Roundtable Recap: Hybrid Work - Heaven or Hell?

Written by Elliott Sparsis , Convene, Head of UK

Many of us have become accustomed to working a few days in the office each week and a few days at home in the modern “living-with-COVID” world of work. We’ve also got used to meetings and events where some people are in the room and others are present virtually.

But is hybrid work working? According to new research from Leeds University Business School, more than a third of UK office workers (39%) see themselves as hybrid ‘misfits,’ lacking the right balance of home and office working.

With hybrid showing every sign of being here to stay, there are urgent questions to revolve around how to make it work. Are employers happy with a hybrid arrangement: part office, part remote? How do event organizers nail the hybrid format? What does a successful hybrid experience look like?

With these issues in mind, we invited a group of experts, hosted by our Head of UK Elliott Sparsis, to our flagship event space at 22 Bishopsgate in London to discuss.

Moderating the conversation, Susan Freeman ???? , Partner with British law firm Mishcon de Reya LLP , noted that writer and consultant Julia Hobsbawm described hybrid working in her book ‘The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work And The Workplace Of The Future,’as being “fiendishly complicated.” Susan agreed: “The fact that two and a half years after lockdown started we’re still trying to work our way through this suggests it’s an incredibly multifaceted and difficult issue.”

Most corporates were still trying to get the right balance, agreed David Kaiser , WeWork ’s EMEA Head of Real Estate. “How many days should people be in the office? Should some days be mandated as ‘office days?’ How do we create better hybrid environments if people want to work collaboratively? It takes investment to get that right, and a lot of businesses are just now figuring out what their staff want.”

Athely Guedes , Principal at architecture firm Gensler建筑设计事务所 , said the hybrid working ‘genie,’ having escaped the bottle, was unlikely to be forced back inside. “There is a lot of focus on ‘how many days of the week?’ rather than what’s the best way in getting people to do their jobs well.”

The impact working away from an office and colleagues has on younger workers was a hot topic. “Those with the experience of face-to-face interaction understand the value of that lived experience,” commented Nell Halford , 谷歌 ’s Events Program Manager, EMEA. A point on which Matthew Davis , psychologist and associate professor at 英国利兹大学 , agreed, “The big risk would be for those in their mid-career. They can do their jobs nicely, but they’re missing out on the experience to that next step.”

The potential loss of ‘social capital’ was a related issue, suggested Elliott Sparsis, our Head of UK. “There’s much to be gained for a young person from working closely with other more experienced people that they don’t get at home. They don’t just learn about the job itself, they see how colleagues and bosses operate, what they wear, how they deal with people. Those soft skills are vital, and they can’t be learned at home.”

Working every day for a great boss early on in his career certainly meant the world to Brendon Frye , Senior Vice President at investment bank Eastdil Secured . “I learned everything from her, listening to her negotiate deals. Those things remain important as we grow. The thing is, how do we replicate that if everyone is working from home?”

Switching the conversation around, Ben Fawcett , Deliveroo ’s Global Head of Real Estate and Workplace, suggested ‘hybrid’ working meant different things to different people. “To some it means totally remote, to others it’s flexible working. You have to look at it departmentally and how it impacts certain teams and decide what works best. I’d suggest sales people need to be in the office more.”

The impact of working from home on productivity remained a contentious issue. Duncan Kennedy , Head of Data and Analytics at technology consultant LMRE , said that as long as people felt they were as, if not more, productive when working from home, there would be a debate about why they should come into the office, but for some firms it was important that they did. “Getting across learned behaviors requires we have junior staff in the office three days a week, otherwise they don’t make as much progress. But then some of our quickest growing clients are those that are fully remote. It depends on the business.”

Maintaining a company’s culture was also crucial, and those round the table collectively agreed that the ability to regularly bring together people from an organization – especially if it operated a hybrid working arrangement – was vital if it wanted to promote its ethos, its values.

When it came to using work space facilities to do this, there has been a “flight to quality,” according to James Frankis , Convene’s Vice President of Product. Being more expensive than its competitors hadn’t been an issue, he said. “We provide technology-enabled space, with a great hospitality offer, and our clients tell us they book and re-book because of the experience our facilities give them in terms of a physical in-person event, where they can bring most or all of their staff together several times a year.”

COVID played a part in this too, said Oliver Marlow , Co-Founder and Creative Director of architecture firm Studio TILT. “People are like, ‘It’s much better for us to meet 700 people six times a year, and then everyone goes off, gets their head down and does the work.’ In a way, the pandemic highlighted that actually there had been a loss of engagement for years prior.”

When it comes to the type of space that people want for a hybrid environment, “People get that it’s more than just the room and the tech, important though both these are,” said Imogen Privett , Associate Director of Workplace Innovation at management consultancy UnWork . “It’s about how you service this technology, how do you provide catering, how do you deliver that great experience that a company is looking for?”

Going forward, with hybrid working here to stay, it is clear that these ways of working and meeting need to be future proofed to ensure everyone – and notably younger generations and those in their early career - don’t get left behind. As the discussion concluded, a quick run round the room went in favor of hybrid working finding its place in heaven, rather than hell, albeit with the caveat for some it was still a work in progress and dependent on individual choice. Encouraging, nonetheless.