Hybrid work is ripe to move away from default settings to design-led
As employees increasingly return to the office, companies struggle to balance their return to work policy with the need to keep teams motivated and in sync. This workplace problem is a design problem. Companies have the power to reframe this moment into an opportunity for increasing worker engagement, retention, and shaping the future of their work.
Once the dust from the latest variant outbreak settled, companies have been pressured to unveil their official hybrid work policy. Through surveys, anecdotal observations, and zoom discussions, business leaders synthesized the results and proposed their own 2, 3, or 4 day in-person work week. You can come in for X, be excused for Y, and everyone will get to enjoy the best of both worlds. Employers will offer respite from relentless work commutes AND provide safe harbor from the daily dog bark at the mail carrier — a balanced win-win, right? It should be. But what if it isn’t?
Hybrid work policies that specify days, permissions, and processes are in danger of missing a key component: defining what the team works on when the team is physically together, and what individuals work on when they are at home. Think those decisions should be up to each worker or manager? Think each day varies? Think again!
Workers that aren’t silently quitting or contemplating resignation are still at risk for disengagement or flight. Hybrid work is the reason this can happen, despite the optics of providing a balanced work life. The struggle lies in a lack of deeper understanding of the constructs of worker motivation, happiness, and productivity.
Pre-pandemic office life had some constants. By default, you knew when you could reasonably expect your team to be together, at what time, doing certain types of tasks. Meetings were set to check-in, review in-progress and upcoming work, create and review plans. Micro-interactions filled any gaps between tasks and meetings to help clarify priorities, pivot to emergencies, and build social networks. Good old days?
Despite all good intentions, the silent secret was that the office workplace was often the worst place to get work done, subject to default office standards. Overbooking staff with meetings was certainly not by design. Add loud talkers, foul microwaves, and horrible HVAC. All of these things were likely to happen all at once, to any degree it needed to and that was by default, facilitated by harried managers or forced by demanding clients. To mitigate, workers adopted headphones desk heaters and overbooked enclosed meeting rooms to keep focused as best as they could. They were working late or took work home because how were you supposed to get work DONE? In essence, the office model often felt broken, in that workers were forced to work in spaces that were not optimally designed to produce the best work while making healthy progress on work tasks. The default settings were not working.
The Pandemic removed office workers from the chaos and quickly taught them that a physical presence was not necessarily needed to get work done, because, just like pre-pandemic, many workers could still put their heads down and get work done without noisy colleagues AND they could get it done more efficiently without the typical office distractions. Working at home wasn’t by design, but it presented some compelling features and some were relishing the results. But there were still remote work defaults, and they also produced negative effects. Overly-booked Zoom meetings and endless screen time were not reaping the benefits of in-person interactions and team leaders were left with a very hazy view of team health and productivity.
And so we come to hybrid work. The default for hybrid work is to simply pick in-person and at-home work days. Why isn’t that enough?
“I show up to an office half-full. Sometimes I don’t know who will be there and who won’t.”
“I spend the day writing silently with other silent colleagues sitting near me and wonder why I’m here.”
“My junior staff can’t reap the benefits of shared knowledge if we’re not consistently in person.”
If companies accept their hybrid policy as a default setting, just how long will it take to get to this simple metric: “We are doing just enough work in just enough time that results in successful worker AND client satisfaction.”
Companies have a huge opportunity to capitalize on this moment with their teams. One policy will not satisfy everyone all of the time. But if companies and organizations go further and set an intention to design the work to be done for their teams when they are together and apart, they don’t leave productivity and happiness up to chance.
When companies co-design this work with their teams, suddenly they’re building a shared understanding, creating an empathic space that surfaces individual pain points and are then working collaboratively to build a new mindset that is pin-point focused on both worker happiness and productivity. And what becomes of a company that is intentional and invites teams to co-design? As Jeanne Liedka observes in her Harvard Business Review article Why Design Thinking Works, companies “unleash people’s full creative energies, win their commitment, and radically improve processes.” This feels like a truer win-win.
Organizations can integrate design-centric workshops into times of change to create that intention. These workshops do not push in new ideas, rather they’re inclusive and they cultivate the ideas teams inherently have within them and surface solutions that naturally solve the problems that are unique to each team. Design thinking promotes iteration and testing, resulting in incremental improvements that naturally build upon each version. What if your team started to adopt this way of working in other aspects of production or client delivery? Would you see exciting new ideas flourish? Would it happen quicker?
Accepting a default hybrid setting will risk dissatisfaction in the long-term. Moving hybrid from default to design-led brings teams along to a new work life, one they own, and likely one they will want to keep.
