In-office vs hybrid vs remote work—the new era of experiment-driven culture

The pandemic transformed the way we work. A recent study by PWC showed that, in the US, 29% of the companies had at least 60% of their workforce working from home once a week and after the pandemic, that value increased to 69% of the companies having at least 60% of their workforce working from home more than one time a week.

During the pandemic, many executives realized that it’s possible to lead companies remotely and still perform. Working from home increased productivity, though many times at the cost of mental health and a lack of clarity of when the work stops and personal life starts.

Companies and teams that already operated in a hybrid mode (remote + in-office) didn’t face as many challenges and have now a good working model to operate as we learned to live with the COVID-19 virus and overcame many challenges through it.

Remote-first and companies that moved fully remote learned to drive virtual engagement and operate in a specific type of culture that can work excellently if applied well.?

There’re still so many questions out there on the best form of work: some CEOs want teams to come back to the office and be fully present (talking to you Elon Musk), some CEOs believe in the hybrid model and some others learned the value of being fully remote. Each model has its advantages and I’ll outline the pros and cons of each as well provide some insights on what matters most in building a performing and belonging culture, independently of the setup you decide for.

The scale up levers for each model

There are a lot of reasons to pick a method of work for your company. All of them have pros and cons and different culture levers. Below you can see a visual exemplifying the differences and the diverse set of culture levers.

Digging a little bit more about those, with a story on each.

In-office work—driven by creativity and social interaction?

This is the most common method of working for the past decades. With a few exceptions, most companies operated in this method until the pandemic came.

Many CEOs still see going back to the office as the best way to move forward, though rarely at the benefit of the employees, but most of the time because the CEOs themselves struggle to lead and influence the company in the way they wished. They don’t know how to engage digitally and can’t grasp how the company culture is changing since they don’t see people in the office.

I still recall my times at Talentsquare. It was incredibly fun to go to the office and got lucky to have a peer like Timoté Geimer , with whom I spent so many times on the whiteboard and meeting rooms doing design sprints and creative workshops. That was the biggest benefit and driver to go to the office—I knew we had the intent to not just go from meeting to meeting, nor doing solo work, but mostly to collaborate and think how our hiring software would add value to customers.

On the downside, it took me at least one hour in the morning to get to the office, and because I was living in Brussels, let’s just say that the reality would transform these 60 minutes into 90 minutes or sometimes more. I can recall many mornings at Starbucks in the central train station because the trains were not moving.

The key here is the drive to excel at in-office culture: creative workshops to create real progress, design sprints to solve customer problems or build new solutions and of course, the much needed social interaction that can create deep connections.?

Hybrid work—embracing team design and asynchronous comms

When I moved to EVBox, I knew that down the line I needed to embrace a different type of work. When the team got slightly bigger (more than 15 people), and the office got a bit cramped, we started having a hybrid type of working. This meant that my team could work 1 to 2 days a week from home.?

One of the immediate positive effects that happened is that everyone was happier. They could pick when to be at home and because it was pre-pandemic and sort of new to many, we were able to talk about how we were gonna make this work.?

Let’s pause. Read that sentence again.

“They could pick when to be at home and because it was pre-pandemic and sort of new to many, we were able to talk about how we were gonna make this work.”

Why is this important? Because it gave autonomy to the team to pick their work from home days, what type of work they would do and we talked all together on the habits to form. It was not a top-down decision, but rather a joint effort that we reviewed frequently.

Simple things like:

• Embracing asynchronous communication, meaning we don’t all have to be at the same time. This meant that sometimes we created videos of ourselves explaining something that people could watch at different points in time, audio calls for people to listen later etc.?
• Be in office on Mondays and Fridays, because we agreed that the kick off meeting on Monday and the Friday retrospective was key for collaboration and seeing everyone at once—though we did change that when the team got to be more than 40 people.
• We experimented often on tools that could help with our communication, vision clarity and performance (read OKRs, Miro, Asana, etc)
• We increased team days and the budget to do relevant and creative workshop when in office

All in all, the key here is the ability to switch the way you work with your team and ensure you experiment on team habits for the better good.

Fully remote—asynchronous lifestyle, automate, and reflect often

I’ve been only a few times on fully remote teams—mostly trying to build a product and startup with friends. One of those times was back in 2011, and we were trying to build a geolocation app to provide insights on hotspots in towns, aka a Foursquare alike before Foursquare existed.?

I was in Brussels and the other teammates and founders were in Colombia, Australia, and the Netherlands. The different time zones, lack of good tooling to help us move forward and understanding of how to work remotely didn’t help us at all—thus failing to build and launch the product in the end.

But since then, I’ve got hooked to fully remote work and I’ve been following a few companies that do it well, like Buffer, Automattic, Zappier, or Basecamp.

They wrote a series of blog posts on lessons from remote work and I’ve picked ten amazing nuggets to share here:

1. If you’re thinking about experimenting with remote work at your company, try to make sure everyone feels equally part of the team and in the loop. It sucks to be a “second class citizen” just because you’re not in the office.
2. It helps to create a morning and evening ritual to help define your days. It can be as simple as watering the plants or taking a walk.
3. If you’re an introvert, fewer and fewer things will feel worth going out for. If you’re an extrovert, more and more things will feel worth going out for.
4. Visibility does not equal productivity. Not even close.
5. Slack creates false urgency in decision making. Slow it down on purpose.
6. If you work from home mostly, have a space that’s just your own and just for work (if you can). This is doubly important if your partner also works at home.
7. There’s no substitute for physical presence (yet). Six months is about as long as we like to go as a team without getting together at least in small groups. Just being in the same physical space once in a while is a powerful recalibration.
8. Time zones are impossible. Get help from Every Time Zone and Timezone.io.
9. If you can swing it, batch your meetings and syncs into one day or block of time so you can block out focus time. You can try to do meetings in the morning, so you can have heads-down work time in the afternoon.
10. Communication without body language is hard. Assume the best intentions in all interactions.

A word on culture—it matters no matter the setup

Whatever the setup you’ve decided to go for, it will influence how you scale. Because culture influences how productive your team is, how engaging and collaborative people are, and how they connect purpose with their own values and ultimately how it translates to customer value.

When building a culture, there are a few dimensions to think of:

Shared Vision & Goals: The team has a clear vision on how they contribute to the company, to its mission, and have specific goals (annually, quarterly, etc)—that create progress and add value to the customers and stakeholders the team serves.

Rituals & Behaviors: What rituals and behaviors help the team get into the flow—the state where the teams operate autonomously, are productive and collaborate with intent. Think of morning and evening rituals, retrospective, quarterly team days, etc.

Experiment-driven habits: The team has open communication and talks about its values, successes and challenges. The team picks habits to experiment on the team and see if they work when everyone is committed.?

Feedback & Trust: The team has a feedback embedded culture, both prompt and structure. Everyone has the space to voice out when things are not going well and the safe space to do so.

Deepened connections: The team has put efforts in the social interaction, independently of being remote or in-person interactions. There’s space to learn on the job, during working hours and connect on a social level with the rest of the team.

This is it for this week’s article. As a final reminder:?

Everything can be copied. Products, features, services, and even processes. But one thing that can’t be copied is your company and team culture. And that will ultimately become a competitive advantage when you scale up.