IF INTERESTED #181: Intentional Hybrid

Future of work is here.

hi,

Witnessing some of the conversations in organisations and workshops, some principles and facts need to be revisited. I summarise my thoughts here based on scientific facts mixed with some personal experience. Some of those points will make you say “yeah we know that”, but those are there to give a context.

To start with: calling it "Future of Work” is not right, it is already here. Has been for a while. Some organisations already call it Hybrid Work, maybe that’s a better heading.

What I call it is Intentional Hybrid. As you can guess, it is about being more intentional about the work that should be done together face-to-face versus that which can be done remotely.

Some principles about Intentional Hybrid:

1. Knowledge workers (and almost everyone) are happier and perform better when they have Autonomy. That is well established back in the day with Daniel Pink’s Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose work. Hybrid work cannot be about dictating strict rules.

2. As an organisation you need to set the framework that makes scientific sense and gives the right flexibility to employees and leaders.

3. Some leaders will be demanding flexibility and autonomy about how to set rules in their units, some leaders are more comfortable when they can refer to rules set by the organisation. You need to listen to the former and develop / support the latter so that both are comfortable.

4. Whatever you decide as a frame, you need to make sure that you enable those rules. If you want collaborative work to happen in the office, you better have the right tools and digital / physical setup in the office. And good coffee, please don’t be cheap on coffee. There is enough suffering in the world, good coffee is a human right : )

5. Hybrid work is a subset of Employee Experience. Once you have defined the frame for the work, you should approach the topic from the employee experience angle. If you want some more reading, my earlier posts about experience might be interesting for you.

6. Treat everyone as smart adults. Because we all are. Nobody likes to get paternal instructions.

Be clear about your problem statement

As the famous saying goes “a well-defined problem is half solved”, you need to define what the underlying problem is that you want to address with a new hybrid work. It can’t be only that some executives want people back in the office, because of some archaic opinions of productivity.

From what I see, there are four main problem statement categories that organisations want to address:

1. Productivity. Yes this might be an issue, as the famous Microsoft research says. Employees think they are more productive at home, leaders disagree. The reason, I believe, is the definition of productivity. Some of us as employees think that answering more emails and getting more individual work done is all there is to productivity. But as David Sacks said on the All-In podcast, “you are expected to be productive not only on your own work”. I am paraphrasing but what it means is that we also expect our people to develop, coach and mentor each other, see challenges of the business and co-create solutions, onboard new people etc. Some of those can be done remotely, some of them are done better face-to-face.

2. Collaboration. Cross-unit collaboration is a big topic for any company that is large in size. “We work in Silos” is probably heard very often in all corridors. Remote vs office work has an impact on cross-unit collaboration. I hear some of you thinking “yeah we knew that”. Scientifically being in the office increases our “bridge connections” to other units, where as working from home makes us more closed to our first tier network, that is mostly our team.

   Managers and executives suffered nearly three times the erosion of bridging connections that average employees did (3.5 times for executives and 2.7 times for managers).

   The Adaptive Hybrid, Michale Arena et al, 2021

   Note that managers and executives amplify collaboration through their personal relationships and networks.

3. Information diffusion. Information flow happens unintentionally during random conversations in the office. 100% remote workers are usually more limited to their first tier and team member networks, and miss the broader information flow. Product features that the next department are working on, the challenges that other people are working on, etc.

4. Innovation. Finding novel product and feature solutions happens at different efficiency levels remotely versus in office. Executives mostly mention innovation decline as one of the core problems of remote work. We all know that innovation happens better when people are in the same room, but we underestimate the importance of physical presence during idea generation.

   our research revealed that in one company employees also found it 15 percent more difficult to incubate new ideas. This loss was especially evident in the video game industry where 44 percent of developers said the pandemic delayed the launches of their games.

   The Adaptive Hybrid, Michale Arena et al, 2021

   Below picture shows a typical innovation network, dots being people and lines being connections. The second network is after remote work becomes the norm. Please note that it is remote work, not hybrid.

   

Talent attraction and retention are two the more obvious topics or possible problem statements if your organisation is struggling with one or both.

There might be other issues, but these should cover the majority. It is beneficial for each organisation and unit to be specific about what their own problem statement is. This will impact the design of hybrid work.

What is Intentional Hybrid

When we formulate our hybrid work frame, it is not enough to say “we need you in the office 3 days a week”.

Organisations should be more descriptive about what work should be done, how, and why. If you want people to come to the office to do co-creative work, then you need to be intentional about it and enable that: “we want you to be in the office for co-creative work during product development and feature design, and we have booked studios for you Tuesdays and Wednesdays”. Explaining why and being intentional about the work and purpose will get people on board.

In short “Intentional Hybrid” is to match the nature of work to how we work.

The company Workday has already embraced the Adaptive Hybrid Model. Co-CEO Chano Fernandez believes it will be the business model of the future. As he puts it, Workday will be in the office for the “moments that matter,” bringing people together intentionally at certain times.

The Adaptive Hybrid, Michale Arena et al, 2021

Here is a more detailed explanation of what I mean.

Nature of Work

This is the nature and type of work being done irrespective of function or area. Some examples are:

1. Innovative work / Co-Creation (product / feature design, solving a business challenge, strategy setting, etc.)

2. Alignment, information sharing, workshops to come up with solutions that are not novel, scrum daily stand ups, etc.

3. Self-work: Answering emails, focused reading, self-reflection or just thinking time

4. Customer meetings, customer interactions

Every job has one or more aspects of the list in any given week. By addressing when and what kind of work needs to happen, the hybrid work will become more intentional.

