The great hybrid kerfuffle
Tech companies are in a tearing rush to get people back into the office. They say they want to try a "hybrid" working model. This move stems from a misunderstanding of the term which can be dangerous.
- If organisations respect people's work preferences, they'll automatically be hybrid. There's no need to make every individual hybrid. This lowers everyone's productivity to a lowest common denominator.
- "Forced hybridism" threatens to erode gains in operational efficiency over the last two years, in areas like hiring, staffing and training.
- This is also a costly move. Employers pay for infrastructure and office space, employees pay with a poorer quality of life and society plays with poorer inclusion, brain drain and environmental impacts.
- Many arguments in favour of forced hybridism are weak. They stem from a status-quo bias and a lack of deep thought, than from data or research.
- When leaders force their view of hybrid-work on employees, the decision is asymmetric. There's very little impact on leaders' work lives but employees pay a disproportionate cost in comparison.
- Pushing hardline decisions in a cold job market may work in the short term, but it leaves companies vulnerable in the long run. Top talent will migrate to employers that afford a flexible workplace.
- Instead of forced hybridism employers should consider making the right investments in systems, people's learning, retreats and social events and modern ways of working such as async agile. This'll help them stay ahead of the future-of-work curve.
A few days back, I mentioned that this project will take a few detours for the next few weeks. Consider this post one of them detours. For good reason, I assure you. It’s because I have hope. Hope that the world of work will change for the better by the time I’m ready to make this project a book. The trigger for this post is what I call, “the great hybrid kerfuffle”. Over the last several weeks, some tech companies are doubling down on getting people back to the office. The focus - to get people to work in a “hybrid” mode. There’s also some misguided advice out there from very respected researchers who say companies shouldn’t let employees pick their work from home days. I’ll let you Google who said that.
To make matters complicated, this comes on the back of “the great resignation” - a phenomenon that saw over a million resignations in my country, India. Today we stand amid what some people are calling a recession, a global oil crisis and a crypto winter. Employers are hedging their bets as they summon people back to the office. The tech job market is indeed slowing down. Maybe disgruntled employees won’t leave after all.
The message, however, is rather subtle and buzzword compliant. It’s almost as if “hybrid” is a panacea for all problems companies face today - engagement, culture, onboarding, productivity, what have you. Even as we throw that word around, it seems we don’t quite understand what “hybrid” really means. Getting this wrong can be counterproductive to being async-agile. In today’s post I want to unpack that word for you and I want to explain why misunderstanding this term is dangerous.
Hybrid organisation, not hybrid employees
The term “hybrid” gained popularity somewhere in the first half of 2021. The world was slowly but surely fighting back against the pandemic and it felt like “forced-remote” would soon be a thing of the past. My research told me that different people had different work preferences. Here’s some data from two consecutive years of data gathering at a major Indian tech firm.
| How many days per week do people want to work remotely? | 2021 | 2022 |
|---|---|---|
| 5 days | 15.47% | 32.41% |
| 4 days | 12.15% | 10.02% |
| 3 days | 34.25% | 23.24% |
| 2 days | 24.45% | 14.71% |
| 1 day | 6.08% | 5.33% |
| Never | 7.6% | 14.29% |
I want you to examine this data closely. You’ll notice that in the space of one year, the middle ground has shrunk. The percentage of people who want to be all-remote or all in the office has almost doubled. Of course, please read this with a grain of salt. When I conducted the 2021 survey, India was in the throes of a debilitating second wave of Covid-19. People were more isolated than ever and we still don’t know what the mental health effects of those times were. Between then and now, the Covid-19 has almost become endemic and people have got better at working remotely. Which explains why one in three people now wants to be remote all the time.
Even when I used the word “hybrid” in 2021, I was conscious of this spread of preferences. As a remote and asynchronous work evangelist, I must also admit that working from home works only for certain people. Those that have a home office setup are likely to thrive over those that are just making do with temporary hacks. Working from home is toxic for anyone who doesn’t have a great emotional environment at home. Victims of abuse, for example, don’t want to be stuck at home with their abuser(s). If you have a disproportionate share of household responsibilities, you need the contrivance of “going to work” to escape the drudgery of your daily chores. And all these circumstances are only valid for knowledge work. Let’s not forget that a large percentage of the working class don’t work on a computer. For them, remote work isn’t even a thing!
