If we’ve learned anything over the past 24 months is that if everyone is dialled into a call individually, calls work better. With good facilitation, things are more inclusive, equal, and fair. Great meetings with loads of vision and lateral thinking can happen over a video-conference. Mics don’t always need to be off, or on. Neither does video. There’s a time and a place for all of those remote meeting settings so prescribing ‘a company rule for everyone’ doesn’t work.
You know what else doesn’t work? Two or more people dialling in from a shared webcam while the rest of the meeting participants dial in individually. No amount of training or self-control has been able to discipline the two (or more) co-located people away from engaging in a more fluid, richer conversation together at the exclusion of those who have dialled in. Body language is rich, turn-taking is slicker, the centre of gravity of an in-person conversation is so strong that it simply makes it much more difficult for someone else to participate when they aren’t in the same room.
So, where does that leave us? Well, if just one employee has to dial in, it leaves us having to support distributed working. There’s no middle ground. People need good AV equipment, good remote facilitation skills, an understanding of how turn-taking works in online video calls – they (and especially business leaders) need to know how to work in a distributed way. If anything, the idea of saying, ‘we’re hybrid’ sets up an office environment for failure not success. Things will only get harder until we reckon with the underlying question – what’s the office for, now?
What’s the office for?
The office used to be a place where managers would sit, attached to a factory, and make sure workers performed their jobs. But with knowledge work – work that simply requires a laptop and phone – work doesn’t happen in a factory anymore. So, what’s the office for now? Why do we think that ‘returning to work’ is synonymous with being at a particular place for a particular time.
Maybe the office becomes a meeting place? Maybe it’s a place for people who don’t have great working-from-home setups to get some distance from their home so they can work in an environment that’s more ergonomic and conducive to better focus for them.
Maybe it’s a place for people to have focussed collaboration space and work through gnarly problems together – problems that are novel, highly collaborative or where the multi-sensory component of the get-together is important to the outcome (like training). Or, maybe you think it’s still for leaders to ‘watch over’ their employees to make sure they’re still doing their job. But, if that’s the reason, then hybrid won’t work for you either – 100% in the office is probably more your jam because what that says to me is that you don’t yet trust people.
Some examples for re-thinking ‘the office’
Right now, what seems obvious is that to support distributed working well but also leverage the benefits of a place that many of us can decide to use at the same time, the office could be setup differently; to enable individuals to sit next to one another, without risk of background noise or mic crossover. This is easily achieved with some noise-cancelling software and a decent mic (call centres have been doing this for ages, by the way).
This idea provides a way for everyone to dial into remote meetings individually, regardless of location. It makes it inclusive for those who can’t make it in that day. Then, when everyone leaves the meeting, those who chose to work from the same place, say, ‘the office’, can still go to lunch together and enjoy the benefits of in-person time.
Perhaps pairing this idea with optimising the design of the space for larger collaborative group exercises as things head back towards something that resembles normal – work that enables experiential, novel, or highly-collaborative – gives ‘the office’ a different but more useful purpose than trying to cram everyone back into individual desks, only to have them all wear headphones anyway because open plan offices are terrible for concentration.
For some businesses, a communal space for employees still feels important – there are huge benefits to this, but it’s not an ‘office’ anymore. Words like ‘collaboration hub’, ‘meeting place’, ‘homebase’ feel a little more descriptive and true of how those ‘office spaces’ could be used now. No matter what anyone calls it, what it truly means is that there’s no such thing has hybrid because as long as we choose to support one person dialling in, we all need to have the distributed working skills to make it work inclusively and fairly for that one person who couldn’t be in that day.
Sure, there will be times that full teams can work together, at the same place and at the same time. Supporting distributed working also doesn’t mean giving that up. But, if teams also value inclusivity, even though they may have a space to share that’s sort of near where their employees live, it doesn’t mean they don’t need to invest in good tools, practices and processes to support everyone and not just the few who live within a commutable distance to a common space we used to call the ‘office’.
‘Hybrid’ is a false hope
The examples I give aren’t exhaustive, but it worries me to see that the leaders seem to be thinking that the decision to adopt a ‘hybrid model’ seems to imply some middle-ground. A little bit of a relinquishment of the absolute power an employer used to have over their employees. But, as businesses try to grow out of a pandemic, it’s the employees who have the power now, and it’s up to businesses to adapt.
A hybrid model doesn’t mean less work, it means more. Even partially distributed teams means you need to understand and nail how distributed teams work together, properly.
Hybrid work as a middle ground implies that the two ends of the spectrum (all remote, or all in office) are somehow more difficult now. But, to be in the middle means you need an even more nuanced understanding of how work works, what offices are for, how people behave in environments you can’t control, a recognition of the blurry lines between work and life that have always been there but are now more apparent than ever, and that even more elusive value for companies – trust in your employees.
What’s emerging is that for knowledge businesses, there’s far less physical time and effort required in leaning into distributed working as the way forward, regardless of whether 40 people happen to want to work from your collaboration hub for a day or two a week.
Using design to adapt to a post-pandemic workplace
I’ve spent quite a lot of time over the pandemic years helping organisations adapt remarkably well to a distributed ways of working and who are working harder than ever to get better at it. They are experimenting daily, working across time and the country to figure out what good looks like for the people they have employed – with all their neurodiversity and specific environmental needs. The results are happier employees & better quality work for the business. All that’s preventing every knowledge business from doing the same is fear. Most of the time it’s fear of ‘losing control.’
So, if you’re a leader whose curious about how your organisation could better leverage the benefits of distributed teams and the benefits of having ‘the office’, I’m happy to spend an hour or so listening and sharing what I know.