Founders: adopt a hybrid working strategy that creates context

Until Spring 2020, the predominant working experience involved leaving home, going to an office, encountering a bunch of people, doing some work with them, bidding them goodbye, and going home. The culture of this ritual with the same characters flung together day after day, attempting to accomplish grand or humble things fuelled Ricky Gervais’ and Stephen Merchant’s The Office, the definitive mocumentary.

The show’s bleak world was addictive, skewering the common ordinariness of office life with painful observational humour. But we might not have realised how going to the office lent our daily lives a sense of occasion, seeing folks putting on their coats trudging out the door for the bus home. We now do. Over the past three years, the routine of the office has gone. There’s a wistful frisson in remembering that feeling; we hadn’t accomplished everything we’d hoped to do today, but we’d be back tomorrow, and give it another go.?

March 23rd marked the third anniversary of the first Covid lockdown, a momentous day that subsequently drove a coach and horses through the traditional Monday-to-Friday working week, triggering a revolution with profound implications for our lifestyles and the economy. Hybrid working is now wired into the daily working lives of many people who seem in no hurry to squeeze themselves back into the early-morning commuter slog when they can work from their kitchen tables having taken the kids to school.

Research from property specialist Remit Consulting shows that while numbers coming into offices are slowly rising - the national daily average?office occupancy of 34.3% in January was the highest since they began tracking the figures in May 2021- but there are few signs of a rush back to five days a week ‘presenteeism’. It suggests that for most the new normal is to be in the office for two/three days per week, often between Tuesday and Thursday.

Feedback suggests that hybrid is the best option, but we shouldn’t look to enforce one structure above another. Working from home is popular, whilst office-based days are important, enabling in-person meetings providing a break from video links, as well as the opportunity for social connection, networking, and learning.

Work would be so much better if you could get some actual work done. It’s hard to focus wherever you are with a consistency amid the ongoing rhythms of meetings, relentless staccato of electronic messages or the simple distraction of folks thundering past you discussing the latest gossip. Since Covid, I’ve found every single place I set myself up to work has become less conducive to concentration.

Working for myself, I’ve enjoyed the benefits of hybrid working for several years. At home I flit about from room to room across the week to give myself different views from the windows. The dog follows me everywhere, so I always have someone to talk to who doesn’t talk back and just likes a tummy tickle as a sign of friendship - which is an obvious faux-pas with office colleagues.

This worked well when no one else was at home. But since Covid, my wife has more of a digital footprint, grabbing the best spot for the Wi-Fi and window views, eating lunch, and gaggling loudly to a gaggle of friends in person or ‘online lunches’ on zoom herself. Home has become a co-working space but without any of the common courtesies.

And even if none of my family is with me at home, they now know I might be. That spells disaster. Parcels are delivered for them here to pick up later with a frequency that sees me on first name terms with numerous delivery drivers. Large chunks of my day are spent being photographed on my own doorstep holding intriguing packages that are not for me.

Worst of all, my wife books workmen in for jobs on days when she knows I am at home. Are you working from home today? Might sound like an innocuous question, an opportunity for mid-morning coffee together, or a walk and lunch together? Klaxon sound: it should put you on high alert. It means that a bunch of people with ladders and drills will storm the house just as you settle down to the laptop as my wife knows I’ll be in whilst she can go for a spa treatment.

One natural response is to head to place you were trying to avoid – the office, a coffee shop or public workspace. But we seem to have evolved from a nation of tea drinkers to coffee drinkers and all the coffee shops are full and noisy. Hush, I’m trying to work. The shared workspace’s role has changed since the pandemic too. Before you might have been able to sit in a cubicle, your own space affording quietness to concentrate. Now openness is in vogue, which means fewer partitions and greater visibility.

Before you might have had a normal chair and a desk. Now you will be asked to wobble awkwardly on a tall stool like you get at a champagne bar. Before you were interrupted, now you are being given an opportunity to interact. I get it, some folks like the social interaction, but I go there to actually work, but there is less emphasis on single-minded attention. I’m sounding grumpy now. Home is heaving, the office is off-putting, co-working spaces and coffee shops are noisy.

Also, the dichotomy of convenience versus staleness of online meetings have made it acceptable to reach everyone everywhere. It used to be said that you are never more than six feet away from a rat, now the same is true of a Zoom call. Wherever you’re at a coffee shop, workspace, or monastery someone is within earshot, yapping away about something that manages to be both tedious and impossible to ignore, making you eavesdrop.

There are ways around all of this. Base yourself in the garden shed now the warmer weather is approaching, is my latest thought. That way I could also sit outside when it was sunny enjoying the fresh air, with access to my radio and a kettle.

Julia Hobsbawm has identified an approach to the new way of working as rather than a daily commute: work in?the Nowhere Office. Why Nowhere? Partly because we are in a liminal space between one phase of work and another, and partly because?nowhere?is an anagram of Here, now.

