My colleague Ranya Nehmeh and I have an article out now in the Harvard Business Review—“Hybrid Still Isn’t Working”—about problems with hybrid work arrangements and how leaders can fix them. (Editors pick headlines, by the way.)
For employers that retained remote work after the pandemic, the idea that they could simply tell employees to work from home three days a week without doing anything different and that it would be problem-free seems like magical thinking.
The most obvious problems now are employees just not coming in on “anchor days”—with three-fourths of employers reporting that challenge—and spending more time on meetings that are even less useful than when they were in the office. Leaders could fix issues like these quickly if they tried.
The bigger problems stem from the fact that a lot of how we got work done in offices before the pandemic involved personal ties and interactions. We ask someone we know for help, we pick up what people now call “weak signals” in water cooler conversations about work issues, we look after new hires when they are lost, we go to someone we know if we can’t get something done, we talk in person if there is a problem rather than fire off a memo.
Those capabilities weaken when we are not face-to-face. Leaders could help employees build those ties even if they are only in the office a couple of days a week, but it requires more effort and action from the organization to make that happen.
Hiring into hybrid orgs
The longer-term problem is new hires, something that employers have not paid enough attention to. Since the pandemic, an entire generation of employees who did not have a full-time work experience with their colleagues has entered the workforce. The average job tenure in the U.S. now is only four years, so if your turnover is about 10% per year, half your employees are new since the pandemic.
If you’ve been operating with remote or hybrid work arrangements, you’ve now got a two-tier workforce with an older, more senior group of employees who know people, the culture and the informal ways things get done. Then, you’ve got a newer, less tenured group that doesn’t know nearly as many people nearly as well as the older cohort did at the same age. They also have not experienced the organization the same way, and they don’t know the culture or the informal way things get done. The need to do something about the lack of a common experience seems pretty obvious.
The case for consultants
Our article is based on the premise that bringing everyone back to the office is not feasible. This is, in part, because most hybrid employers have reduced office space, meaning the entire workforce doesn’t fit at the same time, and also because employees don’t want to come back. What does HR do now?
As with most practices in human resources today, there is an industry of vendors—in this case, consultants advising on remote work—offering input. Our arguments make the case for more consulting work, but some consultants aren’t cheering that line of thinking. I think there is a belief that pointing out problems with hybrid work threatens their business.
As Upton Sinclair noted, it’s hard for someone to understand an argument when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it, and that would be especially so when they have entire organizations advocating hybrid work. On LinkedIn, an evidence-optional medium, one consultant called the paper “rubbish,” another suggested that helping each other in the office couldn’t really be very important because no one helped him.
It will probably have to fall to those who do not have a stake either in maintaining the status quo or rolling it back completely to make progress.
Getting to the root of the issues
To begin, it is important to understand why employers that want to roll back hybrid are making that argument. Every time a story about rollbacks comes up, we hear (to my mind) a conspiratorial explanation that employers simply do not trust employees to do their work if they are not watching them. If that’s it, five years of remote and hybrid is a long time to wait to make that case.
I think the reason comes down to management. I sense that these employers do see real problems with hybrid work. To my mind, though, they have not done a good job explaining to their employees, with evidence, what is wrong with the current arrangement, which opens the door to conspiracy explanations. Yet, I don’t see them doing much about it.
I suspect the real underlying issue is that they may not see how they can fix their current problems. (If so, read our article!) But they may also think that fixing them is more work—and requires more of their time—than they want to undertake.
And that’s an opportunity for the consultants—although it is easier to preach to the converted.