To think ‘hybrid working’ is a bit shit actually?

[OctopusDare]

(Full disclosure: I’m really hoping all the replies are “YABU because my employer is doing it properly and it’s great”, to give me some hope to look elsewhere. Please also let me know if you’re hiring.)

My office job went WFH at the start of the pandemic. This was shit for those of us who don’t like WFH, but okay, pandemic. This year we have been trying ‘hybrid’ working. What this means is that coming into the office sometimes is ‘encouraged’. In practice it looks like this:

• Senior people mostly don’t, except their bosses want them to, so what we get is them regularly hassling us to “have a conversation with your manager about what works for you and your team! But come in sometimes! But it’s entirely up to you! But also you should definitely come in sometimes,” on Zoom calls from their lovely garden offices.

• About two-thirds of people say they want to work out of the office some of the week, but that they don’t want to go in if it’s nearly empty, they only want to go in if there are other people there to work with. And this never seems to get co-ordinated, so in practice people just… don’t go in because it’s empty because of all the other people who aren’t there because they don’t want to go in if it’s empty.

• For those of us who are in, the office is bleak and weird to work from and feels like a post-apocalyptic disaster film.

• Because of all this it’s really hard to train up new people to do anything other than very process-based work. We have lost some newer recruits because they felt like they weren’t getting to meet people or learn from them, and because they didn’t like the choice between working from home and working from a near-empty office on their own.

• There is ENDLESS whining, on and on and on and on, from some of the people who want to WFH full-time and feel like they’re being ‘pressured’ to go back in. “But I am more productive from home!”, says the person who just emailed a distribution list of 40 of us to complain yet again at length about how much he hates offices.

• Endless amounts of time trying to work out “hybrid ways of working” which all just end up the worst of both worlds. Like meetings - the rule is now that we encourage meetings to be in-person, but everyone in person should have their laptops in front of them with cameras on and talk to the camera, so that the people joining from home don’t feel left out. Which is rubbish. So people don’t do it and just work from home, which the managers then complain about, which… etc etc etc.

I liked the idea of hybrid working, but in practice it feels like the worst of both worlds. All the bad points of WFH except with added faff and stress and whining and uncertainty.

Are there places which are making this work? (And by ‘making this work’ I do not mean ‘the office is open for people who want it i suppose but I personally don’t leave my house’, we already have that, I mean a proper mix of in-person and at-home.) Or is hybrid just inevitably shit?

But they CAN make unilateral changes, my sister's firm changed counties! Lots of people had to wfh or leave.

Yes, the organisation can make unilateral changes if it wants to. But this organisation has not done that. It does not have an 'everybody WFH' policy, or a 'do what you like, we don't mind' policy. It has a 'we are a hybrid workplace!' policy which is poorly clarified and not suiting anybody.

you say everyone is unhappy. Are they? It sounds like the majority want to wfh and have to make a noise when people try to push them back to the office.

The majority of people are unhappy with some part of the current policy and setup (which again: is not 'everybody WFH', is not 'only go in if you want to'), yes. If you want to see one side of this unhappiness as righteous indignation rather than whining then ok, I suppose, but I'm not sure it changes the fact that most people are currently a bit grumpy.

can't you and the people who like the office just fix some days to be in together?

No. We have to sit where we are told to sit. Beyond that, see the circle of annoyingness already discussed earlier, where the majority of people say they want to be back but only if it's busy when they go in.

If he was in a meeting, you'd have to wait for an answer.

is it the type of job where there is a big impact of waiting on answers?

OP being told where to sit is nuts
what's their reasoning for that?

it sounds like the other grumpy folk are grumpy because they don't feel secure in the wfh?

it sounds like you think the solution is everyone back in the office.

one of the worst things about work is people often moan for the sake of it. You sound unhappy but I wonder if the people emailing "I hate the office" just feel obliged to make their point clear.

would you feel better if mgmt said "we are selling the offices, covering your office costs, now just wfh" as then there'd be more clarity?

You are so spot on Op, scarily accurate!

OP being told where to sit is nuts
what's their reasoning for that?

We sit in allocated seating for our business areas, so we can - you'll laugh - get in-person interaction with our teams.

it sounds like the other grumpy folk are grumpy because they don't feel secure in the wfh?

And because they intermittently get told off for not coming in ever.

*it sounds like you think the solution is everyone back in the office."

No. I wouldn't want to go back to 5 days a week in the office myself. This would not be an ideal solution for me.

My ideal solution in the short term would be that they set clear frameworks and expectations for what they think 'hybrid working' should be, which include things that get the best of both worlds rather than the worst (everyone sitting in a meeting on their own laptops in the same room is just stupid), and we see how that works out for a while.

In the longer term, I do not know what 'good' hybrid looks like - which is why I started this thread! I used to think I liked the idea of hybrid and it was a perfect compromise, but I'm increasingly wondering if good hybrid is even possible. (Judging by some of the other comments here it is possible which is heartening to see - although it will not suit the people who only like 'hybrid' if it's a euphemism for 'wfh'.)

You're missing the point.
I don't want an answer to my question that minute.

It's the difference between noting that he's not busy (I am not so impolite as to disturb someone who is clearly in the middle of something), asking the question, getting an answer and then going away. Total time taken = 2 minutes.

and

writing an email or an IM double checking it's clear what the question is, chasing up for a response (often more than once), eventually getting a response which asks for clarification, which I then send and have to chase up again

or
organising a 15 minute Teams meeting which will inevitably get bumped at least twice involving 2 lots of rearranging, to have a meeting where at least one of us will be late and we'll end up making small talk about the weather or the annoying thing our manager just did before eventually getting down to getting the answer.