So my idea about “hybrid” was to respect people’s choices. When you hire capable people, they want to do meaningful work. Trust them to choose where they’ll be happiest and most productive. Given the spread of work preferences, you will have a “hybrid organisation”. This is the nuance that many organisations have missed. Instead of thinking of a hybrid organisation, they’re thinking about “hybrid employees”.
This misunderstanding of nuance leads to abominations like the 3:2 model - “three days in, two days out”, or vice versa. Let’s look back at that table above.
If you take people on each extreme of the spectrum, then right off the bat you’ll piss off almost half your workforce - 46.7% people. The middle ground doesn’t work for them.
Even the people in the middle won’t be happy. Depending on the version of 3:2 that you employ, you’ll upset 30-38% of your people, because the arrangement won’t match their preferences.
That leaves you with 23-15% of your people who may be happy with the arrangement. News flash - even they want flexibility. They don’t want you to tell them which days to come to the office.
As an organisation, you want to create a system where you elevate everyone to their highest level of productivity and happiness. The 3:2 model and its equivalents bring you down to the lowest common denominator of unhappiness. And hey, I just did back-of-the-napkin maths up there. You should check out why Laura Cassiday and David Rock call the 3:2 model the worst strategy.
A move backwards
Over the last two years, the operations teams of most tech organisations have been innovating. Working from anywhere for two years meant companies had to learn to hire from anywhere and staff projects from anywhere. Teams are distributed by design these days. In large organisations, teams find themselves spread across multiple locations.
In person training, which was not just costly, but cumbersome to organise, made way for virtual classrooms and online learning. I can tell from my experience that I’ve designed virtual workshops that are far more effective than their in-office versions. There’s also industry evidence of this phenomenon. Simple media creation tools have lowered the cost of production for content. No wonder you see a boom in online learning.
This apart, teams have woken up to the inadequacies of the all-office environment. They understand that they’re more productive when they have the flexibility to choose where they work from. It’s clear as daylight that copy-pasting the office working model onto a distributed workforce is stressful and doesn’t work. Indeed, asynchronous agile aims to bring new, more meaningful ways of working, to this workforce.
The nerfed understanding of “hybrid”, where leaders are choosing to act in haste instead of being thoughtful, threatens to erode all these gains. There are several unanswered questions.
If you’ve spread team members all across a country, how does a 3:2 model or something similar bring them together?
What will you say to people who you hired from a place where you don’t have an office?
Are you willing to let go of the flexibility to hire from anywhere and staff from anywhere?
How will you match the scale and efficiency you got from adopting virtual classrooms and online learning?
Cost, cost, cost
A poor understanding of hybrid-work is also costly for all stakeholders. Let’s start with employers. Back of the napkin calculations for the data I shared above will reveal that all you need is office seating capacity for about 40% of your workforce. Don’t forget, you reduce your electricity, maintenance, water and sometimes food bills as well - depending on what your offices provide, of course. A “three days in, two days out” setup needs you to have seating capacity for 60% of your workforce. That right there is a 50% additional cost that increases every year.
While the other variant of 3:2 is just as expensive today as allowing full flexibility, the costs keep mounting each year. When you allow your employees a true work-from-anywhere setup, people will become more proficient with remote work, with time. You don’t need to grow your offices each year.
Infrastructure is another cost we don’t think hard about. Hybrid work requires you to provide your employees with:
a world class office infrastructure;
a world class remote working environment;
and a way to straddle both worlds.
The companies that are betting big on this way of working are also making enormous investments in purpose-built technology. Take Google’s experiments with Campfire, for example. Many companies gloss over this part of the hybrid solution and focus only on the marketing spiel instead.
Next, let’s talk about employees. Each of us knows colleagues who’ve moved to a smaller town or closer to family and are not just enjoying a better quality of life, but are saving more of their salaries. A forced-hybrid model takes that way of life away from them. If they have to be in an office two or three times a week, they can’t stay in another town anymore. You are choosing to uproot them from their family and imposing a higher cost of living on them.
And lastly, let’s discuss society. This part of the puzzle is so big that I need to break it down into smaller sub-sections.
Facilitating brain drain
The Tulsa Remote project seeks to reverse the “brain-drain” from Oklahoma by attracting people who can work from anywhere, to come live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They reward this through a $10,000 bounty. While that’s pretty cool, it underscores a lesson for every small town around the world.
Take India, for example. Most of our knowledge work happens from eight tier-1 cities. These cities are expensive and get most of the attention from the government and private service providers. The congestion in these cities makes them increasingly unlivable. Household savings and the quality of life aren’t great, though people take home decent sums of money.
