Feature
At the beginning of 2023, there was still ongoing debate over which work model between remote, on-site and hybrid was best suited for business. While remote flexibility had become popular among employees, there were signs that many company leaders had had enough. They wanted staff back in the office. At least some of the time.
And as organizations started recalling workers to the office, many reports claimed this was the beginning of the end of remote working.
Throughout the year, we saw many examples to support this contention.
By the end of spring, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet all had implemented a hybrid working policy. Even Zoom, a company built on remote collaboration principles, asked its employees to return to the office, announcing in August that it would be taking a “structured hybrid approach” to work.
Technology companies that walked back their remote policy captured more of the headlines than those in other sectors, in part due to the fast pace at which they were calling employees back. According to Advanced Workplace Associates' Hybrid Working Index, although initially tech companies had less than half the attendance of financial and professional services firms, their average office attendance increased substantially during the first half of the year. By August, tech office attendance reached 32%, almost closing the gap with professional and financial services companies, which sat at 35%.
The trend, of course, extended beyond the tech sector, and it continues cross-industry still. Case in point, just a few weeks ago, at the beginning of December, General Motors announced that it was calling workers back to the office Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays each week. Smuckers received accolades for the way it handled its hybrid work policy.
Hybrid working, it seems, has become the standard rather than the exception, a trend that is likely to continue into 2024. Here's why.
Hybrid Is Here to Stay
Kirstina Prodnar, a digital policy consultant based in Washington, DC, expects not only that hybrid is here to stay, but also that it will reshape how corporations work and relate to employees.
“I see the shift [to hybrid work] as irreversible, despite all the overblown headlines indicating that employees are being asked to come back into the office,” she told us.
She added that one of the key indicators for sustaining this trend over the past six months is that productivity is up on average from where it was same period last year. “If performance and customer delivery are sustained and employees prefer the combination work model, I do not see organizations moving away from hybrid."
She believes that, generally speaking, organizations will “iron out” the Monday and Friday work-from-home concept, with many corporate workers coming into the office three days a week, usually Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
The fact that this approach is working well for individuals and business units will prevent a return to all physical full week, she said. “In some organizations, we have seen a ‘work from home the 2 weeks after major holidays’ approach as a means of keeping Covid transmission rates low, further cementing the hybrid working model approach."
Related Article: Conquering the Top 4 Hybrid Work Challenges
Finding a Valuable Compromise
Digital workplace strategist and advisor, and the founder of Engaged Organizations, Rachel Happe, also believes that hybrid work is here to stay, pointing to data from WFH Research to substantiate her claim. But she also sees this move to hybrid as the continuation of a decades-long trend that started with senior leadership.
“I started my career in management consulting, and I was working remotely in the mid-1990s. Many senior executives were never in the office five days a week,” she said. And with the Covid pandemic, this dynamic spread to individuals and industries that had historically participated in remote work at lower levels like non-profits, education, healthcare and finance, she added.
When she asked individuals about the benefits of hybrid work, schedule control was ranked first by a significant margin.
“People don’t like to be told what to do, and now, the metaphorical curtain has been pulled back, and people realize, like executives, that being in the office five days a week is not required to get their work done. The genie is out of the bottle,” she said.
She says that while most people miss the connection and energy that being together can generate, it's unlikely that employees will accept going back to the office full time if it means coming into half-empty spaces just to join virtual meetings all day, which she projects will be reality for many for at least a year still.
To resolve this issue, she said, the office has to have an ROI. "Organizations should assess offices the same way technology platforms are evaluated: by evaluating work practices and building spaces that make those practices easier or better," she said, relating a conversation she had with Ted Hopton of Motorola and John Day of IEEE.
Executives are seeking some of the positive externalities that come from having people together, but they are not accounting for the costs individuals bear to generate them. Cultural cohesion, she called it, is a benefit of being together, but it is not anyone’s job — it comes from employees who use discretionary effort and energy and spend unpaid time commuting.
"It makes sense that if executives don’t have to invest to get that benefit, they don’t want to, but individuals don’t want to be taken advantage of either, especially if their effort is not even acknowledged," she said.
Tp make going to the office more compelling to employees, she suggests redesigning offices as event spaces and investing in events and activities that give employees time to learn, reflect and connect. "They could invest in helping front-line managers better understand how to streamline group work practices and align technology so employees get more benefits from network effects, whether using technology or coming to the office," she said.
"Trust is rarely given to those in power if it is not extended first," she said.
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Related Article: 4 Considerations for Designing a Seamless Hybrid Workspace
No Single Strategy
For Iliya Rybchin, a partner at Elixxir and a growth, disruption and innovation consultant, the decision to have a hybrid, remote or onsite workplace is not that black-and-white and depends on the organization and its culture. "It depends because there simply is no universal answer to the hybrid question," he said.
Many have attempted to predict the future of the workplace, but, as Rybchin noted, every workplace is different. What we do know, he said, that can tip the scale against fully remote work is that while in times of crisis working from home is viable for nearly every industry, in a "normal" setting "viable" is not an acceptable benchmark for some companies.
“Take my industry, consulting,” he said. “I grew up in consulting in an era where your week meant catching a flight on Monday, spending the week at a client office and coming home Thursday night or Friday morning.” That model, he said, was put on hold during the pandemic and the consulting industry did not skip a beat. More importantly, clients realized there was no reason to pay for teams of young consultants to fly in every week and live in 4-star hotels while dining out for breakfast, lunch and dinner. For most high-intensity consulting projects, the cost of weekly travel did not justify the outcomes.
While the consulting firms are eager to get back to traveling to clients' offices, clients are still demanding the remote or hybrid model, having realized that the in-office experience benefits consultants far more than the client.
In response, Rybchin said, some consulting firms have increased the need for workshops. Many projects that have absolutely no need for workshops have work plans filled with various workshops, merely as an excuse to put the consulting team face-to-face with clients and arrange dinners, he said. We see this in other industries where hybrid is a perfectly viable or even a superior model but external forces, unrelated to productivity or cost-savings, are driving the push to more in-person work.
The result, he said, is that answers to questions about the future of the workplace must focus less on the mechanics of hybrid working and more on the nuanced needs of the individual businesses. “I hate to sound cynical, but decisions about work policies rarely take the needs of workers in mind. These decisions are made based on cold business rationale,” he said.
Plus, he noted, the push to back-to-office began while the job market was still incredibly tight. Employees who wanted remote or hybrid work knew that they could easily quit and find other remote or hybrid jobs. In a tight market, companies are very skittish about aggressive enforcement of office policies, so hybrid seemed like a good compromise. And while the job market is still challenging, the unemployment and job openings numbers are normalizing, which means the dynamics between employers and employees may readjust over time.
As more employers move toward back-to-office, the opportunities for fully remote or hybrid jobs will decrease. “We will still see pushback, and some firms may experience some attrition but acceptance of back-to-office will gradually increase,” he said.