I had an interesting conversation at an event this week around hybrid working and was asked how many days people should be in the office. Lots of quick pro and anti-thoughts spun through my mind before I prepared my answer. Employee wellbeing, post covid travel/crowd anxiety, the value of working in person, the value of working in peace and quiet at home, 10 Teams meetings a day, walking/exercising more or less, the cost of energy, the cost and reliability of travel, working longer hours, being in the same building for the sake of it, does visible equal more productive, trust, the cost of unused office space. So, after all that running through my head in rapid time, I said “2 days a week in the office”, but quickly countered with “depending on your job”. I reflected that we definitely miss something from just being in the same environment as each other. We miss the subtlety of body language, wellbeing signals, we miss the impromptu conversations that start with “seeing you has just reminded me.” These things add to productivity and connectivity and there is no doubt that a fully remote working practice suffers slightly because of it.
However, the answer in my opinion is probably not to simply mandate a set pattern of days in the office every week. Strategy type meetings, solution explorations, product brainstorming, and many like this are very much more productive in person, so I definitely advocate coming together for these. Many conversations can happen at once, little break outs can occur naturally even in the same room, and your people bond more. Even if they have been working together for a long time, relationships need care and attention, so we will always benefit from spending time together. But does forcing people to work in an office a set number of days a week, regardless of what their tasks are for the day, actually improve the productivity or give you greater visibility of what they are doing? If this is the only reason for mandating office attendance, then I rather suspect that your end of year performance will not be drastically different than if you had simply left everyone to their own preference.
So, I would advise, don’t feel the need to follow the herd or a trend, or revert to comfort zones, just because it is always how we used to do things. Treat this like any other business problem you have to find a solution to. Gather views, be as informed as you can be on how people work most effectively. Test your decisions with devil’s advocate challenging. Then arrive at the right solution for your business at that time that will maximise productivity, fuel staff motivation and generate a buoyant culture that you are proud to lead. It almost certainly will be a hybrid option, I am in no doubt this is here to stay, and it will be an option that the people in the company want and understand rather than are forced to have. Make sure your people meet often enough to appreciate value from working together, ensure that there is a clear purpose to justify the travel and longer days that is more than sending a signal of “I don’t trust you are busy if you are not here”, make sure that the trust issue is dealt with by effective leadership and management principles, not thinking visibility alone is the answer.
Vince