Hybrid Work - Playing with Space and Time

So many of us are right in the middle of our hybrid working experiments. Not all of us. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who is restricted in who they can connect with at the moment. I hope this serves you and your thinking in the meantime.

Hybrid work is all about how we blend working-from-home with work-from-the-office. This is a brave new world for most of us. For some, they’ve successfully done it for years. The difference is that those few who know all about it used to be the exception. They could rely on time in the office being a guaranteed opportunity to connect with colleagues because it was the natural default for the majority.

That has all changed. Now when we head into the office it can feel like a ghost town. So many people ask the obvious question, “Why did I bother coming into the office when no-one else is here? I might as well have stayed at home and saved myself the commute.”

Why do people still want to come into the office?

There are two main reasons. 

The first is for connection. Higher-quality connection than 2D-virtual life can give us. 

The second is to have better boundaries between worklife and homelife. Some of us much prefer to have that physical boundary that an office provides.

From a business perspective, richer connections and good boundaries are really important. 

Richer connections between colleagues are a key ingredient that drive long-term productivity and innovation. Nick Bloom found that short-term productivity is driven by a lack of distraction, often supported by quiet workspace or working from home. However, long-term productivity requires us to have planned and unplanned interactions with a wide variety of people. The insights, ideas and new thinking that emerge creates new and different work over the longer-term. 

Good work-life boundaries reduce stress and create stronger levels of wellbeing for us all.  

So in this brave new hybrid world how do we make it work well for both employees and the business?

We can either spend more time together or rethink how we can work together when we’re actually apart. In short, we get to play with our ideas of space and time!

Play with Space - Physically and Virtually

To spend more time together in the same space we need to be so much more deliberate. We can no longer just turn up. We might be met with a tumbleweed blowing through an empty office. Instead we need to plan ahead for when we come to the office and figure out who else is committed to being there at the same time. 

We can also try out new virtual spaces. Those informal connections are what so many of us miss when we’re at home. I know teams who have virtual open workspaces. There’s a period of the day when they open up a zoom room but just to work on their own stuff. That way they can have informal chats whenever they want to without the friction of initiating a tech connection.

What could you try to play with physical and virtual space?

Play with Time - Synchronous and Asynchronous

Synchronous work is when we do work at the same time. Asynchronous work is not done at the same time. The hybrid model will be more successful and friction-free if we can take more work out of the synchronous bucket and into the asynchronous. 

Endless online meetings is not something anyone is excited about anymore. We know it’s exhausting. Scheduling them has become almost a full-time job and that’s no fun at all. It’s a good example of how we’ve taken our office-default mindset into the virtual world without questioning what else we could try. We assume that meetings have to be held with all the people there at the same time.

What can we do instead to turn more ‘meetings’ into asynchronous interactions? Without replacing them with streams of email traffic.

An example I’ve seen work well is having a group on a platform such as WhatsApp. People add their thoughts, questions and reflections on the ‘meeting topic’ as voice messages. Others in the group can listen to the contributions when they’re able, reflect for themselves and then respond. This can keep things moving, give everyone a voice and keep the conversation and interaction moving without any need to schedule a synchronous ‘meeting’.

What could you try to play with time and get more work happening in an asynchronous way?