Expert Q&A
Harriet Molyneaux
Managing director, HSM Advisory, UK
Harriet Molyneaux focuses on the future of work and engages with clients across innovation, inclusion and diversity, people experience and shifting cultures.
What is hybrid work, in your opinion?
Hybrid work is about sustainable high performance, achieved through flexibility. Now, what does that mean? Well, at one end of the work spectrum is a model where everyone is in the office from nine till five. Both time and location are restricted. At the other is a model where employees work from anywhere around the world at any time. Both time and location are unrestricted. Hybrid is anything that sits in the middle of that.
Hybrid work being only about location doesn’t paint the full picture of hybrid. That’s a location-based flexible working policy. Hybrid work is much more than that. We're looking at redesigning work holistically.
What are the biggest drawbacks of hybrid work?
A significant risk is that the “always on, always connected” culture pervades, which we’ve seen happen in many companies since the pandemic began. A second challenge is around actual performance. Organisations that haven't thought ahead about hybrid work might find that performance and productivity drop. For instance, junior colleagues who don’t have a good working environment at home—say if they work from their living room with three flatmates—might find it difficult to focus. As a result their senior leaders could be tempted to just bring people back into the office.
The third risk is that organisations say that they are shifting to hybrid working patterns, but their senior leaders are in the office five days a week. Many employees naturally follow what their leaders are doing, which could result in a culture of presenteeism again. The fourth risk is that managers aren't given the support that they need, given we are asking them to do skilled people management.
The other thing that concerns me is the inflexible way in which flexibility is being implemented in some cases. For instance, organisations that mandate a specific number of days or certain days that the whole company or whole departments need to be in the office. This is relatively inflexible. Decisions around where people do work should be based around tasks, such as, “is this a task that requires focus and where do I focus best, in the office or at my home?”
What is the role of managers in building and maintaining these policies?
In my experience, managers are the biggest pain point in hybrid work by a significant margin. In a hybrid system, we’re asking a lot of managers when it comes to their people management skills specifically, and many find this challenging.
We also find that a strong resistance point in many organisations, although certainly not all, is senior leadership perspectives around the connection between being present in the office and performance. Many senior leaders are uncomfortable with hybrid work because all they have known is being in the office from early in the morning until late in the evening. That's what they’ve done their whole lives, and that's in part what their success is based on. It’s important for leaders to establish what their personal narrative is around the benefits of not having been in the office all the time, and to set the right tone from the top.
How can organisations develop sustainable hybrid working policies for their teams and employees?
A company has to first consider its context, history and ways of working in the sector to decide on how it’s going to redesign work. Organisations need to draw up shared principles, such as sustainability, high performance, trust, fairness and humanness. These should be co-created with front-line employees.These principles will allow the company to draw some red lines in the sand: for example, to not value people who spend more time in the office over people who spend less.
Following that, there need to be agreements at the level of the team. Not 150 people teams, but, for instance, teams of seven. There is a need to co-create with not just managers, but all employees. This is about a distributed accountability model.
Further, these discussions must involve three different types of fairness. There's the process itself, and then the outcomes of that process. But also important is the fairness of the interaction. Do I feel my communication with my manager is fair? That's where the perception of fairness comes from. Perception is as important as actual fairness.
So the first point is co-creation, that is not only to understand what your people are thinking, but also to get their buy-in. And when you create solutions with people they are easier to embed further down the line. The second piece is around aligning leaders around the idea that hybrid work is about high performance. This is not about losing control, nor is it about forcing all their people out of the office.
What is your three-year outlook for hybrid work?
Most organisations are likely to go through a number of hybrid work iterations. Progress will depend on how quickly they iterate, and how well they are listening to their people. I would be enormously surprised if any of the models that are being implemented right now will be exactly the same in 12 months’ time.
It’s my view that organisations will take 12 to 18 months to get to a point where they have broadly settled into what their hybrid work model will look like. However, they shouldn't then just remain in that state, they should carry on developing.