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Experts warned us this would be hard.
When the first wave of companies ramped up their return-to-office plans and settled on hybrid models, experts said they’d encounter many unexpected challenges.
They warned of the inherent difficulties of aligning hybrid schedules and maximizing productivity when workers weren’t fully in the office or fully at home.
They cautioned that a successful hybrid office would require constant evolution, especially for the first few years.
They said it would require substantial trust between managers and employees — trust that would need to transcend the ebbs and flows of sales cycles and the economy.
They told us all those things, yet here we are.
While many companies are seeking to dial back on hybrid work, employees are holding the line and managers are finding themselves caught in the crossfire.
None of this should come as a surprise. As experts told us late last year as it became clear the economy wouldn’t maintain its momentum, companies were likely to exert more influence over workplace policies in 2023 — especially when sales struggled.
That’s exactly what we’ve experienced.
Many of the moves have been made in the name of improving productivity, but it’s worth asking at this point whether remote work is the real problem.
It’s true that productivity has dipped in 2023, but productivity also soared in 2020 when the bulk of workers were fully remote, at least according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
What changed between 2020 and 2023? The majority of companies implemented hybrid models, bringing workers back to the office.
Does the mean hybrid work is the real problem? Of course not. There are many factors that affect worker productivity — and comparisons to 2020 and 2021 are difficult by nature, as those years were statistical anomalies in many respects. Not to mention, the connection of worksite and productivity can obviously vary greatly from employee to employee.
But from a practical standpoint, it’s easy to see how hybrid models could contribute to a dip in productivity at the granular level.
For one, companies are still in the learning process. Experts said it would take time to find a routine that marries the best of both worlds, and employers are still very much in the learning process.
There was a certain degree of predictability when everyone was at home or everyone was at the office. In summer 2019, you may have eliminated a meeting by hashing out an issue in the hall or over a cubicle wall. In summer 2020, you knew that meeting would definitely be a video call.
In summer 2023, sometimes you know and sometimes you don’t, depending on how well your colleagues coordinate their schedules. Small talk that might have occupied five or 10 minutes at the start of a 30-minute Zoom call now happens between calls in the office like it once did — but you still might have the five minutes of small talk with your remote colleagues on the Zoom call. At scale, that time adds up quickly.
Beyond the uncertainty, there’s the inherent customization required by a hybrid approach.
Managers need to tweak their approaches by the employee and by the day, depending on the arrangement. From a productivity standpoint, that’s not ideal for either party or for the company.
Anne Maltese, director of people insights at Quantum Workplace, said companies are asking a lot of managers in the hybrid world — and that's before you even consider factors like mental health issues that have also accelerated over the past three years.
"I don't know that managers necessarily know how to manage hybrid, and maybe we're just now as organizations thinking about that," she said. "We need to be mindful of how much harder being a manager or a people leader has become in recent years and make sure we're investing in them, because they're going to set the tone for their team. They're going to manage that microculture of the team compared to the organization."
Then, there’s the investment. Maltese said many companies simply haven’t made the necessary investments to make hybrid successful.
"We're asking people to come back sometimes because we don't have the time, the bandwidth, the money or whatever it may take to make the investment there or put that energy there," Maltese said. "It's just easier to ask everybody to come back."
Beyond those challenges, employers are discovering that hybrid models include some headaches and questions that aren’t accounted for in company policies.
Being a relatively new option in many businesses, there were simply a lot of scenarios that weren’t accounted for in initial hybrid policies.
Devjani Mishra, shareholder at Littler Mendelson PC, said managers are now encountering scenarios for which there is no precedent or existing protocols.
“Now, there’s an understanding of how many parameters we don’t have for this situation,” she said.
That’s particularly true around issues like child care and its connection to remote work.
Confusion is arising for employers when it comes to remote workers who have young children at home full-time with no child care, for example. Many businesses don't have policies to account for that — or are unsure if they should have a policy for it after many workers spent months at home working full-time with young kids.
“Pre-pandemic, remote work was something that was more rare. You had to make your case,” Mishra said. “Considering it would have to be granted, it could be revoked at any time. Agreements that were drafted in this way would sort of say, ‘This is our time. It belongs to us, and you can’t use it for other things.’”
Mishra believe those unaccounted-for scenarios will continue to pop up, which brings us back to what experts told us back in 2021 when hybrid became the go-to option for employers looking to maintain flexibility: A successful hybrid policy will need to evolve over time.
The hard data and the anecdotal evidence suggests that's where we are today: a period of evolution.
Given the state of the job market, it's unlikely employers will be able to fully ditch hybrid models without significant consequences in morale, retention and recruitment.
But companies are also realizing the hard way that, for hybrid to be successful, the policies they crafted in 2021 and 2022 must be viewed as living documents.
