Why most companies will fail at hybrid remote work
To be successful with remote work policies, define how you work, not where you work.
A few months ago, a feeling, a realization suddenly dawned on me. Social distance guidelines are going to last a lot longer than initially projected and work probably isn’t going to go back to “normal” anytime soon.
The largest national economy in the world will have been forced into an experiment, shifting as much of our economy to remote work as possible, for most likely 1+ years. During this time period, we’re all getting a dose of an alternative to the daily commute, lunch at the office, and in-person meetings, not to mention the informal conversations with people who swing by your desk.
So what do we expect and want when we’re given the all clear?
The default position seems to be a “hybrid remote” approach. According to the New York Times, a model of split time between an office and work at home is the ideal for many employees, citing a survey that suggested 47 percent would prefer it.
Where it all starts to go wrong
What most organizations fail to grasp is that hybrid remote is putting the emphasis on where people work and not how people work. Here’s a classic way hybrid work comes up for an organization:
Some of my employees want to work from home. They might have long commutes that take away from family time and might induce turnover. But if they work from home all the time, how will we protect the culture of the organization, make sure people are productive, and allow for collaboration, creativity, and serendipity to flourish? Let’s give our employees a few days a week they can work from home. Hence the hybrid model is born.
In some ways, a hybrid remote strategy can be seen as a perk for employees to allow them to take a few days off from a long or strenuous commute or take advantage of being at home during the work day once in awhile. It is a compromise solution in this depiction. It’s not a method to achieve a company goal and it’s not building a competitive advantage.
The number one problem with hybrid
Changing where you work and not how you work is the primary failure trigger for organizations thinking about how they will handle remote work.
When your office communication modes, meetings, and processes still rely on in-person interactions as the dominant way of getting things done, working from home will typically become an exception that bears a cost to the organization.
The way this manifests is that key meetings are pushed until everyone is in the office, people wait until someone is at the desk to talk to them about that new idea, or people who are remote might not have as much context for what’s going on in an organization on the day they’re not physically present.
By putting forward a hybrid-remote strategy and not supporting it with a change in practices, you’re opening the door for failure and reversion.
Here’s a good basic test to see whether your organization is practicing a remote-friendly mindset (when we’re back in the office): does the team always add a video chat link to a calendar invite and dial-in when they start a meeting onsite? If you’ve ever had a team meeting where a remote teammate has to email or message someone in the room to dial-in for them, you’re facing a cultural center of gravity in the office.
Define how you work
Defining how you work and the processes that will enable your desired level of remote work are essential to success. Without this mindset and deliberate intentionality, any hybrid remote strategy will feel a lot more like WFH Fridays than a meaningful adoption of remote work practices.
Another Medium post by The Startup, “The Five Levels of Remote Work — and why you’re probably at Level 2” covers this topic well. Most organizations during quarantine are recreating the office online, but still maintaining the habits from the office such as the “unnecessary meetings, interruptions, and real-time communication, except it’s now online.”
There is a small cohort of companies that have been trailblazing the remote work path for the rest of us. The key to their approach is a focus on working asynchronously and effective written communication. To do this well, a cultural shift needs to occur where ideas, decisions, and progress are documented well and publicly for others in the company to self-service access (this is not the same as sending someone a Slack message and waiting more time for them to respond). Most requests for input and decisions are also made in writing, but include plenty of context, reflect the analysis or critical thinking necessary to make a good call, and are explicit about the decision outcome and next steps. There is an intentionality that is forced by writing and planning for asynchronous work.
Even though Amazon is not a remote-first company, Jeff Bezos famously has a no PowerPoint presentations policy. Instead, Amazon employees focus on writing out decisions and plans in detail in an effort to generate more thoughtful planning and analysis. By shifting to a writing culture, Bezos is betting that writing with intentionality is a competitive advantage.
When I worked at GitHub, we used GitHub issues as our primary method of communication. For the uninitiated, a GitHub issue is like an open, timestamped thread of communication dedicated to a single topic that is numbered with a unique ID and searchable. Each team at GitHub had an area where all of their issues were publicly displayed to the whole company. If you wanted check on the progress of a particular project, you didn’t have to ping someone, you read the issue. If you wanted to coordinate work with another team, you opened an issue and wrote out the problem statement, request, and provided relevant context. As the idea, project, question, request, etc. evolved, people commented on the issue, added references to files (like a sales presentation or copy for an email campaign).
When everything is written out in this transparent and asynchronous way, it was easy for teammates to be anywhere in the world and still know what was happening for any team in the company. It didn’t matter that I worked in the office most of the days of the week while I had two teammates I saw only 4 times a year and a head of marketing that lived in NYC. In fact, several of our executives did not live in the SF Bay Area at all. By focusing on asynchronous and effective written communication intentionally, our company allowed people to work from anywhere, even though many of us preferred to be in the SF headquarters. We called this approach a remote-first strategy and it proved to be a solid foundation for working more effectively regardless of whether we were in the office or not. Practices and tools that equally support remote and in-person work are the essence of a robust hybrid-remote strategy.
We still have a good amount of time before our COVID quarantine lives are returned to normal. We plan to spend more time in future posts exploring how to build a successful remote strategy. The punchline of all of this is that we should all take the time to explore what work will look like when this is all over and what we’re willing to do to make our work policies, remote or otherwise, successful.
