How will ‘hybrid’ (wfh/office) workplaces actually work out?

[Bubbinsmakesthree]

Everyone keeps saying ‘the future of work is hybrid’ and talking as though there is some kind of utopia where we have days working from home and then come into the office for ‘collaboration’.

Which sounds cool in theory but I have no idea how this will work in practice.

In my office, we lots of teams that collaborate together. In a typical week I have about 20 meetings. Only one meeting a week is my whole team, the rest a mix of people from different teams.

I could imagine a situation where everyone works from home a few days a week and we then have an ‘all in’ policy for the remainder. But that just seems daft - even without social distancing requirements are offices really going to hang on to a desk for everyone for a couple of days a week?

A fully blended approach where people pick and choose whether they wfh or in the office sounds like a recipe for chaos. Pre-pandemic I used to wfh home a couple of days a week when most people were in the office and from a work perspective it was shit.

So how will organisations actually make this work?

Hot desk booking system. If a meeting is marked as "in person", then attendees will try and go to the office.

It will probably work better for some teams/projects than others. Generally I'm 100% on a project for weeks/months so that team could agree to tue/Thu and the rest WFH.

We've already said (for example) that teams that work closely together need to make sure they all come in on the same day(s). But this falls down when you work across teams (my job). I can see that whatever days I come in, there will always be some key person/team that I never see.

For me, one of the things I've lost in homeworking is the ability to pop to a colleague's desk or grab them after a meeting to ask a 2 minute question. I now have to IM or email said question and normally chase up at least once and it can take several days to get an answer. This is still lost by the blended approach.

It's an interesting question I'm looking at a lot in my work for an international built environment organisation!

I guess technology and place booking will be important until distancing can be reduced. I hope we'll organise things so my team is in together at least 2 days a week. Tbh,, even before I think there were only ever 2 days a week when we were all in, sometimes 3, as our manager comes in from another city.

I think a lot of smaller businesses may drop a central London base for a cheaper place in suburbs or outside London, just using a flexible space in town for certain meetings or events. Huge change for office real estate.

Polls say roughly 30% of businesses are expecting to 'downsize' in some way when they can.

I think it will be tricky. My place said there will be pre bookable hot desks only. Due to reduced capacity, the likelihood of being in with my team is minimal. Also I work for L. A and some staff are pretty rude and aggressive so I'm concerned about cycling into work with a heavy laptop, only to find some venom spitting gargoyle at my pre booked desk.
There won't be managers present so do do I just drag them off the chair? Seriously they are vile. Like the hot desk hunger games.
Then bike all the way home... To wfh.
May as well not go in.
Also they've removed our double monitor so nothing there that isn't at home tbh.

This is a very interesting question. I have found myself wondering the same. It's going to be difficult organising this hybrid model. There will be teething troubles. Definitely. But I hope companies see the upaides and come up with a workable solution down the line. Would be a shame to go back to the old way of working.

My workplace is fairly tiny- 35 employees. So we could all come in when our team comes in I suppose. But larger corporations- nightmare!!

Omg @Chimeraforce "venom spitting gargoyle" 😂😂

Do they wee all over the desk and Mark their territory?

It's not that difficult once the culture is embedded. I worked for a company with a hybrid working model years ago and I don't think it was the only one already using a combination of home and office working. Large chunks of the civil service did this a long time ago with Smarter Working (I can't guarantee that it went well everywhere!).

You need clear agreements on how you will work with colleagues. Changes in culture are important, eg making calendars very open where possible so people know where each other is, agreeing together who will work where when so everyone knows. Using remote communication tools like Teams well to drive remote collaboration where required. Office buildings need to have the right equipment in them to facilitate meetings which are a mix of online and in person - this seems to be a particularly tricky one for some places to crack.

Hot desking is the only way to actually realise space efficiencies rather than leaving desks empty, and making sure you have more meeting rooms as you'll have more people coming in for meetings but then leaving, or people needing to have some privacy while in. Again, if you haven't hot desked before it takes some getting used to, and you'll need to make reasonable adjustments for anyone with specific requirements.

