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Getting People Back To The Office? Now The Transition To Hybrid Working Starts For Real.

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Before Covid-19, office working represented the status quo for most knowledge workers. Since the pandemic emerged, it clearly shifted to working from home.



Now that the pandemic is subsiding in many western geographies, many leaders want their people to return to the old way — at least for part of their time — because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that home working is diluting their organizational culture and diminishing a great source of creativity, productivity and cohesion. As a result, employees are being forced to go to the office for 2-3 days a week whether they like it or not.

The only problem is that people have now developed new habits, patterns of working and living while anchored to their homes and they believe they can do their work effectively without attending the office. After all, they did it perfectly well for the past two years, so why should they start making the daily commute again just because some ‘out of touch’ manager says they should. You can see the dilemma.

With that in mind, it’s worth exploring some of the powerful reasons that people might not want to head back to the office.

1. Cost Working from home might increase your energy bills, but it also reduces the cost of the commute. For people on an ‘average’ salary, this could amount to as much as a 25% tax free wage increase. As the cost of living increases, disposable income is at severe risk of reducing.

2. Further away During the pandemic, many people decided to move away from the city to more remote locations for quality of life. This group doesn’t want to travel long distances on a daily basis now that they are further away from the office.

3. Value of the office These days, many knowledge workers have jobs that involve working with people in different regions and have less to do with the folk in the nearest office. Many returning to the office for the first time have found that the very people they need to collaborate with are not actually in the office on that day anyway.

4. Personality The office was largely the domain of extroverts, who enjoyed the community that the office offered. The opposite was true for introverts or the socially anxious, which make up a substantial percentage of the population.

Getting the best of all worlds

Of course, with hybrid working, with the right leadership and thinking, organizations can have their cake and eat it too. Knowledge workers can do all the things that require focus at home (assuming their environment permits) and go to an office when they need to work on complex tasks with others, socialize, attend events or drink at the cultural well.

Social cohesion is the lubricant of the knowledge work world. Although it can be nurtured online, there is no substitute for having a coffee, beer, breaking bread or getting round a white board to work on a tough problem. But does everyone need this every day? I doubt it.

So, the question is: how do we arrive at a new hybrid working norm that makes sense to everyone?


Pre-pandemic organisations needed ‘change management’ or ‘transition programs’ to help their people move to new agile work models, to overcome old habits that were generated through years of repeated office practices. Post-pandemic the same is true.

To overcome the new habits and attitudes generated through the pandemic, Change programs will be needed again to help organizations and their people transition to new hybrid norms balancing face-to-face-in-the-same-space with online interaction.

Setting a two-or three-day minimum number of days policy in the office isn’t cutting it. Employees feel their intelligence is being insulted by these mandates that, as they see it, are patronizing and make no sense in the context of their roles.

Moving forward, organizations need to engage employees in developing new working principles and rules and communicating these through champion networks and other mechanisms to get to everyone excited. Then, they need to raise people’s awareness of the value that being together brings (see my previous article: The Power of place – 8 reasons why you might need an office).

Leaders need to up-skill so that they can understand what it takes to manage hybrid teams, including facilitating new team-based working arrangements that support the organization, the team and the individual.

Teams need to work out how they will maintain each other’s trust, strengthen relationships and share information when they indicate they are on duty and off duty. They need to determine the best times to use video or have physical get-togethers. Most importantly, they need to figure out when it's okay to say ‘no’ to tasks placed on them, and how they will deal with tensions in the team.

It's clear that there’s no going back to pre-pandemic working arrangements, but making the new hybrid world work will take more than an email or two from the C-suite. The transition to hybrid working will require a proactive and well-designed program of re-invention for organizations to get the most from this new age.

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