The organisational efforts supporting the D-Day Normandy landings were in a way a prototype example of a Nowhere Office: desks, fax machines, and punch card operators were set up on the windswept shores after beachheads were established, providing the back-office infrastructure for a vast military operation – a kind of ‘pop up office’ in which what mattered was not the place but the people and their mission.

The cultural shift started as millennials entered the workforce, bringing with them digital native skills, and clear expectations of freedom and values around purpose, that challenged the always-on, always-in culture in favour of mindfulness and meaning – rejecting presenteeism, which for too long meant showing up for its own sake on a schedule rather than for a purposeful reason.

The Nowhere Office is a positive place where purpose and meaning drive productivity, and where employees, shorn of the obligation to just show up, will no longer face what the social historian Studs Terkel memorably called a Monday to Friday kind of dying. A good example of the concept comes from Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky who operates a strategy that employees can work from anywhere. The policy can be summarised as:?

• You can work from home or the office – wherever suits you best.
• You can live anywhere in the world, not near an Airbnb office.
• There will be one week in person team gatherings, once a quarter

This moves the debate on nicely, from arguing the benefits and downsides of the remote-office-hybrid options. People want choice and the opportunity for what I call work-life integration. It’s not about where people work but trusting them. It’s about outcomes not hours. This is especially true for startups creating a business model and culture to attract the right people to be creative.

I’ve taken some of Hobsbawm’s and Chesky’s thinking, and combined with my own thoughts, considered how to translate this into a work from anywhere strategy for startups.

1. Hybrid working means a hybrid environment: digital and physical

The physical office is an anachronism, the only space everyone needs to be is the internet. Physical communities are getting digitised - Amazon replace the Shopping Centre - however, the problem is you don’t meet people on Amazon, like you did at the shops. On zoom, you create a hermetically sealed bubble.

People need space and won’t want to work from home every day. The startup office has to do something home can’t do. It has to be for different purposes, for example an interactive face-to-face collaboration space.

2. Remote workforce means thinking global

Take the opportunity to see your talent pool as global and your team distributed, don’t limit yourself to a radius around the office. The way to see the future is not to look at the old companies if you want to know what the workplace future looks like - you don’t have a bricks and mortar of lease-hold legacy holding you back, be flexible, mobile, and nomadic.

3. Don’t default to tech

Tech has redefined the relationship with the place of work. Go in when it matters and stay home when it doesn’t. The thing about human connection is it’s inefficient, but tech is like gravity, it wants to find the fastest point between A and B. If we’re not careful, we will remove all human connection and your startup will live with no culture. Chesky advocates being more intentional about when people need to be in the office.

4. Big Rocks?

Working from home has given more clarity about what’s really important in our lives - the big rocks - family, friends, hobbies. Life priorities have come to the fore, employees will have some big rocks they don’t want to give up. Young people like being part of a community, and it’s hard to get to know people on Zoom. Build a big rocks sensitive culture where the physical space is a cradle of innovation.

5. It’s about rhythm, not balance?

I’ve never thought work-life balance was the right perspective, creating an optimal work-life rhythm should be the focus. Work-life balance is a temporary state especially in a startup where life is constantly in flux. Don’t create friction that comes with office-based work.

People have created routines and rhythms that are more productive while working from home. Some days it will be faster, others slower. Nothing is permanent; you just need to be clear about the elements that inform your optimal life rhythm and integrate that with work.

6. Recognise different teams and people have different needs

Today’s offices are often an open sea of desks with a perimeter of meeting rooms and no personal offices. Creative people want a wall for whiteboarding and space to walk around and think, engineers want a totally different thing. Make your office space creating a culture that is stronger than any bricks and mortar. Make the office a collaboration hub.

Summary

We’ve eschewed the Orwellian routine of the office forever. Many startups had already adopted a hybrid, flexible model before Covid, embracing the freedom, space, and cost advantage of free-spirited working, and focus on wellbeing not productivity.

The biggest challenge is that of ‘virtual distance’ - the sense of actual human detachment builds up over time when team are apart and become over-reliant on tech to mediate their relationships.?Virtual distance changes the way people relate to each other, and startup leaders need to create a hybrid environment where team members feel emotionally and psychologically connected to one another.

Startups are immersed in tech that provide a high degree of connectivity and productivity enabling collaboration, removing boundaries and barriers. Yet the conundrum of this is that as we build culture and a team with shared values and purpose, we are consciously reducing the amount of meaningful human interaction we have with each other.

We have the opportunity to create a more adaptive organisation. However, we need to create context, hybrid work is not just about where you work, it's about the freedom to define how you work, it's a cultural shift, empowering individuals to design their working lives with intention, weaving a tapestry of collaboration that knows no physical boundaries.