How work happens

Satya Nadella had a good discussion with Adam Grant about future of work, the video is here. During that conversation Satya introduced a 2x2 matrix about when and where the work can take place. When the work should happen vs where the work happens.

Synchronous vs Asynchronous

Synchronous work means the conversation or work should take place at the same time for all the parties. It could be a face-to-face meeting or a video call, the key is they are real time interactions and need scheduling.

Asynchronous work (or asynchronous communication) happens on your own time. An email that you will answer, a teams chat you reply whenever is a good time for you.

Office vs Remote:

Office work means the physical colocation of employees. In the most broad sense, employees of a company share a physical space, interact in-person, and commute from their homes to the workplace. Remote work means employees do not work from a shared physical space.¹

Putting Nature of Work and How Work Happens Together

Intentional Hybrid has a lot of different layers and a strong connection to the Employee Experience. For the sake of simplicity, I will only introduce mapping of nature of work to how work happens here. Hopefully this will start a good conversation and lead to the design of the employee experience for the intentional work to be done.

One of the things that hurts the future of work is broad rules like “three days a week from office”. Lacking intentionality, employees often end up being in the office but having video calls from a room. Frustrating for the employee and inefficient for the organisation. By introducing the mapping of nature of work, we can help leaders be more intentional: “please be in the office on Tuesdays and schedule your f2f meetings with cross-functional teams working on product design”.

An example frame can be like below. The tone is important, we want our people to feel their agency and flexibility. Some rules can be strict, like “we will be in the office Tuesdays and Thursday between 10.00 and 16.00”. But most of the intentional hybrid has to be a guideline.

People will appreciate that their commute to the office is not for some random corporate rule, but has been designed intentionally.

Leadership

Leadership shapes around the hybrid as well. Leaders should be comfortable to create:

1. An inclusive environment for each member if half of them are in the office, and the other half is spread out geographically working from home or other offices.

2. A firm stance towards the commitments. If you agree to be in the office on Thursdays and leave the diary open for casual conversations and one creative workshop, everyone sticks to that decision. You can’t let 1-2 staying home because they thought it was ok.

3. A role model by being present virtually or in the office, with agreed work style. Own their decisions instead of pointing fingers to corporate or HR rules. Tweak the rules in case there is a need from the team. If the team has agreed on asynchronous decision making for the new policy, then the leader demands everyone to study the pre-read and do their homework.

4. A common culture, which can be established virtually as well as physically. Our work will include geographically spread teams or hybrid work. Leaders should be proficient at getting through screens and virtual settings, be examples of what is expected and what is not tolerated, in a physical and virtual setup.

Best way to do this is define the principles with the team within the frame explained by science.

Technology

Even though the technology is not fully in place to imitate physical working with Extended Reality (XR), it will be there soon. The new Meta avatar is impressive and maybe a good indication what is to come.

In the meantime organisations should aim for a digital experience that will enable the intentional hybrid.

• Utilise tools like Viva insights which already knows our calendars and whom we email and talk the most. We should expect organisations or leaders to utilise those insights and create better gatherings and better participation to those gatherings.

• A sense of community is not only through physical togetherness, digital tools should be better suited for information sharing.

• Simple tools like better screen positioning for virtual meetings should be readily available. Below is a good example of Microsoft from row hybrid work setup.

Very soon copilot will be in MS Outlook and help us schedule our work with team mates, recommend employees to include our meetings that work on the same topics, or experts that can help our next challenge and suggests an automatic introduction meeting. Organisations should adopt those technologies fast.

We are barely scratching the surface of digital enablement of hybrid work. 5-6 years from now, it will be a different working environment.

Some more thoughts and terms

Choicefulness. I love this word, even though I suspect it is not a word in English. Whenever we design a work frame for our people, introduce it with choices and alternatives. Let people choose from a set of alternatives as individuals or as teams.

Bridge Connections. Organisational Network Analyses has revealed a lot about how we interact with other people. Bridge connections are mentioned in this article by Michael Arena. These are the cross-unit connections that make the information flow and collaboration possible. It is proven that remote-only work will weaken those bridge connections. Notice I stress “remote-only”; hybrid work still enables them : ), I want to avoid jumping to conclusions like “see, working from home is bad”.

In that article, Michael also identifies different stages of innovation, and the most effective work method for those stages. Three stages that he introduces are: idea generation, idea incubation, and organisational scaling. Each stage requires different disciplines and connections, hence different working methods. It is worth your time to read it.

Information Spill Over. This is a term that explains the information flow that happens with random interactions in the office, where you hear about the next departments strategy work, the features neighbouring product team is working on, the new policy coming to town about procurement processes etc. It is an important advantage of being physically in one place.

Summary and Conclusions

As with all people related topics, hybrid work is also a complex system of variables and levers. Any policy will have second and third order effects on people. The more we discuss based on scientific evidence, the better our decision making will be. This issue of IF INTERESTED is an attempt to bring that intentionality to all our hybrid work conversations.

A key aspect of Intentional Hybrid is communication. Words matter. Just treat your people as smart adults and enable your leaders to select the best alternative within a good and scientific frame.

thank you.

1. https://www.software.com/devops-guides/remote-vs-office