Are we doing hybrid wrong?

It’s me, again, talking about the future of work. Again!

You’re probably calling your teams to return to the office as things start to pick up. But not everyone wants to come back to sit in an office.

It’s understandable that some prefer to log in from the comfort of their personal space, while others prefer to visit the office only on certain days.

And I believe it will be this way from now until the next disruption.

When you think of the extremes, one of them is “I only want to WFH,” and the other is, “I only want to work in the office.” And then we have somewhere in the middle, “Let’s do a bit of both. Let’s go hybrid.”

All three are correct; it depends on your perspective. Are we going to impose something and say, “Hey, you need to collaborate for this many hours”? Or are we going to leave it up to teams and individuals to sort something out, which could result in different ways for different teams? Should we be hybrid 50-50, 70-30, or 1 day out of 5?

The exact number of days in the office does not define hybrid work arrangements. It’s not an in-office and virtual work “mashup” or a temporary alternative for when the world is slowly transitioning back from home-office to the traditional brick-and-mortar settings. It is the way forward. The future of work.

But hybrid, by definition, only includes people who are close to the office. What if the talent you’ve been looking for doesn’t live close to one of the physical offices? Are you going to let them slide or relocate them? Why not expand your strategy beyond the binary “home vs office” into a third space – working from anywhere?

Today, the emphasis is on HOW teams work rather than WHERE they work. And this leaves no room for micromanagement.

Whether to work from home or the office is simply a matter of preference; each arrangement certainly has its pros and cons. It comes down to how employers, managers, and leaders provide employees with the necessary tools and autonomy that empower hybrid working.

However, with flexibility comes choices, and with choices come collaboration challenges – how do we include everyone?

And is there a best practice out there? No, not yet. We’ve all done what we’ve done. The important thing to me is what we learned. What do we think works and does not work? Let’s remember those and do more of them. That’s why at TRG International, Kaizen is one of our core values, our DNA. It reminds us to keep being agile and resilient and to keep learning from our mistakes.

As our business expands our footprints globally, it’s getting a tad bit tiresome having to get up at the crack of dawn or even before the crack of dawn and go to bed late to accommodate somebody that is 8, 9, or 10 hours away. The only solution to that is to have somebody else over there so we can have a good night’s sleep and get some more balance in our lives.

In a business-as-unusual world today, holding on to the thought that being physically present in the office equals values and productivity can result in missing out on opportunities for diversity, inclusion, and talent that decide to improve their life balance. If you want people to show up in person, you need to back up that claim with metrics and explanations. Otherwise, you’re not “saving” by reducing wages; you’re using funds to funnel recruitment efforts. And that, in a nutshell, is a much more expensive problem to solve.