7 Reasons Hybrid Isn’t Working – and What HR Can Do About It

If you love the hybrid workplace, you are going to hate this research.

If you care about employee engagement, company culture and workplace productivity, you’re going to love it.

Either way, if you’re in HR, you need to hear it.

The Facts on Hybrid

In the wake of increased corporate demands for a full return to the office, researchers Peter Cappelli and Ranya Nehmeh, co-authors of In Praise of the Office: The Limits to Hybrid and Remote Work, compared many studies for their research in the Harvard Business Review.

Their evaluation found hybrid work has some bumps that — despite our years of doing it — still haven’t panned out.

What’s most interesting is that the researchers found that these common hybrid and remote problems often happened in-house prior to the pandemic. But — and this is the big BUT — they were handled and resolved with personal relationships in offices.

Here’s what they found:

1. New Hires Struggle

When teams work remotely — or on different in-office hybrid schedules — new hires struggle to learn and catch on. Why? They have no one to watch and mimic. They need to do extra work just to ask for help. And peers, colleagues or mentors who care, but don’t physically see them struggling, can’t offer guidance.

2. Employees are Self-Focused

The researchers found that people in remote and hybrid settings tend to focus more on their individual KPIs and less on working with and helping colleagues. Proximity helps collaboration. When people don’t work together, they can’t stop by a desk or pass each other in hallways to ask questions and get answers.

Researchers also found that people respond to requests for help when they’re pinged … but usually not until after they’ve finished their own tasks.

3. Teams Collaborate Less Effectively

Not surprisingly, when employees are more focused on their individual work, they spend less time brainstorming, meeting and collaborating with others. The biggest problem is collaboration between separate teams. Employees jump more hurdles to make connections on teams outside their own. Then information doesn’t flow efficiently.

4. Meetings Lose Effectiveness

In their analysis, researchers found that virtual meetings are less effective than in-person meetings for several reasons. They:

• Garner fewer useful ideas. People don’t tend to bounce many good ideas around
• Fill calendars. They’re more frequent because employees can’t quickly collaborate in person
• Slow productivity. More people attend them because there are no space constraints
• Lack focus. People tend to multitask because they’re not seen, furthering the drain on time, productivity and ideas, and
• Multiply. Because people aren’t getting much done in the original meeting, more meetings are called.

5. The Wrong People Get Promoted

Because leaders and employees focus on individual performance in remote and hybrid settings, the people who excel at that get promoted. This happens whether the person has the skills to effectively lead people. One body of research found that the best individual performers who are promoted to management end up leading the worst-performing teams.

6. Cultures Become Divided

The researchers are seeing a growing divide in workplace culture: Those who were hired and worked in the office before the pandemic observe one set of cultural norms. Those who came on board during and after the move to remote and hybrid work observe different norms.

“Because they have different ideas about what is acceptable, employees from both groups may think they are doing the right thing while behaving quite differently,” the researchers wrote.

7. Employee Commitment Weakened

Employees were starting to feel less committed to their companies before the pandemic. They didn’t feel connected to their organization and its goals, and hopped from job to job more often.

Now, employees simply don’t see one another as much and don’t have a building to make connections in, so their commitment has faded even more.

The Problem with the Hybrid Problems

One of the biggest problems employers face with these research-proven hybrid and remote issues is this: People want to work hybrid, despite the Harvard research. In fact, Gallup found that about 55% of Baby Boomers and Gen X employees prefer it. Sixty percent of millennials and 71% of Gen Z prefer hybrid work

So, theoretically, let’s say you get rid of hybrid or remote work. Then what do you get? An upset, unmotivated workforce that will likely start looking for new jobs.

Solutions to Common Hybrid Problems

Fortunately, the researchers also suggested ways employers can avoid or curb the most common problems with a dispersed workforce.

The No. 1 key: Treat yours like a new workplace, not the same one you left behind when everyone walked out the door for Covid.

“You cannot effectively manage teams of remote or hybrid workers using the methods you relied on when all employees were in the office together,” the researchers said. “Re-creating the cooperation and collaboration that happens in the office in a virtual context requires new rules and policies—as well as mandates that reel in some current practices.”

Some tips:

• Assess your situation. Researchers suggested analyzing your calendar software to see if the number of meetings, the number of people in them, and their duration have increased in remote and hybrid settings. Also, check how long it takes for pings to be answered. If they’re all on the rise, you likely have a hybrid problem.
• Define the time. Be conscientious and specific about when people are on-site. “The bottom line is that people just aren’t in the office together enough,” the researchers said. Create in-office anchor days. If your type of business relies on more collaboration, you’ll need more days on-site. And any company can consider a four-day workweek with You Do You Fridays.
• Make the space. Many companies downsized offices during the pandemic — and that’s their excuse for not demanding people to be on site together. If you lack individual workspaces in downsized offices, make on-site days all about collaboration.
• Check your KPIs and promotion standards. The more individual performance is measured and rewarded, the less employees will collaborate and create better ideas and cultures.
• Build communities. Create experiences for people to connect from onboarding to retirement. Offer mentoring and reverse mentoring experiences. Ask team leaders to create working and social relationships with other teams that are critical to their roles. Give employees opportunities to learn over lunch, volunteer together and/or join Employee Resource groups where they can interact face-to-face more often.
• Monitor mental well-being. Remote and hybrid work may cause feelings of isolation. Mental well-being has suffered in recent years because of this. Employers want to help employees find resources to support their well-being. More importantly, you want to train and support managers to identify and help employees. Researchers noted: “Managers should be required to have routine employee check-ins, and if these have to be done remotely, supervisors need training and access to resources on how to better assess employees’ well-being in a virtual context.”