Is “Hushed Hybrid” a Sign That the Tide is Turning on the Return to the Office Ideology?

New workplace trends seem to be a daily occurrence in modern working life. Even though we are long past pandemic restrictions, many employers and employees are still struggling to come to terms with the changed world and find solutions that work for everybody. As some predicted at the time, once many of us had worked at home full-time successfully for a couple of years, the genie was out of the bottle, and employers were likely to struggle to convince many of us of the necessity of regular office attendance.

Many employers are now attempting to enforce compulsory office attendance for at least some of the week, though they seem to have resorted to the argument of “because I said so” in many cases, which always signals to me that you have lost the argument! How likely are people to take advantage of the alleged benefits of office work when they have been forced to be there against their will?

This, among other factors, led to the phenomenon of “quiet quitting,” where employees do not resign but do enough to get by, having given up on being properly respected and recognised for their efforts by their employer. I have long felt that most organisations severely undervalue the extent to which they depend on the goodwill of their people to thrive or even exist. This trend seems to be a realisation of that in some respects.

The latest development I have seen is known as “hushed hybrid”. This is where an organisation has a policy of office attendance, but individual managers quietly agree to more home working with those they oversee. There can be many reasons for this, including staff retention, morale, and increased productivity.

I have to say that this does not surprise me. The senior managers in many organisations seem to be losing what little trust they ever had from those they lead. The failure to make a clear, evidence-based case for mandatory office work but insisting on it regardless was always going to be a hard sell when everyone who worked from home through the pandemic had readily available evidence that their own performance did not suffer as a result.

Being in the office is in no way the same as being productive or even working at all. I am sure we have all encountered people who seem to spend much of their time wandering around, chatting, and generally doing anything other than work while in the workplace. I worked at home occasionally before the pandemic years, and several times was questioned quite vigorously by managers about precisely what I had done in that time. I have never faced such scrutiny for a single day spent in the office, but I will freely admit that some of those days have been less than entirely productive!

As the Forbes article above points out, being present seems linked to being productive when nothing could be further from the truth. Being present can, of course, be linked to being easier to micromanage, bully, and snoop on. It is high time that we started assessing people on what they do rather than anything else.? This applies both to recruitment methods and to ongoing work management. Does it really matter where or how someone works if they produce what is required, when it is needed? But I suppose when we seem fixated on a recruitment method that assesses only the ability to talk about doing the job rather than assessing the ability to do it, nothing should surprise me!

It is interesting, too, that some managers are taking the hushed hybrid route to aid retention and productivity. It always seemed likely that employers who more readily embraced hybrid or home working would find it easier to recruit and retain the best people. Is this the evidence that this is starting to happen? Then there is the productivity question. Many modern workplaces are just not conducive to certain types of work, at least. They may be great if you want to spend your day bouncing ideas off other people in person and move from meeting to meeting (as many senior people seem to do.) But if you need to think or focus on doing some work, they may be a very poor place to be.

Finally, there is an enormous irony in all of this that I am sure many senior leaders are unaware of. For years, employees have been told to embrace change and stop complaining as yet another management fad disrupts ways of working that are not broken, only to be quietly abandoned in favour of something else a few months later. But when a change had to be implemented for external reasons (the pandemic), rather than embrace the benefits that came for employees, the same managers who usually love change could not wait to try to turn things back to the old ways!

What matters is getting the work done. I would be shocked if many organisations did not have more severe issues to address than if people were coming to the office. Trends like “hushed hybrid” seem to indicate that it is not about productivity, which we all knew anyway. This ideological fixation at the expense (as usual) of those who do the work needs to stop. When will the time and resources going into enforcing attendance quotas be devoted to really addressing bullying, harassment and discrimination in the workplace??

Most managers do not go against company policies without good reason. If some quietly disregard attendance policies, they likely see it as the only way to deliver their objectives. When will those blinded by this ideological obsession finally open their eyes?

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