Reaping the Rewards of Hybrid Workplace Friendships by Addressing the Challenges

Hybrid workplaces are the most common type of workplace for employees that can work from home, according to Nick Bloom 's latest WFH Research data. The proliferation of hybrid workplaces is no surprise, given that, as Nick suggests in a September 2024 International Monetary Fund article:

"...hybrid work ... has a roughly flat impact on productivity. WFH benefits workers by saving them from exhausting commutes and typically provides a quieter working environment. But by reducing time at the office, it can also reduce employees’ ability to learn, to innovate, and to communicate. These positive and negative effects roughly offset each other, generating no net productivity impact of hybrid WFH"

The key word in this statement is "communicate". Counterintuitively, in an era of ubiquitous communication and constant connection through apps and social media, the communication of employees working remotely is reduced and not of the same quality, if we compare it to face-to-face communication. This lack of face-to-face communication appears to hinder deeper and more meaningful connections between employees.

At the same time, a recent article by Michael Arena and Aaron Chasan published in the HR Exchange Network shows that workplace friendships can have a significant impact on employee retention rates. Indeed, a survey by SHRM found that 76% of U.S. workers who have close friends at work say that it makes them more likely to remain with their employer. It is no coincidence that Gallup , in their Q12 Employee Engagement Survey, ask employees to indicate if they have a best friend at work. But friendship at work can only happen if employees spend enough time together, in person.

This raises the question, if friendship is an interpersonal relationship unrelated to work, aren't these findings supporting a work-life blend, rather than a work-life balance? To answer it we must assume that promoting and nurturing workplace friendships implies a positive spill-over effect of the workplace in the personal and, in fact, one of the most intimate domains of the employees, the emotional relationships of mutual affection and trust. A friendship with a colleague creates a hybrid relationship, where two people are simultaneously professionally and personally related, a double bond that benefits both sides, the individuals and their organisation.

The problem is that in the era of hybrid workplaces, creating and nurturing such friendships is a significant challenge. Let's dive into the statistics of hybrid workplaces. According to the most recent report from the Flex Index , 85% of Tech firms with a min days/week policy require 2 or 3 days in the office. So let's analyse how easy it is to create and maintain a friendship in a hybrid environment.

In a traditional 5 days/week in the office workplace, let's assume that the probability that two employees are simultaneously present and able to physically interact in the office is 100%. Now, once the requirement for 5 days/week in the office is no longer there, the probability changes dramatically. For 4 days/week in the office, the probability falls to 64%; for 3 days/week it falls to 36%; and for 2 days/week it falls to a mere 16%! Given that for tech firms the average is 2.5 days/week in the office, the average probability of physical interaction with a colleague is just 25% compared to a full 5 days/week.

This implies that creating and nurturing a friendship in a hybrid workplace is four times more difficult than in a traditional office workplace. Indeed, one can argue that remotely located employees can also become friends and sustain their relationship, but without the physical interaction. Although this is theoretically possible, it does not correspond to the actual ways friendships are created. According to a 2021 American Perspectives Survey, 69% of respondents said that they are friends with people they mostly see only in certain places, such as work, school, the gym, the park, or a coffee shop, 67% with people they have known since childhood, 51% with people who participate in common activities, such as sports, hobbies, community service, or some other activity and only 39% with people that only interact with online. That is, it is twice as likely to become friends with someone you see and physically interact in your everyday life, compared to with someone you only interact online.

So we are faced again with aspects of the Hybrid Work Paradox: People want more flexible working (aka as working-from-home) and at the same time more connection with their colleagues. And the more they are connected with their colleagues, the more likely they are to stay with their organisation, provided that the organisation is offering flexibility. But the more flexibility is offered, the less connections are made, if no specific initiatives are taken by the organisation.

That is why we propose Coremoting as a way to promote connections, increase physical interactivity, create meaningful connections and nurture new and exciting friendships. We propose a more thorough and practical blending of Work and Life by providing employees with the agency to offer their homes as coworking spaces, hosting their colleagues on days they work from home. Through an intelligent and safe platform, employees can choose to be hosts or guests, volunteering to participate in a new distributed mode of physical interaction and collaboration between colleagues. We have explained the challenges and benefits of this new proposed working mode in an article at Work&Place, and we are in the process of validating the concept.

To reap the rewards of hybrid workplace friendships, the biggest challenge is to find ways to increase the employees' physical interaction time without forcing any return to office policies. Providing tools and ways to incentivise off-site connectivity and coworking is a promising area of research and innovation in the workplace domain. After all, my friends, we all need friends.