A blueprint for hybrid-remote work

One of the reasons that make senior executives fret about partially remote (hybrid) work, is that many of the established ways of working (leading, collaborating, etc.) won't cut it anymore. We aren't just talking about Zoom screen-shares and occasional Slack or Teams chat. It is about getting people, at scale, to embrace interaction possibilities that didn't exist in 2019. And most importantly, it is about using the new ways of working to enhance the employee experience which fosters innovation, culture, and ultimately strengthens engagement.

There is no established blueprint yet, and without the right approach, we may end up with a lot of unwieldy, complex change management. Ignoring the problem won't work either. A new equilibrium may not be reached organically: people with disproportionate in-person presence and hierarchical (or another convening) power will tend to naturally dominate the interactions, and polarize their location. For others, the result may be the weakening of interpersonal ties and lower engagement, resulting in talent loss through attrition and reduced productivity, and less-diverse thinking.?That's why a significant amount of CEOs are ambivalent about the future of partially remote work.

How do we structure the challenge so we can direct resources to solve it? The following framework is based on what we know about experience design and collaboration of large networks of people and inspired by MIT research on collective intelligence, among others.

While perhaps daunting at first, the "hybrid-work cube" below is actually quite intuitive. It identifies eight distinct "cells" where new ways of working (e.g. norms and tools) need to evolve (read: project teams need to be deployed to storm and form.) There are three dimensions to the solution, and their combination is where intentional design can happen.

1- Time: Is a particular interaction (e.g., team meeting, townhall, or brainstorming) between people synchronous or asynchronous? For instance, in pre-virtual times, most interaction was synchronous - with exceptions such as memos and physical libraries. We now spend much more time in asynchronous interactions with a corpus of knowledge created (crowdsourced) through the organic work of large groups of people - think of Slack threads or Sharepoint repositories, and Microsoft Viva in the future.

2- Place: Does the interaction happen in a physical facility or a virtual one? Or maybe partially in both, which I call "phygital" - for instance, when some people are in-person, and others remote; when the same person constantly moves from a physical space to a virtual one; or where augmented reality overlays digital data to a physical environment?

3- Type of connection: This is something that most people don't think about and yet interactions depend on it. Strong ties are often those between people connected in day-to-day, functional work; weak ties relate to more serendipitous encounters across a broader network (e.g., water-cooler) and are crucial for innovation and culture formation. Organizational network analysis (ONA) reveals that both are essential. More recent evidence points out that strong ties tend to be resilient to shocks like a lockdown and sudden change of location, but weak ties may shrink. That's another reason why many CEOs fear remote work.

On any given day, people will cross many of the cells across these three dimensions. Designing the right experience within each cell, and ideally also in the handoffs between them, is the job at hand.

What does this mean in practice? At the very least, this framework should serve as a checklist to identify possible blind spots. But ideally, design teams across employee experience, IT, and lines of business should use it to blueprint and then drive the adoption of new solutions: that is the new tools, and the social norms that will propagate their use. Here are some ideas of design interventions based on the framework:

• Strong-tie, in-person: better traditional offices meeting spaces, based on new office frequentation patterns (likely more space for those, as more of the individual work can be done remotely)
• Weak-tie, in-person: traditional recreational space (canteen, water-cooler, corridors, atria – synchronous; bulletin board - asynchronous)
• Strong-tie, virtual: standing Zoom video calls (synchronous), Microsoft Teams channel thread (asynchronous)
• Weak-tie, virtual: intelligent matchmaking (synchronous), Slack affinity groups (asynchronous)
• Strong-tie, phygital: (synchronous) meetings where some members are remote, e.g. "one dials-in, all dial-in"; or standards for documenting in-person meetings for those who couldn’t participate (asynchronous) e.g., Zoom / Teams video recording and minutes of conference-room meeting
• Weak-tie, phygital: employee townhalls for big announcements; multi-location conferences; “virtual windows” into other offices' shared facilities. All of them should avoid the old-style one-directional download. This is mostly uncharted territory. In a world where distance is no longer a physical constraint, can one bounce into a remote colleague on the way to the corporate-office canteen (perhaps at the hand of an algorithm)?

If some of this sounds unlikely, let's remember that in March 2020 most people would have said that remote work at scale is functionally impossible. What is unlikely is that we "stumble into" a scaled-up solution to this challenge. It is time to structure the work and get on with it.

[You can get more resources on virtual collaboration methods in the guidebook "Augmented Collective Intelligence - Human-AI networks in a Virtual Future of Work" here.]