9 Lessons Hybrid Work Has Taught Us

Hybrid work has settled comfortably into our reality. How it will evolve remains an open question, but just a few months of operating in this model have already told us a lot about work itself. Today we invite you to our subjective rundown of those lessons. We also asked Tina Sobocińska, an expert on hybrid work, for her commentary.

According to the Future Business Institute report, 75% of surveyed Polish employees want remote work combined with office work after the pandemic. The IDC report, in turn, tells us that 1 in 4 European companies plans to keep working mainly remotely in the so-called New Reality. Similar data is coming in from everywhere. The takeaway? The trend is unmistakable: hybrid work is probably here to stay, and there is no going back to the office reality of before March 2020. So what does the new one look like?

Hybrid work — what exactly is it?

What does it actually mean to work in a hybrid model? The general premise is clear: we combine the option of remote work with on-site work. But how — and in what proportions? Do we split the week with a ruler, 50% in the office and 50% at home? Does everyone agree on specific on-site and remote days? Do we form teams that rotate work models on a cycle? Or does everyone work mainly remote, knowing we can always drop by the office?

Exactly. Trying to define hybrid work is a rather tricky task — mainly because it is a model still taking shape, and everyone understands it differently today. It is safe to assume that great “hybrid” negotiations between employees and employers are underway around the world right now. What will come of them? Still unknown. But isn’t that the very essence of hybrid — that it keeps evolving? The hybrid model is really a set of varied work methods from which each organization composes its own ideal system. It promotes a flexible mindset and an openness to testing different solutions, and throws rigid playbooks in the bin.

What does the hybrid model teach us about work itself?

That is the better question. Our experiences with the hybrid model may differ, but we probably share the same common denominator: the fact that hybrid relies heavily on remote work and on qualities like agility and flexibility. Those two factors became the litmus test of our existing work habits. So what have we learned lately about work in general? What should we let go of, and what should we carry into the future?

1. The 9-to-5 is history — a few words on effectiveness

Research shows that when working remotely we are just as productive — or even more so — than when working on-site. 92% of employers surveyed by Antal and Corees Polska rated the effectiveness of their work-from-home employees positively. So it looks like the unity of place, time, and action can safely be left to ancient tragedy, while we approach work in an agile way. The result will be at least as good as before, if not better. In a hybrid model, what counts is flexibility, good communication, and collaboration in sub-teams — more than mere presence and operating within pre-designed frameworks. It also matters far less how much we work, where, and at what time. In the end, what counts is simply the result and what we bring to the team.

And how should you approach building work effectiveness in a hybrid model? The authors of the PwC report Changing Places: Uplifting, measuring and managing hybrid work performance describe five concrete aspects managers and employers should consider.

• Flexibility under control. Agree with your employees on what you collectively mean by “work flexibility.” Discuss working hours and how you will measure them, and be sure to cover potential overtime.
• Equal and individual treatment. Develop mechanisms that treat remote employees and those who come into the office more often equally. Clear communication and flexible management — tailored to each employee’s work mode, potential, and character — will help.
• Zoom in on wellbeing. Treat employees’ mental health and wellbeing as a priority. Work on solutions that help you better identify employees’ needs and problems.
• Workplace safety. In remote and hybrid conditions, it is worth rethinking workplace safety from scratch.
• Data protection and privacy. Make sure employees can rest easy about the security of both the data they work on and their own — especially in remote work. Invest in modern security and encryption systems.

How do you model hybrid work in a specific organization?

We should answer the question of what hybrid work means for our company. If we have worked remotely for the past year and a half, what conclusions can we draw? What worked, what challenges do we see, and how can we respond to them? What hybrid work culture do we want to have a year from now? What behaviors and habits — at the company, team, and individual level — will help us build it together? Culture is, of course, an extremely important topic, and we should absolutely involve managers and employees in it. Every organization has different hybrid-work needs, and the coming months will let us test the solution we put in place.

The second issue is preparing the office. It is very important to answer how the office in our organization should change and how to adapt it to the new expectations of hybrid work. Are we only going to rearrange it, or completely redesign it? We can draw on our observations from the pandemic, when offices changed their function significantly. In some companies, for various reasons, office space was sharply reduced during that time. We also already know there are organizations that, even with significant further growth, do not intend to expand their office space. It is worth preparing for such options and decisions, because the solutions we design in our office space now will stay with us for years.

