Hybrid work on the home front

We love hybrid!

Hybrid work is known to have many benefits. It’s improved participation rates from groups often underrepresented, including women, people with disabilities and ethnic minorities. We also know that people love the flexibility that comes with hybrid work, not having to commute every day and finding it easier to manage life’s diverse demands on our energy and time. Employers also know it’s critical for them to be able to attract and retain the right people, as it’s so highly valued by their workforce.

Hybrid work exploded in popularity over the last few years and shows no signs of abating. It’s here to stay and we all love it.

Hybrid has a shadow side

Nothing is all upside, though, not even hybrid work. If something this significant is here to stay, we need to get real about its shadow side and take it from good to great. If we’re really honest, we know it’s not all sorted. Perhaps we’re scared to acknowledge the downside in case something we love gets taken away, as quickly as it arrived.

One thing we haven’t sorted is to get it humming across our organisations and teams. We’re still really bad at training our managers and teams to get the best from hybrid work. We haven’t built our fluency at making shared decisions about who will work from where, why, which days and for what purpose. It’s potentially harming our productivity and certainly our collaboration and cohesion. 

We also haven’t got it humming on the home front either. Hybrid work has potential for work/life conflict. A recent study, yet to be published, by the University of Auckland’s Dr Joanne Mutter and Massey University’s Professor Kaye Thorn looks into this very idea. What does hybrid do to us at home if two partners are trying to make it work?

Their study involved interviewing 16 hybrid-working couples to learn about its impact and how they’re adapting to best manage it.

Hybrid on the home front

What they’ve found is that hybrid couples have to get very disciplined about managing their boundaries and more deliberate about distributing the ‘life admin’ work.

We know that hybrid work can really mess with our boundaries. Just because we can work from home at any time of the day, it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. The Flexibility Paradox - Why Flexible Working Leads to (Self-)Exploitation, by Heejung Chung, explores this very idea. We don’t always make great choices for our own wellbeing, even when we have genuine choices about our work flexibility. 

We also know that there are two types of people when it comes to managing boundaries between work and home. At one end of a spectrum there are integrators and at the other there are segmenters/segregators. If you’re an integrator, you’ll be coping much better with the blurring of boundaries between work and home, as long as the way you’re managing it is within your control. For those who have a preference for segmentation, it’s much harder. 

Interestingly, this recent study looks at the importance of checking in with your partner at home and finding out what their boundary preferences are. If one of you is an integrator and the other a segmenter, there’s a lot more potential for difficulties and work/life conflict. You’ll be looking at how to manage those boundaries in entirely different ways.

So what did the study find works well for hybrid-working couples?

For the hybrid-working partnerships at home, there is so much to learn from this study. Here are three top tips you can try:

1. Work spaces at home

Most of us have not chosen our home with the need for an office at the top of our list of ‘must haves’. The study found that couples are increasingly redesigning their home to create space for work. In some extreme cases people have moved house to be able to better accommodate their hybrid work patterns. Whatever you can do to keep work and home separate will support better wellbeing and boundary management so you don’t feel you’re always working.

2. Define the end of your work day

Hybrid couples were finding creative ways to mark the end of their working day, putting in place a stronger boundary between work and home. This was more important for those couples who didn’t have a separate home office space. Those examples might be heading out for a walk, mimicking the idea of a commute, making a to-do list for the next day, then stopping work, or coming together for a workday debrief. Whatever you do, having a ritual to mark the end of your working day seems to be the key.

3. Plan your week ahead together

Working from home means that we can get on with some life demands in the margins of our typical working day. Some of those demands include picking up the food from the supermarket, keeping the washing machine fully engaged, doing the school pick-up, or batch cooking. Couples who planned that ‘life admin’ for the week ahead were better placed to manage the work/life conflict. They gave themselves the time to distribute those tasks and were less likely to fall into the limiting gender stereotypes. They could also use that planning time to schedule a walk or lunch date together during their week.

Leadership for hybrid at home

As a leader of hybrid teams, it’s really important that you give people genuine choices about when they do their work and avoid the temptation of paternalistic policies. Some organisations and leaders, with the best of intentions, have a paternalistic policies, such as ‘no emails between 7pm and 7am’. The problem with that is not everyone can comfortably fit within those ideals, because of the other demands on their time. Have an inclusive approach to when work gets done from home and encourage people to put healthy boundaries in place, so they’re in control about switching off. 

Hybrid work needs to be humming in the office as well as on the home front if we’re truly to make the most of this hugely popular way of working for the long haul.