With hybrid work here to stay, is there more you could be doing to elevate collaboration, productivity, and well-being for your in-person and remote teams?

New research sheds light on both the positive impacts and pressing challenges that come with hybrid work, as well as leading practices that can help your organization ensure long-term success.

For example, while 58% of hybrid workers report more productivity, nearly as many describe feeling disconnected from coworkers. You can get insights in a new report to help strengthen workplace connections and learn:

• How culture and technology experts define hybrid work

• What lessons we’ve learned during the pandemic

• How you can achieve a more inclusive and productive hybrid workplace

WHAT IS HYBRID WORK?

Hybrid work refers to a spectrum of flexible work arrangements in which an employee’s work location and/or hours are not strictly standardised. Conventional wisdom suggests that hybrid work pertains only to location—if an individual is working in-person at the office, factory or some other place. This emphasis on location is evident in recent reports published by the International Labor Organisation and the World Economic Forum.7,8,9 Yet a few experts interviewed in this study stress that the time element is just as important— whether or not work hours are flexible. Harriet Molyneaux, managing director at HSM Advisory, a future-of-work consultancy, describes the time-location work spectrum: “[At] one end of the spectrum is everyone in the office, nine till five, so both restricted time and location. 

Andthen at the other end of the spectrum is anywhere around the world at any time. So no restricted time or location. A hybrid is anything that sits in the middle of that.” Brian Kropp, vice president at Gartner, a research and advisory firm, shares a similar view: “Hybrid work is not just about different locations, but also different timings and different schedules.” In short, a hybrid worker’s location and hours must be neither completely fixed nor completely flexible. A freelance programmer who can code by the beach with complete location and time flexibility is not a hybrid worker. We therefore define hybrid work as anything between full in-person work with limited time flexibility and full remote work with complete time flexibility.

THE LONG HISTORYOF “NEW” APPROACHES TO WORK

Over the past sixty years firms in Europe, the US, Japan and elsewhere have experimented with hybrid work, prompted by cost-cutting measures and facilitated by technological advances.  

Modern hybrid work combines elements of time- and location-flexible work models that had their genesis in the 1900s. Time-flexible work models, which pre-date location-flexible ones, first emerged during World War II, when workers producing goods, food and military equipment for the army were allowed to work in shifts rather than continuously. The aim was to maintain a steady supply throughout the war. More generally, time-flexible work models started gaining popularity in Europe and the US in the late 1960s. 

Yet it was only in the 1970s-80s that remote work took off in the US, arguably beginning in the form of WFH policies. The adoption was driven largely by rising commuting costs ( in turn due to soaring gasoline prices, sparked by the 1970s energy crisis) and facilitated by the expansion of landlines, personal computers and other technologies.11 Hybrid work began to seep into pockets of corporate life in Japan, the UK, Europe and elsewhere.

By 1994 organisations such as AT&T and IBM, eyeing huge potential real-estate savings, had started pioneering alternative workplace models—a combination of non-traditional work practices, settings and locations that were beginning to supplement traditional offices.

Enabled by advancing technologies such as the internet, digital devices and cloud computing, the adoption of remote work, often with a hybrid approach, increased throughout the 2000s and 2010s.14 This trend was further accelerated by the need to comply with equal opportunity employment policies, such as those for individuals with disabilities.

This acceleration is evident in the data. The share of the US labour force working at home for at least one day a week increased from 7.0% in 1997 to 9.5% in 2010.16 Meanwhile, a 2014 study found that almost half of the managers surveyed at mid-sized manufacturing firms in the US, the UK and Germany were allowed to WFH during normal hours.

Evidence from these pre-covid experiments in hybrid work demonstrates both the benefits and challenges for all-remote, location-flexible and time-flexible models.  

Benefits to many organisations include operational cost savings, such as from the reduced need for office space and improved human resource outcomes. Organisations have access to a wider talent pool, partly because they can use these policies to retain older and more experienced employees.18 Employees also tend to be more motivated by remote work policies and take fewer sick days. Workers enjoy greater autonomy, flexibility and in some cases better work-life balance and well-being from hybrid models.19 Society, meanwhile, benefits through a reduced carbon footprint (from less commuting) and a higher labour- force participation rate, as more people, including caregivers and individuals with disabilities, can work.

Downsides of past hybrid work models to organisations include the need for investment in telecommunication equipment and IT security; resistance by some workers to this equipment; and communication challenges (both technological and interpersonal) and the attendant coordination and collaboration difficulties. Workers also had to contend with heightened distrust between managers and employees.21  Because of these challenges, some firms did not enjoy (the hoped-for) productivity boosts from hybrid work models, which were instead seen as undermining innovation. Some workers suffered too.22,23 When WFH policies have been firm-dictated rather than employee-driven, employee quality of life has typically declined rather than improved. This has been especially true of time-flexible models.