Your Hybrid Remote Office will probably fail, here’s why…

Photo by Maxime on Unsplash

Right now, most companies will be thinking about how they will handle getting their employees back to an office. Most of those companies will be planning to use a Hybrid Remote model, which seems a logical way to balance the needs of the company and employees, but it’s not going to be easy and will probably fail in several ways.

Before I go into the detail of why, lets first look at what the Hybrid Remote model is.

What is the Hybrid Remote Model?

After working for more than a year at home, a lot of people like it. Both employees and companies can save money in various ways, and people generally like their homes, so they like to be in their homes more.

But people also see the benefit of meeting up in an office for both the social interaction and collaboration it brings.

So to try to get the best of both, we need a hybrid model, which will probably be:

Hybrid Remote Office = 2/3 days in the office + Rest of week at home

In theory this looks great, people still get lots of time to focus at home, as well as being able to see people often and collaborate easily.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Aside from the fact that some people will want to still be at home all the time, and some people will want to be in the office all week, there will be several other challenges:

1. The office will feel like a very different place and most people won’t like it
2. Working at a desk in the office will feel inferior to working at home
3. Not everyone will be in the office at the same time and this will make collaboration awkward
4. Mixed office/remote meetings don’t work well

Let’s go into these problems in more detail…

Most People Won’t Like the New Office

So, your company will have spent lots of time rearranging the office, spreading out desks and creating new rules for when and where you can and can’t go. Everyone will be eager to get back to their old ways; they’ll head into the office, find their desk, and plan to get on with work.

But some of the problems will be immediately obvious. Your desk won’t be your desk, because hot desking will be a necessity; you won’t be able to leave your own things on your desk and you won’t be able to have your computer and peripherals set up just as you want them. Nevertheless, you’ll make the best of it, and carry on.

Then you’ll head to the kitchen to make a nice cup of tea or coffee, but this won’t be a great experience either. You may have been hoping to have a catch up with your colleagues about everything that happened over the weekend while waiting for the coffee machine, but no. Many of your colleagues won’t be there, because it’s not their allocated day in the office, or if your colleagues are in, they won’t all be allowed in the kitchen at the same time. So you get your drink anyway, and head back to your desk.

The Office Desk is Inferior to Your Home Desk

You’ve not got long before the first morning meeting, so you try to get through a few emails or get a few tasks done. It’s a bit frustrating though, because your keyboard isn’t your normal one, and you can’t get comfortable on the seat. Do you remember when you used to come into the office, and someone had borrowed your seat after you left at the end of the previous day? Or even worse, it had been swapped to some other unknown place. Well now you’ll get that feeling every time you come to the office.

Then you just get a few minutes into a task, and someone else arrives to start their day. You feel obliged to greet them, and they want to talk about the traffic, the weather and how much of a stressful morning they’ve had. 15 minutes has gone by, and you’ve lost your train of thought.

So, you don’t manage to get everything done that you hoped, and it’s soon time for the morning meeting. But this is what we’ve been waiting for, this is the main reason for getting back to the office. Lets do some collaboration.

Collaboration Will Be Awkward

The first meeting goes well, it’s the morning team meeting. Everyone is in because you’ve cleverly arranged for the whole team to be in on the same days, perfect! The meeting lasts 25 minutes, and you’re all set up for the day, you each know what you’re doing so you get to it.

So you all set out working on your objectives for the day. It goes ok for a while, and then you hit a problem and you need to discuss it. Ideally you could do with input from Bob and Helen on the customer service team, but they’re at home today, so you gather all the available people in a meeting room, and see how you get on.

You go through the problem and you work out some potential solutions, but nobody knows how it will impact the customer as much as Bob and Helen. So, you give in, it’s time to dial them in. You dial them in and go through the problem again, and the potential solutions.

Hopefully you see the issue here, you’ve gone to the office to collaborate more, but you quickly find that you’ll always have half to two thirds of the company at home, so inevitably you’ll have lots of people missing from your face to face meetings.

Mixed Office/Remote Meetings Don’t Work Well

So you’re still in this meeting, which now has Bob and Helen dialled in, and just going through the ideas again has caused some discussion in the room. Unfortunately, Bob and Helen can’t keep up. Some people in the room are too far from the laptop, so Bob and Helen can’t hear them.

Then someone in the room says something funny, everyone in the room starts laughing but the joke is lost on Bob and Helen.

These meetings rarely work well, but in this hybrid remote world, they will probably be a lot more common than they used to be.

Is There a Better Way?

So the day has not been great. You’ve spent some time, energy and money travelling to the office to find that things aren’t the same as before the pandemic, and pretty quickly you’re going to think you might as well have been at home.

But how can we make better use of our time working face to face in the future. I think we need to avoid this type of Hybrid Remote Office, and think about the office in a completely different way to how it was in the past.

In my view, if we want to focus on a task in isolation, we can do that perfectly well at home, so there’s no point in going to an office to do it. Therefore, there should be no minimum number of days in the office. This is the main point that many companies will get wrong. By mandating that people go into the office for an arbitrary 2 or 3 days per week, employees will end up being less productive by doing the wrong tasks in the office.

Instead, we should:

• Go to the office for meetings, presentations or workshops. Everyone who is required will agree to be there, so that nobody is remote.
• Get rid of traditional office desks altogether. You might need to check and reply to emails, or update something, but just use your laptop.
• Take the opportunity to socialise. Have a coffee with your colleagues in between meetings, or go for lunch together.
• Go and work at home when the collaboration has finished, don’t be inefficient at an office desk. You may have only spent 4 hours in the office, but that should be ok.