The Age of Hybrid Work is Here. Are we Ready?
Welcome to Elewa, a series featuring African thinking for global problems. Here, we talk about the real drivers of value to those that matter most.
Just over a year ago, the world of work closed down. For millions of employees around the world, remote work became a reality – for many, literally overnight.
At the time, many people thought it would be a 21-day lockdown, and we’d be back in the office again in no time. 12 months later, we’re wrestling with the next big disruptor: the move to ‘hybrid work’, where we try and balance some employees returning to the workplace while others work from home (WFH).
As the Wall Street Journal pointed out this month, it’s not as easy as it seems. In an article headlined Companies Wrestle With Hybrid Work Plans—Awkward Meetings and Midweek Crowding, it talked about the challenges involved in deciding who goes back to the office (and when), how to reconfigure offices to ensure socially distanced working, and how to conduct meetings when half the people are in a room and the other half are dialling in. We know the pain.
Some people may never go back to the office
At the height of the pandemic last year, many companies were quick to announce permanent WFH plans. E-commerce giant Shopify said it would allow its 5,000 employees to continue working remotely after its offices reopen in 2021. Facebook is steaming ahead with its plans to transition thousands of jobs out of the office over the next decade. Companies like Dropbox, Atlassian and Twitter said they would allow most employees to work from home "forever."
Some workers may never return to the office – and we need to start wrapping our heads around that. In fact, as I wrote in February, remote work is creating new job opportunities for millions of people in the new digital-first, virtual economy. In a hybrid work world, talent is everywhere. This is a massive inflection point.
Finding the best of both worlds
But here’s the challenge. Lots of people want to go back to the office, for at least some of the time. They’re hungry for the human connection and camaraderie of the workplace. They want the best of both worlds: a survey of more than 2,000 office workers found more than 70 percent of workers want flexible remote work options to continue, while over 65 percent are craving more in-person time with their teams. Software company Salesforce found that 80% of its workers want to maintain a connection to a physical office space.
For Salesforce, the solution has been to permanently switch to three ways of working: fully-remote, office-based or flex, with most employees set to work in the office one to three days a week for team collaboration, customer meetings and presentations.
Microsoft has developed a Hybrid Workplace Dial that defines six stages based on current health conditions: Closed; Mandatory WFH; WFH Encouraged; Soft Open; Open with Restrictions; Open. It’s just moved to Stage 4, Soft Open, where people can choose to go to the office, but are still encouraged to WFH.
Google said in December that it would be testing a flexible workweek once it’s safe to return to the office, with employees required to work in the office at least three days a week.
At TransUnion, we’ve long promoted working from home as part of an inexorable shift towards a flexible working model. This is what the future looks like. But this only works when we make a clear mindset shift to a workplace that focuses on the health and wellbeing of its people, and is committed to giving them the best employee experience possible.
The way forward
So what does this all mean? The fact that every company is developing its own approach and guidelines shows that none of us has the definitive answer yet. We’re all learning as we go. What we do know is this: the world of work has shifted fundamentally, and we need to be more flexible and open to hybrid work environments than ever.
For me, this is the perfect time for us as business leaders to revisit our workplaces and explore ways to accelerate our transition to a digital workforce while keeping our culture and social capital alive and thriving. What remote working did was make us all more human: we met each other’s children, spouses and pets. We saw into our colleagues’ homes. We have the opportunity to bridge the physical and digital worlds in a way that keeps us authentic, engaged and innovative. We must not waste this chance.
What hybrid working plans does your business have in place? Are you considering permanent WFH plans, or downscaling your physical offices? I’d love to hear from you.
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About Lee Naik
Lee Naik was named one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices in Technology and is recognized as one of Africa's leading digital and technology transformation experts. Lee is presently the CEO of TransUnion Africa where he leads a portfolio of big data, digital and information services businesses that help organizations make more informed decisions and consumers manage their personal information to lead to a higher quality of life.
Independent Contractor: Business Process Optimization, Strategy, Recruitment, Performance Management, Virtual Assistant
3 年People miss the face to face colloboration, extremely difficult to challenge a colleague over a Zoom call and frustrating when your network connectivity drops at the most crucial time of a meeting. A drive home was a shut-down/switch off from work, whereas - working from home, there is no shut-down/switch-off. Costs on the home-front has also increased, staff have taken salary cuts yet their productivity doubled or tripled.
Opinions are my own | Building BI teams to deliver insight | Working with cloud platforms to scale ML and LLMs
3 年I believe our behavior and approach to knowledge worker tasks has changed. No longer is co-location and proximity required for completion. That does mean the office as we knew it will not be reinstated. Instead, expect alot more hot desking, cross team hookups and away from the office team meetings.
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3 年Incidentally just read an article about how the Google CEO doesn’t fully subscribe to work from home, but rather a hybrid. He speaks of how true collaboration and team work is best achieved in person, in the office....this coming from one of the first companies to advocate for working from home and were certainly early adopters of the trend, allowing staff to work from home for an entire year. I personally feel remote work is here to stay, even if in a hybrid format. As much as it may not always be ideal, I think there is a stronger case in favour of moving towards a more permanent off site work model. A lot of us have proven that we can work independently and can in fact be more productive working from home. Local companies have snapped up the opportunity to let go of expensive office rentals, also highlighting the financial incentive of going this route. I for one advocate for working remotely. And am very anti companies who want to reinstate working from the office purely for the purpose of micromanaging staff or clock watching. However, for those companies that have genuinely witnessed dips in creativity, ability to effectively collaborate, staff morale and output....then absolutely, back to the office makes sense
Curating Thought Leadership for CEOs Looking to Make a Difference | Innovation Catalyst | Matchmaker | Executive Coaching | Visioning Strategist | Strategy Facilitation | Recovering Banker | Once a CA
3 年A great thought piece Lee Naik. Creating environments that allow colleagues that wfh to feel emotionally connected is the missing link currently. Zoom alone will not create that stimulation we all need such as the passing, public well done from the boss, the backround sightes and sounds, the smells, the casual conversations, the visible helpfulness (dognut and coffee rounds), the change of scene between work (office culture) and home (family culture). Companies need to do more for their wfh staff than simply provide transactional technology which improves productivity - they need to think about how to recreate the feelings we have at work, so the collaboration and comradarie can be a segmented part of working remotely too. Vr and Ar, may help but it’ll need much more than trying to simply replicate. Oh, hold on a mo, think the coffee and dognuts are just being delivered, with a well done note....
Founder FutureClimate IQ | I speak about climate futures, mitigation and adaption in the face of the climate crisis | En-ROADS Climate Ambassador
3 年Another critical conversation for leadership teams to have! The reason I think it’s critical is because whatever “norms” are decided on now will tend to persist going forward. Here is the biggest challenge I see with hybrid workplaces. It is *very* easy to end up with a “two-tier workplace” driven primarily by two communication apps - the office, and the apps the remote workers us (eg Slack, MS Teams, Workplace etc.) How do you ensure that the communication that happens in the physical office “app” is ported over to the app that the remote workers are using? From my experience, that is *really* hard to do. In fact I would say, as counter intuitive as it may seem, it easier to manage an all-remote team than it is to manage a hybrid team for this exact reason. One of the ways I have seen to overcome this (for those that insist on hybrid) is to ensure *everyone* is out of the office and then in the office at the same time. I believe the most successful businesses of the future will be those that manage to achieve physical office “escape velocity” and become truly location independent.