2. Synchronous or asynchronous work? Both!

Hybrid work creates certain challenges around managing communication. In the traditional model, when we were all in one office between a notional 9:00 and 17:00, work happened synchronously. We could throw together a quick mini-meeting or instantly get an important piece of information from someone. In a hybrid model, synchronous communication is still entirely possible. Sometimes, though, the balance tips toward asynchrony — for example, when employees have full freedom over when, how often, and whether at all they show up at the office. Which option is better? There are no obvious winners here. Once again, flexibility takes a bow. Which solution is the right one depends on the circumstances. What does that mean?

Synchronous communication — where the parties work together at more or less the same time and stay in constant contact. It can happen on-site or in a virtual space. Examples? A face-to-face meeting, a phone call, a video call, a quick question across the desk, real-time chat on Slack, a coffee-break conversation.
Asynchronous communication — its domain is virtual work. Collaboration does not happen simultaneously; employees do their tasks at their own pace. How does it work? Usually one person sends another information, a question, or a request, and the recipient responds when they have time. Examples? Text communication (email, messengers), communication via async-work tools (e.g., Asana, Basecamp), recorded meetings.
Advantages (synchronous)
Faster and more dynamic. Works well for solving problems on the fly and running intensive brainstorms.
Advantages (asynchronous)
Far more flexible. It lets employees focus on their most important tasks and enter deep work. It is also the only option that works for teams spread across time zones.
Challenges (synchronous)
It can break your rhythm and disrupt individual work flow. For obvious reasons it is also unsuited to collaboration across time zones.
Challenges (asynchronous)
It can cause frustration when the other side does not respond immediately. Managed poorly, it can also lead to delays and misunderstandings.
What can you do about it?
- make sure the matter really needs a meeting
- put every meeting, even the shortest, on your Google Calendar and the participants’
- keep group conversations disciplined — short and to the point
- phrase your thoughts as clearly and precisely as possible
- lean on the right project-management or async-communication tools
- clear up any misunderstandings as they arise

As it turns out, nothing in nature is ever lost. Perhaps after years of ASAP dominance it is time for at least a little ALAP (as late as possible)?

3. Trust is replacing control

A few months ago, decision-makers at Google, Apple, and many other large organizations tried to convince their employees to return to the office. Without success. The question arose: why do some leaders still care so much about keeping employees close, under control? After all, every metric shows that working remotely we are no less effective than in the traditional model.

The confirmation-bias trap

Gleb Tsipursky, an American researcher in behavioral science and cognitive science, surveyed 61 leaders from 12 large organizations and drew his own conclusions on the subject.

It turns out some employers fall into the trap of a pattern known as confirmation bias. They are so convinced everyone shares their view that they do not listen to the authentic voices of their employees. What is more, they ignore even objective research findings that contradict their beliefs.

And what are those views? Work is a physical office and people who are always on site. Full stop. Beyond clinging to what is gone, a big role is surely played by the desire to keep control over employees and a lack of trust in them.

The new is coming

Fortunately, more and more people clearly understand the need for change.

According to the Deloitte report “The social enterprise in a world disrupted,” 61% of business and HR leaders declare that over the next 3 years they intend to focus on a complete redesign of how their teams work.

Trust should certainly sit at the center of this new design. Without it, hybrid work has no reason to exist. This is proven, among others, by a study by Anna Dolot of the Krakow University of Economics conducted in the early phases of the pandemic. 33% of employees pointed to a reduced sense of supervisor control as one of the advantages of remote work. It is certainly worth bearing in mind when designing hybrid collaboration.

And what else should managers focus on in the near term? Building employees’ sense of agency, and management based on empathy, intuition, and open communication, will be essential.

How do you prepare and support managers in a hybrid model?

In a hybrid work model, they usually decide how whole teams work, but they also respond to individual situations involving particular employees. So there is a need to build new manager competencies — largely soft skills, addressing various challenges: how to act inclusively with the whole team, how to build collaboration when on-site employees, remote employees, and a client dial-in all join the same meeting. How to coordinate projects well in that format, run strategic or creative workshops.

