Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Pitfalls of hybrid workplaces
At many companies, a mushy middle ground at the office creating new work problems
For months, the putt-putt course sat unused. The beanbag chairs lay empty. The kitchen whiteboard, above where the keg used to live, displayed in fading marker “Beers on Tap” from a happy hour in March 2020. But on a recent weekday, over in the common area was a sign of life — fresh bagels.
As employees at financial technology startup CommonBond got COVID-19 vaccines, and grew stir-crazy in their apartments, they started trickling back into the office.
“We call it Work From Work Wednesday,” said Keryn Koch, who runs human resources at the company in New York City.
At one point, autumn had been billed across corporate America as the Great Office Reopening. The delta variant intervened, and mandatory return-to-office plans turned optional.
Still, many people chose to report back to their desks: The share of employed people who worked remotely at some point during the month because of COVID-19, which had peaked in May 2020 at 35%, dropped in October to 11%, the lowest point since the pandemic began, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
A closer look at the New York workforce, from a November survey of 188 major employers, showed that 8% of Manhattan office workers are back in the office full time, 54% are fully remote, and everyone else — nearly 40% — is hybrid.
Few are finding it a smooth transition period.
Some companies used their tentative RTO dates as an excuse to avoid questions about how to balance the needs of their remote and in-person employees, according to Edward Sullivan, an executive coach. That has resulted in a mushy middle ground: video calls where remote workers have trouble hearing, a sense that people at home are missing out on perks (teammates), while those in the office are, too (pajamas). And the stakes are not just who is getting talked over in meetings. It is whether flexibility is sustainable, even with all the benefits it confers.
“We’re going to see a lot of companies get this wrong,” said Chris Herd, an entrepreneur and expert on hybrid work.
Last summer, LinkedIn told its 16,000 employees worldwide that its return-tooffice plan announced in October 2020 had been scrapped and that individual departments would decide where their people could work, becoming one of more than 60 major companies that have promised some permanent form of flexibility.
Asana, which makes collaboration software, recently gathered its executives for a discussion planning for the office’s official reopening. Half the participants were at the San Francisco headquarters, and the other half joined by videoconference. The remote workers, including the company’s CEO, started to lose patience as people in the room talked over one another and made side comments.
“We all had such a terrible experience that we made a decision at the end of that meeting that all executive meetings going forward will be in person,” said Anna Binder, the company’s head of people. “Or they will be fully remote. We’re not doing the in-between.”
It is not hard to imagine all of the ways remote workers might be undercut: muted in a heated discussion, shut out of lunchtime bonding.
But Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom, who has surveyed hundreds of hybrid companies, said that at many workplaces the in-person employees felt just as neglected. “It’s the American-in-Europe rule,” he said. “When an American is traveling abroad, you look around the room, and everyone is speaking English for your benefit. If there’s one person working from home, everyone in the office dials into the meeting.”