How to Think about Hybrid Work Policies

If you’re in a position to shape your company’s hybrid work policy, this post is for you. Does it contain practical tips? Yes it does. Is it a philosophical treatise on the nature of work and time itself? I can feel it heading in that direction. Let’s see how it ends up. 

Work Life Balance

People who love to work are somehow suspicious, as if they don’t have a — life. We wouldn’t call it “work life balance” if the two things were more aligned. But they should be. This is our moment and we should accept nothing less.

I’m just going to say it straight out. I love work. This is something I discovered about myself early in life when my parents wouldn’t allow me to cross busy NYC streets so I trained to become a volunteer crossing guard with a reflective orange vest and a big silver badge. I worked alongside retirees. I loved it.

I’ve dedicated my career to making work better for as many people as I can. I’ve done this in many ways through the years. This post is specific to knowledge workers who previously worked mostly in office settings. 

Hybrid Work

I have always been a hybrid worker. Early in my career, I was an investigative journalist. This work required physical presence in the field, sometimes in disaster zones or complex industrial environments such as nuclear plants. I was rarely in the newsroom. I also spent several years writing intimate stories about people’s lives for private use within families so members could understand one another on a deeper level. This work required extreme presence. I wrote from my home office. 

For the past twelve years my focus at Science House has been on developing work cultures capable of achieving more with less stress. Before Science House, I founded my own company. I designed imaginative hybrid work environments and directed the work that took place within them, including a virtual newsroom for journalists working in oppressive environments around the world to meet and discuss important issues without fear of physical harm. Some of the environments I designed were physical first with a virtual component, others were virtual first with a physical component. All of them were challenging, requiring partnerships with architects, software engineers and teams of collaborators each bringing their unique talents and perspectives.

So I can tell you without hesitation — this period we’re in isn’t reflective of what remote work is when it is done well. What we are experiencing right now is triage mode.

And as we shape hybrid work policies for the reality of the modern workforce, it’s time to think more imaginatively about time itself. Our entrenched industrial mindset left us slow to adopt flexible work when we could have done it more effectively, leaving companies to cobble together a vision of the future from decisions made under duress to cope with a global pandemic. I am writing policy drafts for some of them. My thoughts posted here are raw and direct, and intended to be modified to fit any company’s specific policies. 

Power Structures

There are a couple of pressing reasons why executives want employees back in the office. They often say culture is starting to fall apart without people being in the same place.

The truth is, most company cultures left much to be desired before the pandemic sent people home.

Now is the best time to fix the root causes of that problem as hybrid work takes root. 

Real Estate

After “two weeks at home” turned into two plus years, offices have been sitting as empty as archeological sites. New York City faces the worst of it. I know that pain. The Manhattan headquarters for Science House hasn’t hosted events, clients or staff since February 2020, but the mortgage still comes due. We have been running the business remotely since a couple of weeks before the city shut down. 

The Status of the Corner Office

And then there’s the org chart, that visible symbol of the power structure of the company. You know what really falls apart when people work from home? The status of the corner office or the hierarchy on vivid display in the parking lot. When a boss makes a joke, the courtesy laughter of their “direct reports” doesn’t have the same bright ring over Zoom. 

The strongest argument in favor of being together in person is that people need meaningful opportunities to connect.

Nothing replaces the serendipity of life’s flow, or the knowledge of a person that comes from personal contact. With that said, distance is challenging, but not an absolute obstacle. It can even be a major asset if handled wisely, with clear planning and communication, including a path for problem solving when challenges arise or ideas demand further exploration. 

Things to Think About

I’m painting complex concepts with broad brushstrokes here, so if you’re interested in a more granular exploration of anything I explore briefly below, feel free to leave a comment. Many factors converge to make hybrid work successful. Here are a few. 

Agility. Agile is both a popular software development methodology and a mindset. As a methodology, it is an imperfect response to the way planning and development used to happen. The way it used to happen is that someone came up with an idea for a project or product, estimated the cost, time and resources required to complete it, and then, more often than not, started to panic when the best laid plans completely obliterated those estimations. Executives then nodded through fudged updates delivered on slides full of jargon and diagrams too small to interpret wrapped in approved company colors and graphics. Agile is a way to start with critical, valuable features in an iterative way, demonstrate progress, get feedback and then maybe — just maybe — not spend another three to five years building the rest as technology and customer needs transform at lightning speed. But often what happens is that the name of the project changes and more funding is authorized with a straight face. 