A much deeper question also arises: why should employees come into the office at all? Only once we answer that will employees see the difference between their remote work and the shared, on-site kind — and better understand the whole point of the hybrid model. Managers also face the challenge of the flexible dimension of hybrid work. Here issues come up like management by objectives, management based on trust, new ways of accounting for work, and the natural need to give employees more autonomy. Managers should also advise employees on how to act in the new, often difficult situations that will surely arise. It is important to give managers a platform where they can consult experts, e.g., on employee mental health. It is also worth giving them space to exchange best practices among themselves within the company.

4. We work in teams, not in a team

This is another dimension of hybrid-work flexibility. Operating in this model forced us all to rethink what a team actually is. We no longer occupy one space for 40 hours a week. Some of us are scattered across Poland, and even across Europe or the world. Within a single organization you will often find full-time employees alongside people who are online for a few hours a day, or freelancers supporting the company from the outside.

A team is no longer a monolith but rather a moving structure made of smaller pieces that adjust to one another based on current circumstances and needs. More and more often we work in a project-based way, in many smaller sub-teams, grouping ourselves by specific skills, knowledge, or professional interests. We are no longer prisoners of a structure imposed from above. And that is great news! Thanks to hybrid, teamwork became a (net)work of teams — embodying the model of teamwork that the McKinsey team wrote about some time ago.

5. Remote onboarding can be just as effective as on-site

In the B.P. era (Before Pandemic), onboarding was thought of as a process requiring direct contact with another person: watching, imitating, asking questions. That is probably why 46% of employers still admit they would prefer new hires to work on-site. But aren’t we being misled here too by our attachment to songs we know (too) well? This happens because onboarding is, in essence, a process spanning a wide range of threads (from formal and legal matters, through transferring process knowledge, to building relationships), and moving it to a remote version seems difficult.

At Gamfi, we have supported our clients with remote employee onboarding for several years. Our experience shows that with the right technological support, digital onboarding significantly surpasses the traditional kind — in at least three areas:

• 21% shorter time to onboard into the organization,
• 40% time savings for managers and HR,
• 71% higher employee engagement.

So perhaps onboarding itself is worth including in the scope of hybrid changes? It is also worth thinking about it much more broadly. Onboarding is not only about new employees. We talk about it wherever an employee faces an unfamiliar situation — for example, moving from fully remote work to a hybrid model, or returning from a longer parental leave. Even the most experienced employee feels like a rookie in such conditions and needs support. We call this reboarding.

Onboarding new employees into hybrid or remote work?

Our app supports digital onboarding from A to Z. Find out how to onboard more effectively than ever!

6. FOMO, or why leveling access to knowledge matters so much

This is one of the key — though often overlooked — threads in the hybrid-work conversation. Someone works in the office, someone remotely, someone joins a meeting from the conference room, someone else connects via Teams. Everything seems fine. But the devil, as always, is in the details. After the meeting, the on-site team goes for coffee and naturally discusses additional points related to the meeting topic. Information, conclusions, and decisions emerge that remote employees cannot possibly know about. And so part of the team starts to suffer permanent FOMO, while the work itself loses flow and effectiveness. How do you fix this? How do you make sure every employee has as full a picture of the situation as possible?

• Adopt the remote employee’s perspective. In any hybrid model, it is worth taking the remote employee’s perspective as the main reference point, even if people working solely in that mode are a minority. For example, it is good to adopt the rule that for an online meeting every on-site employee dials in separately from their own computer.
• Daily meetings. An idea borrowed from SCRUM. A daily is a short, everyday meeting that kicks off the team’s work. In just fifteen minutes, employees decide what they are working on that day and who currently needs whose help to complete a task. It is also a good chance to share important information and catch up on any gaps in access to knowledge.
• Recording meetings. It is worth recording more important online meetings and sharing them on a common drive with the whole team. That way any employee can review the content at any time, including someone who could not attend.
• A shared Slack (or other messenger) channel. It is worth setting up a shared thread where anyone can ask a question about any aspect of a given project — and anyone can answer. A good way to let others take part in the less formal flow of information.
• Recurring larger-group online meetings. At a set frequency (e.g., once a month) it is good to hold a meeting summarizing the work of several teams operating around a specific project.
• 1:1 meetings. Invaluable, especially for people just getting up to speed.
• Documenting the process as you go. It is worth teams building the habit of writing down all the decisions made during meetings as they happen. Do not rely on human memory in these matters — as we know, it can be unreliable. Tools like Slack or Miro are great for keeping such documentation.

