Right from the early days of the pandemic, there’s been infinite speculation about what it means for the future of work. Now, answers are beginning to emerge. While a number of leading companies, including Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook, have delayed plans to return to the workplace until the New Year, there’s little question that workers will soon see an end to full-time remote working. But what comes next?

The shift to hybrid working
Hybrid working, where employees work from the workplace two or three days a week and remotely for the rest, is emerging as a popular option – and it’s easy to see why. A hybrid model has the potential to satisfy employees who want to work from home more, and those who hanker for the workplace. It also enables employers to provide their people with more flexibility, while retaining the workplace as a cultural and collaborative hub. 

Hybrid working then, has the potential to offer the best of both worlds — but only if done right. The problem is that many employers are currently approaching hybrid working as an HR policy. They’re imposing arbitrary workplace days on people, with little thought as to how these support organisational culture or effectiveness. 

When hybrid working doesn’t work
Organisational effectiveness — or an organisation’s ability to deliver on its objectives — depends on it functioning well as a system. The right people need to come together at the right time to do things. If employers allocate workplace days at random, it’s highly unlikely that they’ll achieve this. Instead, they could make necessary collaboration more difficult, introducing friction to the system and reducing its effectiveness.   

Culture can also become a casualty of hybrid working. If leaders ask the same people or teams to come in on the same days, they can end up creating multiple siloed cultures, and losing all sense of a cohesive whole. This is a real risk, when organisational culture contributes to employee morale, happiness, retention – and productivity.     

So, what’s the solution? How can leaders miss these pitfalls and unlock hybrid working’s potential to support organisational effectiveness and culture?

See the strategic challenge
Firstly, leaders need to stop seeing the shift to hybrid working as a static HR policy which, once decided on, can be set to one side. Instead, they need to view it as an ongoing strategic challenge. It’s about finding a form of hybrid working that provides people with the flexibility they’re looking for, while enabling them to work effectively.   

Reframed in this way, hybrid working becomes a question of organisational design. How can leaders create a hybrid approach that achieves organisational objectives?   

Understand the system
The key to finding the right hybrid approach lies in really understanding how the organisation, or system, operates whilst taking into account a number of considerations, such as:

• Best serving customers and their changing demands
• How work gets done productively
• Employee preferences 
• Working safely – physical and psychological wellbeing
• How talent is nurtured and developed
• The impact on culture and a sense of belonging
• Being competitive in the talent marketplace

The best place to start is to understand the work to be done to serve customers. Leaders need to understand who does what work, what work requires collaboration, and whether that work can be done remotely. This will help them determine which positions need to be in the workplace, when, and what’s required for people to to work effectively. For example, an IT administrator may manage helpdesk queries remotely, whilst monitoring the servers must be on-site, and onboarding new starters could be hybrid. 

However, creating the best conditions for work is only one part of the equation. Leaders also need to create the best conditions for learning and development, and for organisational culture to thrive. For this, they need to go deeper than who works with who, and look at who depends on who. Graduates might not work with senior people in their team at all, but they could depend on them for learning and development. Equally, graduates might not work with graduates in other teams, but they might use each other as sounding boards and depend on one another for moral support. Leaders need to map all these nuanced relationships to make informed decisions on which groups need to be in the workplace, when.

Design an iterative solution
Undertaking the above process will help leaders develop a strategic approach to hybrid working – rather than a static HR policy. However, they still can’t treat this as a job done. Once implemented, leaders need to constantly review and evaluate their chosen approach. They need to be questioning: are teams producing high quality work? Are people feeling motivated? And do people want to stay and grow in the organisation? It’s only by repeatedly asking and answering these questions, that leaders can be sure that their workplace strategy supports work — and organisational culture.