Remote, Hybrid, Office: New Research Shows What Works

Remote, hybrid, office — what works best now?

Five years after COVID forced nearly everyone home, many companies are still figuring out what their new work norm is. Some threw down the gauntlet with an office-forward strategy to preserve company culture.

Meanwhile, others embraced the COVID-forced reinvention and stuck with a remote-first strategy for major flexibility. And many are sticking to a hybrid model to synergize culture and flexibility.

But what really works best now?

Research on Remote, Hybrid and Office

Two Drake University researchers dug deep into the state of work with the different work arrangements:

• Ina Purvanova, Ph.D., Professor of Management, Zimpleman College of Business, and
• Alanah Mitchell, Ph.D., Aliber Distinguished Professor of Information Systems, Zimpleman College of Business.

Together, they co-authored The New Workplace: Employee Alignment in Remote-First, Office-Forward, and Hybrid Work Organizations and the research behind it.

We talked with them about work, where it happens, and how HR leaders and front-line managers can handle the new norms best. The interview is edited for clarity.

1. What does the data show?

HRMorning: Is there one way to work that is working best?

Mitchell: In our book, we talk a lot about how there is not one right approach to building a workplace or being a worker. Companies today have implemented various strategies from fully in-office, to fully virtual, and a number of hybrid combinations in between.

At the same time, office employees have settled into their own preferences (e.g., preferring to be in the office, working remotely, and even hybrid combinations). So rather than suggesting one approach is the best, we use our book to share our research and ideas around finding alignment in today’s varying work environments.

2. What’s Working?

HRMorning: What are the pros of each kind of work arrangement — remote, hybrid and office?

Mitchell: Depending on who you talk to, you might get different answers about the benefits of the different workplace strategies. However, through the interviews we did for our book, we did find clear values that were shared by each of the distinctive strategies.

Flexibility is the key value that workers who prefer to work remotely really care about while employees who prefer to be in the office consistently highlight and emphasize community. Finally, workers who prefer hybrid models emphasize a desire for balance. 

3. What’s Not Working?

HRMorning: What are the cons of each kind of work arrangement?

Mitchell: Of course, there are going to be challenges with any workplace strategy. Rather than focusing on specific challenges, we really use our book to emphasize alignment. Maybe you have a remote work preference, and you work for a company that requires you to come into the office; In our book, this would classify you as a “producer” and someone who prioritizes work productivity over social connections and networking.

Or maybe you have an office preference, but your company follows a remote-first workplace strategy. In our book, this would classify you as a “community-seeker” and someone who feels like work is not the same without office camaraderie.

Leaders can use this understanding of the intersection of worker preferences and workplace strategies to really learn where their employees are and then lead their employees to discover an overall alignment, ultimately addressing the challenges of varying workplace strategies and employee preferences.

4. How Do You Know What Works Best?

HRMorning: How can companies determine what model will work best for them?

Purvanova: The obvious answer, of course, would be that companies have to know their culture in order to choose a workplace strategy that would work for them. This makes intuitive sense. But, what does “know your culture” actually mean? 

In our research, we discovered that “know your culture” means two things: “know your people” and “know your business model”. Let us give you examples:

• In our office-forward company, the workforce was very attached to both the company (they loved working for this company) and even the physical office space (many called their office a second home). Speaking with employees in both the headquarters office and some of their smaller regional offices, we could almost feel the friendliness, the camaraderie. Leadership’s decision to come back to the office was certainly informed by this employee’s enthusiasm for the company, for the office, and for each other. That’s an example of “know your people”. 
• In the hybrid company, many (in fact, most) of the employees we interviewed discussed how they had already started to work in a hybrid way even before the pandemic. Employees talked about “flexibility,” they talked about how everyone was on laptops even before. So everyone was quite mobile in how they worked. Yet, the company had also recently re-designed the office, and everyone loved the facility. So overall, the workforce was supportive of the hybrid approach — or even used to it — making leadership’s decision to “go hybrid” a no-brainer. Another example of “know your people”.
• In the remote-first company we studied, most employees were already working on remote teams. This was because this company has numerous locations across the U.S., and so, employees already needed to collaborate with dispersed colleagues, even though everyone reported to a company office. The pandemic just made it clear that given that remote teams were already the norm, location did not matter, so the company decided to stay remote (and save significantly on selling office spaces!) This is an example of “know your business model”.

5. How Can We Gain Support?

HRMorning: How can employers gain support from employees for their decision?

Purvanova: Our research also shows what happens when you “know your culture” — aka, when you know your people and when you know your business model. In the book, we report that each of the aligned personas — “Officers” in the office-forward company we studied, “Avatars” in the remote-first company, and “Integrators” in the hybrid company — were the majority of personas. In each company, there were fewer half-aligned personas, and fewer misaligned personas still.

This shows that choosing a workplace strategy that is true to who you are is likely to give you the broadest support within your workforce. And, in research we had done since we wrote the book with these same companies, we had seen that the level of support for the strategy each company had chosen had only continued to grow.

6. Can You Train Leaders to Handle Any Work Environment?

HRMorning: Can you train managers to lead people in each of the workplace scenarios? If so, how? If not, why?

Purvanova: Yes! Managers not only can be trained, but need to be trained. This includes two things which we discuss in our book: understanding the pain points of each strategy, and also, learning to work with teams where not everyone may be fully aligned, as we say, or fully supportive of the chosen strategy.

In terms of the “pain points,” managers need to know what the biggest hiccup of their company’s chosen strategy is.

We found that for the office-forward strategy, the biggest concern employees had — even those who were 100% supportive of the office-forward approach — was the potential loss of flexibility. So managers need to be trained in role modeling and championing flexibility.

One manager told us, for example, how she currently has a new dad on her team, so the team had agreed to accommodate this teammate for a few weeks of work-from-home. Another teammate will work from home when this dad returns to work due to a planned medical procedure. That’s just one example of a manager being flexible and letting their team members know that flexibility is OK. In general, training managers to practice “managing adults” versus “managing children” is important.

In the hybrid company, the biggest concern employees had was figuring out how to actually find balance between work and personal life. This is strange — hybrid after all is all about balance. But in our research, employees kept complaining that the unstructured nature of hybrid is difficult. Some didn’t know when to go to the office, and when to work from home. Others didn’t know how to coordinate with teammates.

Still others weren’t sure what exactly the company expected of them, so they were fearful about, “Am I going in often enough? Am I ‘on green’ enough when I work from home?”

Training managers to clarify expectations, to help their team members coordinate office time, to figure out what tasks require being in the office and what tasks can be done from home, would go a long way toward addressing the pain point of the hybrid approach.

In the remote-first company, the pain point was a lack of community. Many employees — even the biggest supporters of the remote-first strategy — told us they feel lonely sometimes, they forget who they are working for, and they feel disconnected. Some managers we interviewed did a great job building a virtual community; other managers had completely dropped the ball. So, training in how to build community virtuality, as well as in how to have some type of in-person engagement periodically, is very needed in remote-first workplaces.

The second area of training includes teaching managers how to work with team members who may have widely divergent preferences for different work modalities. Even though most employees in each type of company tend to support their company’s chosen workplace strategy, there are still plenty of half-aligned and fully misaligned employees.

In our book, we offer a step-by-step guide designed to teach managers how to understand their team members’ differing preferences, how to get the team as a whole to understand the preferences present on the team, and how to help the team find internal alignment by being inclusive of different preferences while also staying true to the company’s strategy. We call our training model a Trifecta and we are excited for leaders and managers to learn about it when they read the book.