7. Work is more than getting things done

We already know that effectiveness is the least of remote work’s problems. The question is whether, in a broader perspective, effectiveness in itself matters so much to us as employees and managers. In short: work is much more than performing duties. The American psychologist Frederick Herzberg wrote about this back in the 1950s. He divided the experience of work into five key dimensions:

• Skill Variety — the number and variety of skills my work requires;
• Task Identity — the complexity of my task and the process I must go through to complete it;
• Task Significance — how much I feel my work matters to others;
• Autonomy — the degree of freedom, independence, and choice I am given;
• Job Feedback — feedback on how I am doing.

Both remote and hybrid work affect each of these areas to a greater or lesser degree. That is a lot of change, and employees cannot be left alone with it. Without proper support they can feel lost and sense the line blurring between work and private life — that they are, in effect, in it almost all the time. Exactly those answers came up in Anna Dolot’s study on the difficulties of pandemic remote work.

This is where managers have an enormous opportunity to shine. They should develop ways of working and relationships with their team members so that people feel they can count on support and that their work has meaning.

How do you support employees in a hybrid model?

Let’s think about how to help them work effectively in this new situation. Let’s equip them with the knowledge and solutions they need, e.g., around workplace ergonomics (if they still largely work from home). Sometimes it is about very mundane things, like providing an employee with equipment that has a webcam installed. A small thing that has a very positive effect on the quality of relationships in a hybrid team. Another important topic is building collaboration based on trust and mature, partner-like relationships, so that the employee can and wants to use the responsibility we hand them. I would encourage dialogue with employees, asking about their needs and expectations regarding the work environment and model, but also solutions where all sides — employer, leader, employee — feel a win-win situation.

8. Offices (as we know them) have to go

This is perhaps the most controversial thread of the entire post-pandemic employee epic. Some still feel sentimental about the traditional office; others have probably long since said goodbye to so-called office life without regret.

Someone finally has to ask: what do we really need offices for in a hybrid world? So the boss can at least partly control employees? We have already established that this thinking must go the way of the dodo. So maybe to create opportunities for knowledge sharing? But we are armed with a whole range of solutions that enable smooth remote communication. And — as the statistics show — they all clearly work, since our productivity rises in remote mode.

All right — what about the integration function? On that, agreed. HR experts point out that traditional offices should change their function and transform into places for meeting, building relationships, and creative collaboration.

Large, centralized headquarters will most likely soon be replaced by smaller hubs scattered in convenient locations, also known as satellite offices. There are also organizations that give up the institution of the office entirely and meet the need for socializing and integration through regular get-togethers outside work. At Gamfi, for example, these are monthly group walks.

9. Hybrid work? Treat it... hybridly

Hybrid work is taking shape before our eyes. Or rather, we — as employees, managers, and employers — are still shaping it. It is worth approaching this task as flexibly as possible and not lingering too long in something that does not quite work.

That is what Traffit did, as its CEO, Adrian Wolak, described on LinkedIn. The Traffit team adopted a hybrid model in which every employee was to work in the office at least 2 days a week. When it turned out this option was not doing its job — because it added no value over the remote model — the organization backed out of the format and started testing a new one that works very well to this day. On two chosen Tuesdays a month, all employees gather in the office simply to be together and strengthen their bonds. The rest of the time they work remotely. They called it TTT — Team Together Tuesday.

This example shows how useful an agile approach is in a hybrid model. We do not need to have ready answers right away. Test, test, and test again. Something off? Change it! And test again.

Hybrid work is an extremely broad and constantly evolving topic. We are curious ourselves how it will develop in the coming months and years. And although, as Gamfi, we do not have a panacea for every challenge the blended model poses to organizations and employees, there are a few areas where we can certainly help. More specifically? We have developed effective digital onboarding solutions and tools for onboarding into blended-model work. We also know how to support the effectiveness of a team working in a hybrid model.