I am not an Agile methodology purist, but I do strongly believe in the necessity to break complex work of any kind into smaller pieces. Agile works well when an organization prioritizes precisely, plans work in feasible increments, and makes sure every person understands how their contribution connects to the mission.

The concept of “self-organizing teams,” however, has taken off much faster than the concept of constraints shaping what those teams self-organize around.

And this is the obstacle that needs to be overcome for hybrid work to thrive. Regardless of how an organization or team is structured, incremental work delivered in manageable pieces needs to be connected to clear priorities and milestones. And people need a way to figure out whether their contributions connect to those goals, otherwise they feel as if they’re flying in fog and they can’t tell if they’re facing up or down. Even if the company thrives, the workforce can feel the malaise of not knowing whether they contributed to the success. We want to feel we completed tasks well, and without celebratory punctuation to acknowledge the effort and create a feeling of completion even if priorities change, people tend to get restless. And when they do, they may look elsewhere for another job. 

Communication. People contribute in different ways, at different paces, and at different hours. Just because the workday starts in the morning doesn’t magically mean we are all morning people.

Hybrid work means people can work when they have the energy, creativity and stamina.

Before the pandemic, people were often tied up in meetings all day and worked at night and on weekends whether they wanted to or not. That was also hybrid work, done dysfunctionally. Most people consider most of their meetings a waste of time (Science House has a decade of data around meetings). 

For functional hybrid work, make sure the right people communicate at the right time about the right things. This also means people shouldn’t be overwhelmed with information they don’t particularly need now cluttering their minds. 

Time. Hybrid work increases the collective benefit and accelerates the work if — and only if — time is managed realistically and creatively. The ancient Greeks had two concepts for time: Chronos and Kairos. Chronos is clock time. A minute is a minute. Kairos is the depth of time, the meaning in a moment, the importance of it, the texture. 

Office work is Chronos. Hybrid work is Kairos.

Too much clock time kills creativity, and creativity is how complex problems get solved.

I have rarely seen fifteen people sitting around a table solve a hard problem just because someone invited them to a meeting. The reason we get ideas in the shower and on walks is precisely because we can relax. Nobody is demanding an answer. Flexible work makes people snippy when they have to wait for someone else to respond. This reaction is instinctive, built on the backs of punch cards and outdated expectations. We live in an environment of instant gratification and we want answers now. And sometimes, yes, lives are at stake. But most of the time, we can wait. 

Growth and Development 

Hybrid work means more creativity and imagination applied to the path of personal growth.

Office work is many things, and one of them is a structure with proximity to power.

It’s hard to play the game from home and to be in the right place at the right time. But maybe those places weren’t exactly right to begin with. 

Understanding modern skill sets is a necessity for every functional organization. Crafting paths for satisfying development and opportunities for people to grow is critical. It’s not enough to be in the headquarters now or get time with executives as a means for advancement. This is the time to get serious about role clarity and being honest with new hires about the company culture — not the words etched into plaques or written on the walls, but the way you really work every day. 

Some people love working in the office and some don’t. This dynamic is real and it isn’t going away. Attracting and retaining talent will need to take this into account. 

Inclusion. By definition, this means every person. Every person includes many people who do not accept the insistent wishful thinking that Covid is over. It’s not. We don’t know right now what the consequences of even the most mild initial infection in a vaccinated person might be. Covid is taking a toll on the workforce.

We are all dealing with collective uncertainty and grief in our own ways.

People are still getting sick, including with repeat infections, and dying. Even before the pandemic, disability was a spectrum. As resilient as we are, we live in fragile frames. If we design with disability in mind, everyone benefits. 

Prioritization. This also means saying ‘no’ to what you won’t be doing. Learning to say no in the face of pressure is hard.

Curiosity is infinite, but time isn’t.

Ideas are abundant, but you can’t implement them all. Choose. And get to it. 

Performance. If you have role clarity, clear communication and a working understanding of your unique contributions to the overall goal, do what you can, when you can, as well as you can, and then protect your time. If you find yourself with an unstructured block, fight the urge to fill it. 

Give yourself a break, now that the break room isn’t what it used to be. You need a chance to recover from stress, to learn something, to simply exist. We aren’t going back to the way things were before, but it can be better than it ever was, if we roll up our sleeves now and build the future we want to inhabit.