There is another India, which lives in its 97 tier-2 cities. These include some very livable places such as Coimbatore, Kochi, Visakhapatnam, Mysore, Jaipur and Pondicherry. People have gone back to these smaller towns and are contributing to the secondary and tertiary economies of these places. For once, corporations are able to reverse the brain drain they’re historically responsible for. In return, they benefit from having an expanded talent pool to hire from. Reverse brain drain can lead to many positive consequences, such as reinvigorating the local community, creating opportunities for mentorship and fostering an environment for innovation.
“It’s potentially great for emerging markets to get talent back. That’s what I’m most excited about. I think India could get a lot of talent back from the West, but it’s not only India. I think the Indian smaller towns could be the winners. Because there are tier-two, tier-three cities which have enough of an infrastructure that you could work remotely and there’s all the benefits of lower cost of living. And I think they could be the real winners instead of Bangalore or Hyderabad or Delhi.”
Through forced-hybridism, big tech firms facilitate another great migration, a repeat brain-drain. Away from the smaller towns and villages, into the big cities. And for what benefit?
A blow for inclusion
It’s no secret that women share a disproportionate burden of household responsibilities. We also know that women make more sacrifices for their careers than men ever have to. Even before the pandemic, we knew that if we had to be inclusive of women in the workforce; we needed to mitigate the reasons for which they have to exit the workplace. The industry made a rather half-hearted attempt to embrace “flex work” back in the day. While flex work has its minor benefits, you can imagine that if you’re a woman working from home when most of your team hangs out in the office, the environment can turn exclusionary despite people’s best efforts. Remote work during the pandemic somehow levelled the playing field for everyone and I imagine that this is a far more inclusive situation for anyone who’s hard pressed to come to office every single day.
Consider a different demographic - people with disabilities. If you have a motor disability, India’s one of the worst countries to get around in. This has had a non-trivial impact on career options for people with disabilities. If people with disabilities can work out of their home offices, employers can build a workplace that’ll integrate them far more easily into their company’s fabric.
“...work from anywhere allows companies to hire from anywhere and create a more inclusive workforce based on gender, based on disabilities. So my prediction — and of course, this is testable — is that companies that do not offer this option are going to lose the right tail of the talent distribution.” - Raj Choudhury
Companies that force people back into the office, if only for a few days, will find themselves on the wrong side of history as they’ll exclude such people from the workforce. Companies that care about a diverse workforce are also more innovative and productive. Is that something you’d like to let go of easily?
The non-trivial impact on environment
While this topic needs nuance, we need to acknowledge that the daily commute has an environmental impact. In his Harvard Business Review cover story, Raj Choudhury put out some interesting data.
“In 2018 Americans’ commute time averaged 27.1 minutes each way, or about 4.5 hours a week. Eliminating that commute—particularly in places where most people commute by car—generates a significant reduction in emissions. The USPTO estimates that in 2015 its remote workers drove 84 million fewer miles than if they had been travelling to headquarters, reducing carbon emissions by more than 44,000 tons.”
I don’t know of any tech firm that doesn’t recognise the climate crisis we’re in. Are we willing to give up even small wins, for benefits that we can’t justify?
Science or superstition?
I know what you may be thinking. These execs aren’t silly. They’ve obviously thought through the benefits of their approach. I argue you may give them too much credit. Let’s examine some reasons we’ve heard in favour of forced-hybridism.
Drive higher productivity
There’s enough research to show that people are more productive when they work remotely. Productivity was never an issue. Tech companies wouldn’t have made a killing in 2020 and 2021 if that was the case. All-remote companies such as GitLab and Automattic have been around and growing for years. Shouldn’t they have folded by now, if remote work was really unproductive?
The current recessionary climate looks gloomy, but market performance is barely an indicator of employee productivity. Your people may have been very productive in the office environment - let’s concede that for a second. If they were just as productive, if not more, in an unfamiliar, all-remote setup, does it say much for the magic of the office anymore? Or is that just superstition we’re hanging on to?
People should be able to “bump into each other”
You can’t build a distributed, multi-office, multi-continent culture by hoping that people collide at the water cooler.