Not to mention that if I have 10 questions I need answering by 10 different people, then I have to keep track of 10 things and when they are being answered/do I need to chase someone/am I getting the answers in the right order - which is an extra task I didn't need to do when I could just find the person and ask them. Even if I had to wait until they came out of a meeting.

it may be that some companies have worked out how to do collaboration better than ours, but as per OP, the point of this thread is that hybrid is shit for a lot of people.

Redsky "Not to mention that if I have 10 questions I need answering by 10 different people, then I have to keep track of 10 things and when they are being answered/do I need to chase someone/am I getting the answers in the right order - which is an extra task I didn't need to do when I could just find the person and ask them. Even if I had to wait until they came out of a meeting."

but this is part of any job in any place, wfh or not. If the place is big, if people are busy, if you are on several tasks. It's just a normal part of work.

So how about - everyone who wants to be in can be in Tuesday and Thursday? Would that please you?

yes, seating is mad, can you just ignore them? Don't ask anyone, just sit with whom you want to sit/are working with.

So how about - everyone who wants to be in can be in Tuesday and Thursday? Would that please you?

Currently we have 'everyone who wants to be in can be in whenever', so narrowing down days would not really be a big improvement.

yes, seating is mad, can you just ignore them? Don't ask anyone, just sit with whom you want to sit/are working with.

People in from different teams are usually on different floors, sometimes in different buildings, etc. Unless we all agreed to do an 8.30am top-to-bottom roam of the office to round everyone up into a support group (I am actually tempted to do this now) then alas, no.

Maybe the support group just needs to have an 8.30am muster point, then you can all go and sit in a bank of desks together.

What specific things would help, OP?

Not sure how many times I can say this without sounding even more grumpy than I already do, but: no, I do not want everyone to have to work from the office full-time. I do not want to work from the office full-time myself.

What I would like best is this elusive thing called ‘hybrid’, except actually working in a way that isn’t just pissing off everyone. Which it currently is.

It is also not the case, really I promise, that everyone but me wants to work from home all the time, and only us friendless souls who think our loneliness is a work problem, or however you put it, are swimming against the inevitable tide of progress. We’ve done survey after survey on this and it always ends up with about 20% want full-time WFH, 5-10% want to be in the office full-time, and the rest basically want “office some of the time, but entirely flexibly, but when I come in I want everyone else to already be there.” Which is my preference too but it’s just not working out like that for any of us.

OP "“office some of the time, but entirely flexibly, but when I come in I want everyone else to already be there.”

but that is pie in the sky crap which should be ignored.

on the plus side, the people saying this must really like each other.

hybrid working is so new it only takes a few very vocal complainers to have the whole thing removed and force everyone back into the office full-time

Perhaps the answer to this is to show people that it can actually work, rather than wanting them to shut up when it doesn’t.

I think we cross posted
what specific things would help with this, do you think?

Yeah it is and it’s obviously not workable, so the result is most people hardly ever going in, and then either grumbling that they are told to/grumbling that the office is like a waste land/both.

Needs some actual corporate direction. But…

Channel all the energy and passion you have on thread OP…. To raising it with again with your employer and not letting it rest, esp if so many as you say are also unhappy with it in your workplace

I was hoping with this thread that there might be some people from places where hybrid is working that can illustrate what’s worked there. It seems like what works best is some combination of setting ‘minimum days in office’ requirements and making the office itself a decent welcoming place to go back to. So maybe that?

I have raised it. It’s a big organisation that moves at the speed of molasses, and is currently going through a phase where it seems nervous about making big decisions. Sigh.

@Oblomov22 I don't even have half a brain cell. I think I just have a little less than a quarter of one. For example this morning I ended up tying my shoe laces together before I went running then fell down the stairs. I'm really really an idiot - so much so that you and I could be related

I should probably just give up and leave in recognition that my employer will take about six years to do this better. I do really like my actual work, though. And every job advert out there at the moment says ‘hybrid‘, and I can’t trust them.

Sounds like your office needs two changes

1. let people sit wherever - the current rule is nuts

2. let people look at each other in meetings rather than screens. It'll be reet, I've done it loads, been remote in meetings where people are physically together. I prefer sound only though.

If they sort that, then they don't even need to have set days the office is open. Is it physically open every day? Complete waste of money if most can wfh.

I'm freelance. I don't know anyone who is unhappy with "wfh, office available at these times". I've hung out with a 22 year old who has to use an office because he lives with his folks, but he accepts that he is paid to do a job and sometimes there'll be no one else in the office.

Surely the simple answer is to fix the days you go in? My team all go in on Wednesdays. The office also does free lunch on Wednesdays which helps. We have overseas staff as well and when they come over we also go in on the days they’re here. This isn’t a corporate policy, this is just what we as a team have decided by talking to each other.

You seem to want to be able to go to the office flexibly and without the direction of any set days but for everyone else to telepathically know when you’re going to be there and decide to be there too. That isn’t actually possible.

The only way to guarantee you’ll have lots of people in the office at the exact same time as you is to have set days. That isn’t as flexible as you’d like, but if you want total flexibility then you have to accept that your version of working won’t be the same as everyone else’s and on some days you might not have lots of company.

This is difficult because you (and by the sounds of it your colleagues) are asking for the literal impossible. Your best answer is set office days and WFH the others.

I would go back to the security of working for a company like this!