I've never experienced a situation in which every employee has been required to be in the office on a specific day - arrangements are usually on a team/individual basis.

I work for a large multinational company and they haven't yet communicated how we will go back to the office. Everyone seems very happy to wfh at the moment and I imagine it will be a hybrid model with hot desks, but probably divided by business units.
I don't think it's unreasonable to mark a meeting as virtual or in person in advance and be in the office only when needed (or if people want to).
I manage a team of people located in different cities and countries (most of the non-sales teams are organized this way as we work at the headquarter). It's been much easier to manage them remotely as no one had the feeling to be left out (vs me and only some of them in the office, face to face all day). I am planning to continue my team meetings in the virtual environment.

We've worked 3 days in, 2 days at home for years. People choose their preferred days, managers make sure it's fair & there's enough bums in the office and we got desk.

But, since March last year we've all WFH full time and it's worked really well. I thinking they're considering it longer term as even meetings / training are going smoothly.

I work in a place of 400, we had hybrid across a lot of staff myself included before this, hotdesking for everyone, teams had specific days they would be in (I did 2 days) regional hubs where necessary.

I think the only change needed is the tech in meetings rooms to have people join remotely those in the room, which again we had pre-pandemic.

It works, the only loss is that you don’t get the office desk “drop by” but that was a source of contention anyway because it often diatribes people when they were focusing and ended up in a firefighting response whereas focus should be on the longer term goals wherever possible.

Those who who had hybrid meetings pre-pandemic, how do you manage them effectively?

I found this the hardest thing about wfh, partly a mix of bad tech and partly working practices.

I was often the only person dialling into a meeting of a dozen or so people and I could generally guarantee that one of the following would happen in every meeting:

-organiser would forget to dial the meeting room in
-tech problems (either fail completely or it would very hard to hear what people were saying)
-it would be hard to interject into a discussion - often the conversation had moved on by the time I got to say something, or the chair would forget completely I was in the meeting and never ask for my input.

Our face-to-face meetings could be quite —heated— lively and sometimes you’d really need to assert your presence which is hard to do when you’re remote in a majority f2f meeting.

Fully remote meetings has actually brought in better meeting discipline in many ways for us. Though I do notice sometimes that not being able to ‘thrash it out’ means decisions don’t get made - we end up with meetings that are very diplomatic and everyone has a say but we struggle to bring it round to a firm conclusion.

Hybrid meetings are the most challenging thing I would say, and definitely wholly remote meetings are better. I also love the ways they offer of indicating that you want to come in - no one would dream of putting their actual hand up in a meeting but it's so useful!

If you have the right technical equipment - so, decent mics so anyone dialling in can hear everyone in the room, and a big screen so everyone in the room can see the people on screen - that makes a big difference.

But it's also about practice and shifting the culture, which is always the biggest obstacle to changing the way we work. So how might your team/organisation decide they will bring remote attendees into a meeting and how will they embed that? So perhaps a meeting chair should always go round the table regularly to check no one is feeling left out? Or one person in the meeting keeps an eye on the chat and alerts the chair if a remote person lets them know they want to come in? No one method will work for everyone or all meeting types and experimenting will probably be necessary.

If participants are feeding back that mixed meetings just aren't working for them, an alternative can be to make it 100% remote even if some people are physically in the office, so they all dial in from their desks and use headphones.

In fact I'm just off to a hybrid meeting now - the approach in this one is for everyone to keep an eye out for a hand going up on screen, but we're a pretty mild mannered and courteous bunch so that's easily done!

If participants are feeding back that mixed meetings just aren't working for them, an alternative can be to make it 100% remote even if some people are physically in the office, so they all dial in from their desks and use headphones.

If we routinely did that, though, there would be very little point in coming to the office at all - you’d basically be there for the desk and a bit of water cooler chat.

Also it’d be really disruptive if in a team half the people are sat at their desks in the same meeting while half are trying to focus on work.

But I think we will end up with some people who go to majority/solely WFH who will always be at the remote end of a hybrid meeting and it’s hard to see how they won’t get a second class experience.

