Is hybrid work a fight or an opportunity?

Lee Ambrose, Managing Executive: Customer Success, Liquid C2.

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The saga around Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter has given us endless headlines and commentary. In particular, his hard turn of Twitter away from hybrid working and towards emphasising office attendance raised the hackles of many employees, not to mention thousands of people who carry a torch for working remotely.

Yet, if we step away from the drama, Twitter's story is not that unusual. It's instead an example of a significant workplace trend.

We are witnessing a culture clash between employers and employees, tugging at the problems and sanctity of remote working. It's simplistic to reduce this into two camps and short-sighted to dismiss hybrid work as temporary. Instead, hybrid work is the consequence of a digitising world thrust forward out of necessity, the result of digital transformation.

Business leaders need to take this discussion seriously. It certainly weighs on the mind of Lee Ambrose, Managing Executive of Customer Success at Liquid C2. Like many companies, it is starting to look for a new balance between office camaraderie and remote work productivity.

Ambrose supports hybrid work arrangements, but urges people to treat the subject with more nuance and context: "Elon Musk is not the only one pushing back against hybrid work. Apple and Microsoft have done the same, calling most of their staff back to the office for most of the workweek. There are big advantages to both sides. The biggest gain from bringing people back to the office is around building team culture. It's very hard to get a sense of people through a Teams call, no matter how good the technology is. Nothing beats having a quick conversation with someone across the desk."

Ambrose also agrees that hybrid and remote work also bring advantages. "Attendance doesn't necessarily equal productivity. A lot of people are very productive in a home-based environment. This has been a way of life for two years now. A lot of people have moved, a lot of people aren't in the cities where they're originally employed. It's obviously not as flexible or accommodating to just demand they come back."

In Musk's defence, his proclamation to abolish remote work offered exceptions for people with travel difficulties or personal circumstances. But his drive against the culture didn't win supporters for his vision. Apple's decision also met considerable rebellion from staff, and its Director of Machine Learning even quit their role. Still, Ambrose emphasises the debate needs more context: "We should avoid oversimplification. For a lot of senior executives and boards – their default programming is to get back to the way it used to be. And a lot of employees have changed the way they work. But we must remember that this dynamic also changes depending on the business or sector. A mine's accountant might be able to work remotely, but miners need to be onsite. The question of whether you should have hybrid work and what it should look like will change from business to business. Some people have started jobs and have never met the team. I have team members in some countries that I've yet to meet. This is a complicated situation that we all must work together to figure out."

The current upheaval of workplace norms might be an inevitable consequence of digitisation. Since Blackberry phones offered e-mail access, more people started working away from their desks. Technological advancements kept coming, such as video calls and cloud software. The pandemic lockdowns might have simply accelerated a cultural transformation already in progress. Yet while perhaps inevitable, this transformation still requires context and selling a vision.

"Twitter is a poor example for this topic. I think many companies that embark on digital transformation or any kind of radical transformation generally do a better job of communicating the vision and the reasoning behind it," says Ambrose.

Ambrose's comment about radical transformations touches on the link between digital transformation and remote work. Digital transformation fails when we don't pay enough attention to the impact on processes and people. The debate around hybrid working also risks falling into those traps if we don't give people a say in the change.

"How is policy around remote work going to affect people? How have their lives changed in the last two to three years? Ultimately, it's about employee engagement. If you want to attract top talent, if you want to keep them engaged, if you want to keep them invested in your company, what does that look like? Is it remote work? Is it everyone at the office?"

That's not a decision to be made lightly. Apple and Microsoft have taken a different tack, enabling individual team managers to set policies rather than rely on a top-down approach. Pundits call this the no-size-fits-all approach.

Digitising businesses was the easy part. Now the real challenge is how a digitised workplace changes how we work. Companies should embrace this as an opportunity, not a struggle, and set a vision that employees can follow because the technology to support this new way of working has evolved rapidly and continues to do so.

We're seeing improved functionality and usability of collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom and new growth areas in technologies that support staff well-being, learning, engagement and employee experiences. Security vendors have also radically improved their offerings around identity and access management, data security for cloud services and secure connectivity for remote users. Zero trust security, highly suited for hybrid workplaces, has become the predominant methodology to protect users, information and business-critical IT systems.

The world is adapting to hybrid workplaces, not running away from them. Businesses should avoid swimming against this tide.

"Marcus Aurelius said that the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way," says Ambrose. "So it is about looking at how we've changed and developed and setting a vision that makes sense for your business and getting the right people behind it. Remote working has drawbacks. But if it makes sense for your vision, embrace it. And if working from the office works best, go for that. Just don't try to go back to what was before because it was what you know. Too much has changed. Companies and their employees need to change too."