“The truth about hallway conversation is we only had it with people very close to us in the physical office. You meet and talk to the same 10 people every day. And people talk to people just like them — sales talks to sales, R&D talks to R&D, and interns talk to interns.” - Raj Choudhury
Depending on the size and design of your office; sheer presence on the same campus cannot guarantee serendipity, as Tom Allen discovered many decades back. And what about the people they need to interact with in other locations? Let’s not forget, introverts aren’t at ease with these gregarious interactions. The water-cooler pattern is not just unscalable, but non-inclusive. In distributed organisations, employers need to be intentional about serendipity. I’ll get into more detail in a future post. For now, I can tell you we need to use technology better - enterprise social networks, chat rooms and company intranets.
Preserve culture and the “secret sauce”
Culture is more than just people sitting in proximity to each other. Clay Christensen talked about it as a combination of your resources (in tech that’s often your people), your processes and your values (spoken and unspoken). This culture should be visible in and out of the office. As a consultant, I’ve often worked for clients at their office. That didn’t stop me from living what I thought was the culture of my employers.
Forced hybridism for the sake of culture creates the illusion that it’s all about in person activities.
“Having people work remotely forces you to forgo the illusion that building a company culture is just about in-person social activities. Now you can get on with the actual work of defining and practising it instead.”
A problem of asymmetry
Even if one were to concede the arguments about culture, productivity and serendipity, there’s a problem of asymmetry in forced-hybridism. The execs decide, employees bear the costs. Most execs who are driving this mandate keep optionality in their work lives. They can choose to work from home or work remotely when they please.
I’ve heard a rather pernicious argument as well. One where the C-suite says they’ll come to the office in solidarity with the rest of their workforce. Make no mistake about this - they’re using their discretion here as well. It’s just that they expect the entire workforce to mirror their choices.
These arguments seem disingenuous, because you often see few investments in the things that’ll actually improve productivity - such as investments in people’s growth and the right tools. Or on activities that help people bond - such as retreats or discretionary travel budgets. Instead, organisations that misunderstand hybrid-work impose most costs on their employees.
Short-term bets; long-term risks
I could be wrong, but I can’t help but think that there are some cynical calculations at play here. First, Elon Musk set the trend by throwing a shade on remote work. Some legitimacy for the “back to office” argument, I guess. Second, it’s possible that employers are betting that their employees have nowhere to go. The global economy is slowing down because of several reasons and startups are laying off people; at least in India. They may think that a new, “new normal” is possible in these circumstances.
The recession won’t be forever though. The tech industry will continue to grow. Jobs will be back eventually. What then? Raj Choudhury says top talent drives workplace trends. If top-talent values flexibility, then inflexible organisations will see an inevitable exodus. Organisations that put people first will have a competitive advantage.
Treat everyone as remote
While I’ve been critical of organisations and execs who are employing forced hybridism, I admit they may also have good intentions. The path to hell, however; you know how the cliché goes! The aim of this post was to outline the dangers of misunderstanding what a truly hybrid organisation should look like.
Organisations can still stay ahead of the curve (adapted from James Stanier)
There are those of us who believe that the future of work is remote-first and that working asynchronously is going to be a key skill. GitLab, Invision, Buffer, Basecamp, Doist, Automattic and others were the early innovators. More recently, companies like Shopify, Dropbox, EPAM, and Slalom have joined the party. As early adopters, they’re already reaping benefits. There’s still a window of opportunity for firms to be the early majority. Those that miss this window will lag the innovation curve in designing the workplace of the future.
Async agile seeks to prepare for that scalable future, while giving people the work life balance they want. I also see this to be inclusive of people who would otherwise be invisible in our industry. A forced-hybrid model is the antithesis of such a work philosophy. It sacrifices flexibility and inclusion and limits scale. The arguments in its favour, be it productivity, serendipity or preserving the cultural secret sauce, are all weak. Well-intentioned leaders need to think deeper about these problems. Another world is possible.
If you care about connection, give people time, space and the budget to create social connections.
If you care about learning, give people discretionary spend, the right systems and on job learning opportunities.
If you care about serendipity, invest in the right tools and systems.
If you care about productivity, move to an asynchronous way of working.
Oh, and if you retain your office space, your workforce will still be “hybrid”. Just don’t impose “hybrid” on every individual. Make location irrelevant in your way of working. Instead of telling people where to work, let them make that decision. Create a culture of collaboration, where you treat everyone as remote, regardless of their physical proximity to each other. People can still have in-person interactions in your offices if they choose to. When it comes to work though, they just need to be inclusive of those who aren’t in the same physical premises. This is a strategic shift that you as a leader need to precipitate.