In practice if WFH remains a significant part of the mix I think most of our meetings will include people working remotely so I guess we’ll just have to learn how to manage it.

@Bubbinsmakesthree

If participants are feeding back that mixed meetings just aren't working for them, an alternative can be to make it 100% remote even if some people are physically in the office, so they all dial in from their desks and use headphones.

If we routinely did that, though, there would be very little point in coming to the office at all - you’d basically be there for the desk and a bit of water cooler chat.

Also it’d be really disruptive if in a team half the people are sat at their desks in the same meeting while half are trying to focus on work.

But I think we will end up with some people who go to majority/solely WFH who will always be at the remote end of a hybrid meeting and it’s hard to see how they won’t get a second class experience.

In practice if WFH remains a significant part of the mix I think most of our meetings will include people working remotely so I guess we’ll just have to learn how to manage it.

We do do that though and it’s not a big problem. It’s not for every meeting, and people can either gather together in the meeting room on laptops anyway - headphones mean no feedback between machines - or head into spaces where they’re not disturbing people if sitting at their desks. It’s only a few meetings if that as the majority of meetings can be made to work as hybrid if properly supported.

It feels like you’re feeling very apprehensive at the prospect and finding lots of problems, but the reality of it is that people have managed to find solutions and workarounds and are managing pretty well. My current organisation was NOT at all prepared for remote working, let alone hybrid, last spring, but I now have mixed meetings which work perfectly well.

Agree with @Dailyhandtowelwash. Why are you feeling apprehensive OP? Hybrid meetings can work. In the brief two months last summer when workplaces were open, half my team was WFH. Half were on site. We just moved in to a conference room and used Teams/Slack. Everyone remote dialled in as usual. In the on-site group, just one of us dialled in using our laptop. Projectors, good sound tech etc felt like everyone being in the same place.

Good for one or two meetings a week. But you said you had 20+ meetings? Maybe that is the issue rather than hybrid working? Why do you need so many meetings? Can't imagine your working day will be very productive with so many gatherings.

If for example, you have to share new information can't you all just work on a shared document like a white paper? And update new developments with the date and your initials. You can get together at the end of the week to collate and analyse your findings. This will do away with unnecessary and pointless meetings

It’s really my previous experience of hybrid meetings that makes me quite pessimistic. I tried to WFH 2-3 days a week pre-covid but I had to be mindful of the meetings I couldn’t afford to be remote for as I couldn’t rely on being able to contribute effectively if I wasn’t in the office.

Hopefully we’ll invest in the hardware to make it work in our meeting rooms, and we use Teams since covid, which is a lot better than the software we had before. We’ve also got a better culture now for managing remote meetings (though far from perfect) so there are things we’ll be able to translate to hybrid working - so hopefully it’ll go better than I fear.

We work in a very face-paced setting and I work across maybe a dozen projects at a time plus am middle management so various management/ strategy meetings on top of this, so yes 4 meetings a day is quite normal and hard to avoid. We’ve tried to have clamp downs on meeting length and attendance before to stop people’s diaries being swamped but the nature of the work makes it hard to avoid.

Have been doing it for a year. 3 office spaces, desks numbered (all socially distanced). Certain days/half days and spaces prioritised for certain groups eg SMT, operational team, and the rest a free for all. Works absolutely brilliantly and not one member of the team has had Covid.

My employer has announced the closure of several offices and the ones remaining open will be designed better for meetings which means more of us cramming into fewer desks, so I’ve no idea how that will work out.

As long ago as the 1990s when I was an academic working at home for 2/3 days a week was common. Part of the job involved writing and researching and this is difficult in a busy noisy office with phones going off and people interrupting you. We would have team or group meetings when we would agree certain goals to be met by the next meeting. Then we would all depart and it was up to each individual how and when they scheduled the work. Very few people actually sat down at home and worked 9-5 hours. People would do housework, shopping, dog walking etc and schedule the work when it suited them.

Obviously we needed to come in to use the library, attend meetings and see our students and so on, but wah has been common in academia for many years.