Expert Q&A
Dr Anne-Laure Fayard
ERA chair professor in social innovation, NOVA School of Business and Economics, Portugal
Dr Fayard researches how space shapes collaboration (both in-person and virtual) and innovation. She has published on distributed collaboration, how to effectively nurture collaboration and idea generation.
What is hybrid work, in your opinion?
Distributed work, distributed teams, global teams and virtual teams have been around for more than two decades. In the 1980s and 1990s people were looking at ways to connect different offices and support informal interactions. Hybrid work is not completely new. We have practices, and we know how to do some of these things.
What is different now is that there was a big crisis and everybody had to go completely remote. Before, there were still a lot of traditional companies for whom working meant to be five days a week in a specific space. Now the question is between these two extremes, what do we put in the middle?
That’s going to vary depending on the organisational culture, and the kind of work: it's going to vary not only by industry, or by company, but even within a company, depending on the kind of work people are doing.
What are the top benefits of hybrid work, and how can organisations and employees best capture these benefits?
Although there was isolation, stress and burnout, and other negative consequences of being remote, people also felt that they got a sense of autonomy and control, and they don't want to lose it.
It’s key to be aware of variations in needs and constraints. Those who benefit from hybrid work are people who have a type of job that they can do remotely. But not those living in tiny studios in crazy Manhattan or those who are caregivers and don’t have a space to work from home. It also depends on whether the individual is emotionally and psychologically ready to handle the autonomy. Not everybody likes flexibility.
Often conversations about hybrid tend to focus on the number of days in the office and the scheduling. But there's less thinking about the practicalities, sometimes subtle, of interactions. Yet, these matter. So let’s say you schedule a meeting. Assume three of us are online, and two other people are in the office. Shall we go remote and be inclusive of those working from home? Even if those in-person might end up spending half of their day with their headphones on to talk with colleagues who are remote?
Companies are eager to offer work flexibility to attract the best talent, but nobody's really taking the time to think seriously about what exactly these benefits are.
What do organisations need to do to create equity around their hybrid work policies?
One kind of invisible group when you think of office buildings is the facilities staff, including security staff. When we were all at home, they were all in. What does it mean for these people when we talk about hybrid? I heard about one company that decided to give extra holidays to their facilities staff. The message was: even though you can’t be hybrid, we're going to give you a few more days off to compensate.
The pandemic has also shown that the office and its associated ways of working was a box that did not fit many, but that most needed to fit into. With its disproportionate effects on women and people of colour, it has made visible the necessity for organisations to be more sensitive to people’s multiple needs and experiences. This requires intentionality in revisiting your organisational culture: listening to all employees’ inputs; moving from time-based to outcome-based metrics; transparent communication, etc.
What is the role of technology in building a sustainable model for hybrid work?
We need to invent new ways of using technology that account for the differences of hybrid work. For example, the problem with video conferencing is that it just tries to mimic a meeting. The meeting starts at three and it ends at four. But if you remember meeting in an office, what is really important or interesting about it is what happens before and after. You chat with people, you hear things, these types of things. That doesn't happen on video conferencing. It could. If we just try to mimic old practices with technology, we're going to fail. But there are things we can do differently with technology. We can start being creative about the way we do things with technology.
What is your three-year outlook for hybrid work?
What hybrid work means is still very ambiguous, and varies with the nature of work and an organisation’s culture. What is sure, though, is that by challenging our definition of work, the pandemic has created an opportunity for redefining power and roles within organisations.
Many people claim that as soon as this is “over” we will go back to the same work arrangement as before. I cannot predict for sure, but I doubt that we will go back to the exact same work arrangement. In fact, according to surveys, a third of people, up to 50% for Gen Z, say they will quit their jobs if their employer is not offering flexible work arrangements. One thing to keep in mind though, is that the same people who did not have a choice to work from home (all the “invisible” workers in healthcare, transportation, factories and grocery stores) most probably will not have a choice to quit.