EQ Lab Blog Hybrid Work - The Things You Don't Know

Written by Antony Malmo & Dr. Richard Claydon| Image @alexisrbrown What's at stake in switching to a Hybrid Work Model?In short, it's a key weapon in the war for talent. If you do not offer some kind of personalised flexibility, in which work and life can be effectively integrated, you will struggle to attract the type of talent necessary to scale your business. The data suggests that the employees most likely to refuse to work for non-hybrid organisations are customer-facing, customer-supporting and digital/IT workers. Without being able to source people to do such work, it is going to be next to impossible to grow a business. With pandemics historically being followed by economic rebounds, these multidimensional and unpredictable talent expectations need to be addressed if an organisation is to be ready to take full advantage of such circumstances. What Are the Pros and Cons of Hybrid Work for Employees? Why do employees prefer the hybrid workplace?The most-commonly reported reason is the reduction of the stress of the commute. But that's so cliched as to be almost banal. There are a number of other reasons clearly outlined in pre-pandemic literature on remote working that differentiate between effective and ineffective remote working practices. If the 3Fs are present, remote work increases productivity and engagement. If not, then both go backwards. The 3 Fs: Focus, Flexibility, FreedomFocus: contemporary open-plan office designs do not facilitate the level of concentration required to do complex, focused work. Employees find it far easier to do such work in the peace and quiet of home. In the early stages of the pandemic, many employees reported finally being able to catch up on projects because they had the time and space to do it. Flexibility: most employees are far more productive and engaged when they have the opportunity to determine how the work is to be done. In offices, they very often feel over-or-micro-managed in terms of how they should do the work, often in ways that don't make intuitive sense to them. As long as remote employees have easy online access to the technology and media they require to do the work, then their productivity and engagement are likely to improve. Freedom: there is the opportunity to integrate more life demands, such as shopping, fitness and health, family, hobbies, even sleeping, with work demands. Research has long illustrated that this is a central advantage of working from home, providing both employee and employer with significant benefits. Alongside this is a more radical reason. Research in the UK has clearly shown that employees are not missing the organisational culture. Fewer than one in ten employees cite the great culture as a reason for wanting to return to the office. Indeed, it seems that many have revelled in escaping from it. With culture being the main behavioural lever in the vast majority of organisations, some radical reimagination of the behavioural environment is going to be required. Why is hybrid work proving to be exhausting for employees?There are a number of reasons. Firstly, impractical and outdated business as usual models of working have reinjected themselves, fundamentally changing the WFH experience. In the early stages of WFH, when less digital infrastructure was in place, employees WFH experienced a great degree of self-management, doing their work via the above 3F methodology. As the infrastructure has emerged, employees are finding the WFH experience is becoming an amplified version of the poor office experience that they previously experienced, with all the downsides and none of the upsides. Cyberspace amplifies both the bad and good aspects of the real world. If meetings seem boring, disorganised and pointless in the real world, in the digital one they will be akin to having teeth pulled without anaesthetic. If communication is unclear and imprecise in the real world, in the digital one it will be incoherent and fragmented. The impact is enhanced complexity and emotionality for everybody. Beyond that is the problem of drudgery. No matter what type of thing you are working on, the experience is the same. Present an idea. Brainstorm. Listen to a valuable speaker. Every experience is bracketed by switching on a screen and staring at a small window, before switching it off again to stare at your bedroom or kitchen walls. There's no variety. Especially so if all the freedom and flexibility in how to work has been taken away by micromanagement. This is amplified by the inability of employees to take part in transitional role-switches between the role they are playing in one meeting and the next, or the role they play at work and at home. Moving from meeting to meeting requires the press of a button, without any chance of movement between offices or light-hearted chat between colleagues (which is something the UK research on returning to work highlighted as being absolutely missed by over 60% of the workforce). Partners and children see their other half or parents in work roles, and perhaps do not like what they see. There is no decompression time between work and home, with people simply needing to turn off the computer to change roles. Rapid-transition role-bleeding is, for many, a deeply stressful experience that takes a significant amount of emotional and cognitive resources to manage. For many, it is exhausting.The outer limits of this is the increase in work hours. For many, it's the act of starting work at a time that would have been half-way through one's commute, and finishing similarly late. An hour or so extra a day. For others, it is an increased willingness to answer emails at any time of the day, until the moment they close their eyes to sleep. This is especially common in English-speaking countries. Much of this is impression management - the desire to illustrate how hard you're working and how valuable you are to those you cannot impress via face-to-face communication. While it is completely understandable, as research clearly illustrates that those who regularly see their manager get the best work opportunities, it also predicts poor productivity and engagement, increasing the likelihood of exhaustion and burnout. Finally, for some senior executives, with a global reporting role, international time zones have blended together, with executives at the HQ calling all-hands meetings in their international colleagues' late evenings or early mornings, often every day of the week. The worst example we've seen was a New York based company keeping their Australian employees on the call until 05:00 in the morning. This is not impression management, but a loss of awareness on how hard anybody can work before their brain and body shuts down, caused by the shrinking of the world by the rapidly introduced digital infrastructures. Behaviours have yet to catch up. Once again, exhaustion and burnout are the likely outcomes. What Are the Pros and Cons of Hybrid Work for Employers?There are cost savings to be made and communication and well-being challenges to be considered. Clearly, if an organisation can reduce its real estate footprint by having a lot of its workforce WFH, it is going to reduce financial costs. However, this has potentially significant communication and well-being knock ons. In offices, people can quickly deal with communication necessities. A 60-second conversation with a colleague can result in much value. In written communication, the same 60-second message can be spread across multiple emails, with misinterpretations and requests for clarification extending the exchange to an almost absurd level. This slows down performance and negatively impacts collaboration. The excessive need for such clarifying communication extends the working day, harms working relationships, causes cognitive overload, and, eventually, impacts well-being. Alongside this is the necessity for centralised communication to be more carefully crafted and more regularly disseminated. While some employees read this, not all do. So information quality is compromised. Not only that, much of the high value communication is spread between employees via informal channels in liminal spaces such as coffee shops, bars, and cafes in or around the workplace. Other than via text messaging groups such as WhatsApp and Slack, which suffer the same clarity of communication challenge outlined above, these channels do not exist in a WFH environment. How Hybrid Work Impacts Productivity? Done well, hybrid work can boost individual productivity and collective performance. Firstly, it is important to understand the difference in terms of value creation. At an individual level, the most productive workers are 2.5x more productive than the mean, and 10x more productive than the least productive workers. At a collective level, the most high-performing teams are 10x better than average teams, and many, many times better than the worst teams. At an extended level, in which diverse, innovative ideas are being integrated into the work to create new value, we are then talking about the best teams being 50-100x more valuable than the average. Individual productivity requires:Large dedicated work spaces in which work can be spread and leftLow distraction and low interruption environmentsIt won't take anybody much time to realise that very few contemporary workplaces are designed to support such work. Why is that? In simple terms, because people were trying to boost collective performance. Research showed that team members that couldn't see each other didn't talk to each other. Remote workers often never spoke to their teammates at all. So, workplace design shifted into open-plan spaces in which people's line of sight enabled them to see pretty much everybody. Following that came the idea of serendipitous connection, in which people who didn't know each other could strike up value-creating conversations if only they could just bump into ea