Half time check in - What are the real effects of hybrid work?

Niklas Madsen, Jenny Madsen & Rosanna Rippel

Up until now since the dawn of the pandemic, the aim of every decision and effort has been to survive. In a crisis situation, people can muster a lot. But as we are now entering an era where the focus starts to shift from surviving to thriving, where suboptimal hurried solutions are to be replaced by long term sustainable ones, it is time for a half time check-in. In this article, we will walk you through which high risks and golden opportunities to pay attention to as hybrid work becomes the new normal.

The future is here

The post-Corona era has arrived. The change has taken place. Working remotely or from home has become part of everyday life for most people and organizations. Nowadays, it is no longer strange to spend more time in digital worlds than in conversations with people in the same room. The main function of the office has quickly transformed from being a place where you mainly produce into being a place where you come to meet.

Challenges and questions that we never considered before are suddenly falling into our laps. How will onboarding of new colleagues, community, culture and innovation happen when people rarely see each other in 3D?

We see unique office solutions and individually customized workspace designs popping up everywhere to address new needs and purposes. People are doing their job from their summer house, the café on the corner or from a restaurant by the beach at Mallorca. They play padel at 10 am and make up for the time in the evening hours or during the weekend. Employees from all generations have grown used to the flexibility of the post-Corona work life balance, and are reluctant to go back to the fixed nine to five. They, as well as the business leaders, have come to understand that the conventional frames are not necessary for productivity, and that having ownership over when and where to work feels pretty good.

At Superlab, the winter and spring of 2021 has to a large extent evolved around helping our customers with strategic questions regarding how to cope with the new normal and prepare themselves for the future work life (yes, the change will continue).

Coping with dream scenarios

Ample research concludes that the most common employee dream scenario is to spend 2-3 days a week at the office. However, this poses some difficult challenges for the employer. How do you ensure that the facilities are being used in a smart and effective way? Perhaps your company has recently invested in new furniture, but every other day there is nobody there to enjoy using it. That’s unfortunate.

In fact, the employers are not alone with this concern. Employees’ most frequently stated reason for wanting to turn up at the office is the social connections that take place there. Therefore, it lies in their interest to minimize the risk of turning up at the office, super ready for a common lunch or coffee, and discover that nobody else is there. Also, the energy of an empty office cannot match the pulse of when it is full of life, with people moving and working together. This pulse is another important aspect that employees travel to the office to get a taste of. It simply is not the same at home.

With the intention of avoiding these scenarios, some organizations have been experimenting with different types of booking systems. One solution we have seen in this area is to make it possible for a manager to book their team along with suitable physical work stations for a set period of time. Everyone is then expected to show up physically on site. Scheduling work in this way opens up for new habits and use of the physical space.

However, don’t entrust one manager with the task of deciding how their whole team should work when the company shifts to a hybrid model. It is suboptimal from a motivational perspective since it robs employees of the highly valued right to make their own choices. Moreover, it imposes a big risk of falling back into old habits and easy, short term solutions. Therefore, we advise you to set up guidelines for your organization to promote a coherent course of development that has the company's best interest at heart.

How to adjust your office post pandemic style

As most of us learned already, the need for private work stations and areas for hot desking is decreasing with the normalization of the hybrid work model. Of course we still need places to do deep work individually, but more urgently we need common spaces where teams can bump into each other without making plans for it. Research is clear on the point that these informal meeting spaces are a gold mine for sparking creativity and innovation.

Other important needs to consider when optimizing your office space are spaces where teams can work together and plenty of meeting rooms. Many organizations are still disregarding what we would call an essential feature of tomorrow’s offices; rooms properly equipped for digital meetings. In order to be able to tackle the dawn of hybrid working models, this is an absolute must.

Although these factors apply to virtually every company, the master key for luring employees back into the office after growing attached to remote work lies in analysing their needs and behaviors. We believe this might be the most central factor in order to get a hybrid model to work and to foster a healthy company culture. Who are the employees? How do they currently use the office? Under what conditions do they collaborate best? Questions like these can be investigated in several ways. Some companies use surveys where people themselves get to describe their preferences and behaviors. This method can absolutely serve the purpose, but risks being affected by biases and the fact that humans are generally bad at introspecting. Therefore it’s a good idea to complement the voices of your staff with data on their actual behavior using sensors or thermal images. These are able to show how people move around in the office in the course of the day without compromising integrity.

This data is useful in many ways. It makes it easier to see how the office space can be designed in the employees best interest, and how it can support the company culture in the best way possible. Further, it informs decision processes that might otherwise be hijacked by one single manager who is used to being in charge and deciding for the whole team.

Young generations + hybrid = true?

Though it may very well be that employees demanding a private, fully-equipped ergonomic work station at the office while often working from home are making an unreasonable request, many are still looking for the full-on hybrid model. The word “freedom” is trending in job posts globally, and it is one of the qualities job-seekers rate as most valuable when choosing their new position.

One example from our own work shows that a hybrid work model is bordered with faulty preconceptions. We helped a sales organization with a big employee turnover to attract and keep young talent. In addition to making a few modifications in the physical space, they offered employees the possibility to work remotely whenever they felt like it. Even though the offer was successful in both attracting and keeping young coworkers, the company also reported that many of them spent quite a lot of time at the office. Oftentimes, they live alone in smaller homes with less ergonomically correct workspaces, and they feel called to the office to get social contact with their colleagues. But, they do not want to feel forced to go there.

Vi hjälpte en säljorganisation med målet att behålla talanger och att attrahera yngre arbetssökande. Utöver fysiska förändringar av kontoret erbjöds även möjligheten att arbeta på distans närhelst de anställda föredrog det. Trots att det erbjudandet visade sig effektivt både för att dra till sig och behålla unga medarbetare, rapporterade organisationen att samma medarbetare trots allt spenderade mycket tid på kontoret.

