How to solve the problem of hybrid work

Hello and welcome to Working It.

Last week I walked into a huge room full of people. . . and I realized I didn’t know anyone. Absolute social dread 😰.

This was an alumni party for my university (St Catherine’s, Oxford), and although I met a couple of near-contemporaries who were lovely, I also had to chat to new people.

I attacked a friendly looking stranger, Alicia Sheldon. And then he engaged in a passionate conversation, rather than a perfunctory one, about his groundbreaking work. I will write more about this in a future newsletter. Sometimes the scary and unknown can lead to serendipitous connections 🍀.

Read on for the latest on the future of hybrid and flexible working from an expert on the subject (i.e. not me) and at Office Therapy I advise someone with a low-energy team member.

Flex your hybrid: what are the latest thoughts on work?

Last week’s bulletin on the need for a Balance “4+2+2” in our work days (four hours of concentration + two of collaboration + two of rest and connection) prompted me to delve deeper into how and where we work. Specifically: what is the situation in the RTO/hybrid/WFH debate? What trends are around the corner? (And will there ever be an end to these acronyms? 🤷‍♀️)

I took some time in FT Business Women Summit this week to ask one of our speakers about all this. Former Slack and Google contributor Brian Elliott is now a leadership coach and co-author of the bestseller How the future works: Leading flexible teams to do the best work of their lives. I asked him to describe the most common workplace problem he sees with clients and more generally in the US workplace (he lives in San Francisco).

“People take a ‘one size fits all’ approach to where and when staff work, he told me. By this, Brian is referring to the very common practice of employers requiring staff to be in the office on certain days, typically Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays 📆 – a pattern that has come to define hybrid working. “This generates a lot of resistance,” he continued. Instead, Brian asks leaders to look beyond their annoyance at the noncompliance of people who stay away and look deeper. “Let’s not focus on the possible solution of getting people back to the office more frequently. We have already seen that this causes people to have a negative reaction towards you. “Instead, let’s look at what the underlying business problem is that we’re trying to solve.”

So if your company is struggling with non-compliance in terms of office attendance, one response might be to distract senior managers from surveying the lack of occupied seats and its associated concern that people at home are spending “four hours a day walking the dog.” 🐕” (a real concern).

Instead, you may suggest honing and defining clear, objective performance-based outcomes for everyone, at the individual and team level, as well as for the entire organization. “Trust is not a one-way street. It only works if you hold people accountable for their performance and you have to know what their performance standards are. “Everyone needs to know what the top three priorities are as an organization.”

That doesn’t mean we don’t need to spend time with colleagues. Far from there. The next stage of the hybrid is already underway: some companies are spending money internally to hire (and this is my definition, not Brian’s) corporate party planners 🎊. He cites the example of the American online real estate agency Zillow, which has reduced the number of offices so that more people work remotely in more distributed locations. But now “it funds team meetings at least quarterly. “They have a core team that helps organize these things.”

In this scenario, Zillow will bring together different teams (the finance and personnel departments, for example) and offer them a three-day agenda with a mix of breakout and joint sessions. “It really creates a deeper sense of belonging,” Brian said.

Have you cracked hybrid working? Send me an email: isabel.berwick@ft.com.

This week on the Working It podcast

If you’re overwhelmed by AI, we have the answer: Working It has a miniseries exploring different aspects of generative AI at work and how it’s likely to impact us. This week’s episode is the first of three on the topic, and we start by talking about something that’s already happening: digital assistants. Have you ever wished there were two of them doing their job?

Some people are programming themselves into a digital twin, which can answer emails, attend meetings, and completely remember all the data they might need. I speak with Iliana Oris Valiente, Accenture’s managing director for Canada, and his digital twin, Laila. I then speak to Financial Times AI editor Madhumita Murgia about some of the general questions and concerns.

office therapy

The problem: What to do with a colleague who is competent but has no energy and doesn’t really interact? They’ve worked in the organization for years and they’ve always been like this: we just had a reorganization and they terminated our team. While they are neither miserable nor pessimistic, they operate in a languid bubble. We ended up finishing his sentences 🥱. Your perspective affects us all.

Isabel’s advice: This is a very nuanced topic because you say your performance is good, so you have nothing concrete to address. In your next one-on-one conversation, mention that you’ve noticed they’ve been quiet.

No one should be forced to reveal personal details, and if this team member does not wish to do so, I would chalk it up to “everyone has something to do” and make it clear that you are always available to chat, emphasize the resources your employer offers for support. confidential, etc.

Then focus on boosting morale. It’s summer: how about an event, like a walking tour, outdoor concert/theater, or cooking class? Preferably something where there is a clear focus on the activity, rather than just socializing, which favors loud extroverts. Organized fun can be difficult and alienating, but as long as you practice inclusion (in the real sense of the word, that is, include) all – then you have made a positive intervention.

Five notable stories from the world of work

1. Silent layoffs are rarely as quiet as bosses hope: PwC asked employees who accepted a buyout to use approved terms in emails announcing their departure, and this backfired. Andrew Hill examines better ways.

2. Meetings in the Metaverse: New technology attracts workers to virtual offices: The enthusiasm for the metaverse has fizzled, but as Hannah Murphy points out, there is still a lot of virtual activity in the workplace. Don’t rule it out.

3. If staff don’t want to work anymore, leaders should step up: The staff is disenchanted and disconnected. Stefan Stern describes some of the ways business leaders and managers can get it right.

4. The Fading Allure of the Overseas Destination: Working abroad used to be a highly coveted venture, but as Pilita Clark points out, the rise of dual-career couples and technology that makes it easier to work with global teams has seen demand for these jobs decline.

5. Employers are looking to ease the pressure fertility treatments put on staff: It used to be very difficult to get time off for IVF and other fertility appointments; That’s changing rapidly as employers begin to introduce more flexibility and employee benefits, writes Emily Herbert.

One more thing

have you seen the FT video series about democracy? It was commissioned for 2024, that strange year in which almost half of the world goes to the polls. (France just joined us 🇫🇷.)

In the videos, four famous women, including Margaret Atwood, the novelist, and (my favorite) Aditi Mittal, an Indian comedian and actress, discuss the importance of democracy and the threats it faces. The project, created by the FT’s director of new formats, Juliet Riddell, has taken on a life of its own: it inspired a fantastic live event last week, part of the London International Theater Festival (RAISE). And there is also a book: Eleven writers and leaders on democracy: What it is and why it is important.

And finally . . .

I met many readers at the FT Live Women in Business Summit in London, where a lively panel on flexible working (and its potential disadvantages for women) included insights from Microsoft’s Colette Stallbaumer. She’s co-founder of the company’s WorkLab and CEO of Copilot, its AI chatbot, and she reminded us that generative AI will transform everything about knowledge work, whether flexible or not. (I take this opportunity to make another mention of this useful Microsoft and LinkedIn investigation which describes the current state of AI affairs.)

It occurred to me that AI could also change the focus of every panel and keynote speech held at workplace events, like the Financial Times summit. Perhaps in the future we will have very different conferences. (Sorry, conference organizers.) However, I don’t think bots will replace real panelists 🤖. Feel free to disagree: isabel.berwick@ft.com.