyone was back in the office.  Flexible work brings out strong opinions, beliefs and biases. 

There are however, within those tensions and challenges, some key areas of commonality.  Where, when these difficulties emerge, there are similarities underneath. 

Here are my top five problems with hybrid work today – and how we can fix them.

We haven’t made enough changes to ways of working

In too many organisations, the switch to hybrid work was a lift and shift of old ways of working.  We used to have an in-person meeting?  Great!  Now we can have a Teams one.  It’s the same old work, being done in the same old way, but occasionally people get to do it from some place new.  Effective hybrid and flexible work needs new ways of working as well as supporting systems and processes.  Solution?  Talk to your employees about what needs to change to enable effective and productive hybrid work.  What are the barriers they experience?  What needs to stop, start and continue?  Top of the list should be how do people communicate, share knowledge and work as a team. 

The office isn’t working well enough

The office, as many of us know it, was not designed for the hybrid era.  There are a whole range of practical issues in many workplaces.  Not enough spaces to accommodate online meetings or quiet work.  Conversely, space that also does not truly facilitate people getting together to do the important social, connection and relationship stuff. The result is a place some people just don’t want to visit unless compelled. Solution? Not everyone will be able to afford a redesign of space. But there are some simple steps that can help.  Create quiet spaces and spaces where teams can be together and be noisy if necessary. Make it easy to book a space to work if its needed – and make it a place people want to come to. Think food, opportunities for socialising, great coffee. If you have more scope for change, start considering a key question. Today and tomorow, what is the purpose of your office? Is it for meetings? Relationships? The stuff that can only be done in a physical place? The future purpose of your office should define how it is used and how it is designed.

Employees aren’t getting as much autonomy as they really want and they are frustrated

Part of the preference for remote work is about autonomy – and a desire for more of it.  Employees want choice and flexibility, not just in location of work but generally.  They know that work can take place around life, and not be the centre of it.  Mandated office time is demotivating.  Employees understandably wonder ‘why am I here’ when they believe that they could just as effectively be working from home.  Having rules about in-person time or physical presence might be operationally essential – but too many employees feel that it is less about a need back up with evidence, and more about trust and manager preferences.  It’s common to hear employees complain that they just don’t know why a particular attendance requirement was set.  The solution?  Within the constraints of the role, provide as much autonomy as possible.  Bring time flex together with location flex, supported by ascyronous tech.  Empower people to choose within a framework.  And if you need to mandate attendance, explain why. 

There’s not enough connection and co-ordination.

This point is linked to the previous one. Employees often say that they lack connection with colleagues when they work in a hybrid way.  This isn’t just about how often they are in the office but the pattern of the whole team.  Because there’s no point commuting to the office to spend the day alone, to spend it on Teams calls, or to do work that can be done effectively from home.  Teams who have regular, scheduled office time at the same time, such as anchor days, have a more positive view of hybrid work and report better organisational outcomes.  Solution?  Co-ordinate in-person time.  Establish regular all together time where relationships, development activities, creativity, discussion and socialising is the focus. Create a way of sharing who is where, and when. Make it common place for people to share how best to contact them and their hours of work. Make in-person time together non-negotiable – but also make it valuable. 

We have neglected learning and development

Not in general, just in terms of hybrid. For many people, hybrid is a very different way of working. It is easy to think that we have all been doing this sort of thing for a few years now and no further development is required, but I do not believe this to be true. We are all still learning about hybrid and how it works in practice, so equally there continues to be learning and development needs too, especially for managers. How to co-ordinate and communicate, how to fully use supportive tech to its best effect, how to make it inclusive, support wellbeing….. The list is potentially long. Solution? Talk to your employees about what would help them do hybrid better, either as an individual or a manager. For managers in particular, provide them with facilitated, supported spaces to talk about their challenges and how they overcome them. Keep refreshing your learning opportunities as hybrid evolves.

Hybrid work does work. It can deliver positive outcomes for employees and organisations. But we do need to put the work in to get us there.

The ideas I present here draw on some of my own research as well as work undertaken for clients, comprising in total of over 12,000 individual open ended survey comments reviewed and analysed over three years.