Having worked closely with these matters for a long time, our experience is that it is not necessarily true that (especially young) people fancying the hybrid model don’t want to spend time at the office. Rather, it seems to us that the element they appreciate most is being able to choose for themselves.

The silo-effect

“Working from home has not affected our company negatively in any way.”. This is the general point of view of many managers we interviewed last year. But sometimes things are not as clear as they first appear. After having dug a bit deeper, we discovered that these reports only concern the manager’s own team. Despite the daily digital coffees and check-ins, something has gone lost with remote working that was not picked up by these managers.

When we study the interaction patterns of organizations, we see that contact between different departments has become almost non-existent. This kind of “silo-effect” where people only talk to those inside their own closest circle has resulted in the enormous negative effect of echo-chamber thinking and shrinking networks.

Many companies report that cross-disciplinary cooperation and communication has decreased, and that creativity levels have suffered from the radical decline of spontaneous meetings that normally take place in the corridors or cantines. The short term consequences of this show up in irritation and misunderstandings. The long term consequences of the silo-effect is that departments lose their overview; the holistic understanding of what they are doing. Oftentimes, this leads to a motivational drop, losing sight of the big picture and focusing only on getting your own tasks done fast.

Health risks of isolation

Then there is the social factor. More shallow relationships, less relationships, and judging from our research; less fun. “We laugh less when we work from home.”, one of our interview participants recently reported.

Social interactions on a daily basis is actually the best predictor of having a long and healthy life. More so than exercise, smoking or dietary factors. And that is not limited to close relationships, but whether you say hello to the waitress at the café, talk to the taxi driver or greet the person passing you in the street. A simple high five with a colleague will lower your levels of stress hormone. Social isolation, therefore, is a big public health risk of our time.

People face this risk of social isolation on different terms. Paradoxically enough, research shows that being extroverted is the most important factor for enjoying remote work. Partly because they are better at keeping their relationships outside the workplace alive, and partly because extroverts gain energy from challenges and the feeling of “we will sort this out together”. Introverts on the other hand have a harder time finding their spark when they are not around other people, something that is important to be aware of as a leader or manager in order to prevent them feeling excluded.

Digital employer branding and culture

In the last five years, much of employer branding has been about creating an identity in the physical office environment. Now that there are employees that have never actually been to the office or met any of their colleagues in person, it is starting to become evident that remote working has taken a toll on company culture.

We believe that virtual meeting rooms and avatars will become just as important as the office design. To step into a shared environment with an atmosphere that mirrors the company you are a part of spurs the collective feeling of community. We are not talking about a blurry background with the company logo in Teams or Zoom, but an actual place in a shared digital world. What if you could meet your colleagues for morning coffee in a lovely lounge, sign contracts with customers in a grandiose hall, or why not have a digital meeting at a padel court? When nothing is materialized, it is easier to be bold in your branding.

Digital employer branding has become a fast growing field. Designers are already developing customized backgrounds for online meeting tools. We think this will soon open up a new market for furniture brands that want their own products represented in the digital environment.

An equally important and also fast growing field concerns the digital culture. As more and more work happens online, the “silo-effect” mentioned above risks cutting the company culture into their own small units, consequently breaking up the holistic vision. The key to a healthy digital culture is rituals, structures and storytelling, which does not need to be tied to a physical location. Spreading the spirit of “how things are done around here” and communicating the vibe the company wants to emanate takes thorough planning and execution. Allowing informal talks on Zoom to make up for the lost spontaneous meetings at the coffee machine will not suffice. Establishing a healthy digital company culture can be cumbersome, but when done right it will foster collaboration, flattening hierarchies and breaking internal barriers.

The suboptimality of mixed meetings

Other than the classic question of whether you can force people to have their camera on, the hottest question regarding digital meetings right now is the matter of what to do when not all the participants are online. When half of the group sits in the same room, and half of them are working from home, there is usually not the same level of participation and presence from those that partake from a distance. This tends to affect the effectiveness and result of the meeting as a whole.

Some organizations have tackled the issue by making all participants join in from their own room, so that the conditions are similar across the group. Of course, this is not sustainable from a space efficiency point of view and it only works when most employees work from home. Another semi-satisfying solution is to make all physically present participants have the meeting platform open with their camera on, so that they all can at least see each other.

Unfortunately, mixed meetings is one of the problems to which we have yet to find an elegant solution, but raising the issue will at least spread awareness which helps people to be considerate.

The aftermath of survival

When people are in survival mode, they can accept a lot. The general perception during the pandemic has been that most of us have been coping relatively well under the circumstances. However, the solutions have oftentimes been far from optimal. Employees have been having online coffee meetings, which works but is not optimal. Organizations have introduced rules of how to avoid exposing each other to danger when visiting the office, which works but is not optimal. Many digital tools for collaboration have been deployed that work, but are not optimal.

But now, it is time to leave the defensiveness behind and start thinking in forward terms again, creating company visions, sustainable work models and other solutions to get things flowing in the long run. To start designing for optimal outcomes, instead of merely acceptable ones.

We are still prototyping the future, and the change will continue. But not to the same degree as before, and it will not be as driven from factors affecting the business from the outside, but rather from within the organization. The spotlight for change is now starting to exceed how we are doing things, and come to include a scrutiny around what things we are doing. Business models are being exchanged, unnecessary positions are being redefined and official offers modified.

When products of hasty survival-mechanisms are being turned inside out, well considered decisions will be the currency for success in the post pandemic times. This is the time to invest wisely.