Most leaders are unprepared for the hybrid future

Recent headlines have been reporting return-to-office disagreements between flexibility-seeking workers and nervous executives, as if this is what will determine business success in 2023 and beyond. The battle for the future soul of the workforce is not between in-person and remote work, it’s about hybrid-work excellence. Yet hybrid-work excellence is something few organisations are capable of today, and very few are even working to build this muscle.

Consider this: in our August 2022 survey of more than 10,000 workers in seven countries, a minority – between 35 and 40 per cent – of workers reported that they were required to work five days a week in the office. The majority were left with varying policies of in-office work ranging almost evenly across the rest of the week, with just 9 to 14 per cent of respondents saying they have no required days in the office per week. Whether the in-office consensus lands at two or three days a week, the result will be the same: on any given day, for any given meeting, there will be more people joining meetings remotely than there were before the pandemic. And that makes hybrid-work excellence more important than ever. 

Don’t misapprehend my point: this isn’t about creating a hybrid-ready workforce in response to new developments in remote work. It’s also because you were never good at something that was already happening even pre-pandemic.

Globally, among workers whose jobs can be done remotely, 6 to 7 per cent were already assigned to full-time remote status before the pandemic, depending on the region. This number has now trebled, reaching as high as 21 per cent in some areas such as the US, where many companies hired talent in regions where they didn’t have offices during the pandemic. And I haven’t even counted the workers that your organisation may have at remote offices that have to collaborate with each other or with headquarters across distances.

Do yourself this favour: count how many people in your organisation are not expected to be in the office on each day of the week. Then visualise how that applies to each meeting you hold to estimate what per cent of people will be attending via Zoom or Teams. Based purely on averages, if you used to have 1 out of 8 people remote in meetings in 2019, expect that to be 3 out of 8 now on good days. Are you ready for that?

The conclusion should be simple: hybrid-work excellence is something you should have been addressing before 2020 but now it’s an absolute necessity to your operational success, not to mention your talent strategy. The upshot for leaders is also simple: stop bickering over how many days of in-office versus remote work you can support as an organisation and commit to making every hybrid experience in your organisation a dynamic and productive one. 

This means updating your facilities, adjusting your policies, investing in your tech and expanding your culture to embrace hybrid-work excellence. For any of those changes to succeed, you’ll have to have dedicated training for your managers in how to manage hybrid teams, create inclusive conversations in their teams, support hybrid individuals, and become, in effect, the managers the moment requires of them. 

But they won’t improve their management unless you, at the most senior levels, improve your leadership. One simple way to rally your culture in support of this large of a change is to double down on your customer-obsessed growth engine, to ensure that internal adjustments and hiccups don’t bog you down in the present but keep you pointed towards the future. This will give purpose to your path to the future and demonstrate that your policies are designed with meaningful goals in mind.

Our latest report to help leaders build this hybrid-work confidence focuses specifically on hybrid-meeting excellence. Read more at www.forrester.com/blogs/mastering-hybrid-meetings-is-a-critical-priority/

Dr James McQuivey, VP and Research Director, Forrester