It’s time to get serious about hybrid work strategies
The return to office debate has been on the airwaves for almost a year – and it has changed. It seems we’ve all landed on hybrid work as a solution to the flexibility that employees demanded and that bosses of personal culture clung to. However, some people still need to be convinced.
In a recent episode of McKinsey Global Institute thinking ahead Podcast, Stanford economics professor Nick Bloom said that not only should companies fully embrace hybrid work, but that it’s time to organize hybrid plans sufficiently. That means having anchor days where everyone comes into the office to make the most of social work.
“To put it bluntly: (a) this does not speak of completely removed; I’m talking about hybrids. And (b) I’m talking about a well-organized hybrid,” Bloom said. “So it’s not the nightmare of 2021 where you’re in the office, I’m at home; I’m in the office, you’re at home. Here everyone comes in on the same anchor days and everyone stays home on the same home days.”
He cited the now-ubiquitous virtual work meeting tool Zoom as an example: Here employees go into the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, where all their social events, presentations and training are scheduled for those days and there is a good reason to be in the office. They work from home on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
This well-organized hybrid model has two advantages, Bloom said. First, workers save time commuting from home during their work, which they then spend looking after children, enjoying leisure activities like sports, and working more—which is where most of their extra time is spent, as his research shows.
“So if you’re an employer and you have an employee who works from home two days a week, they work for you about an extra hour a week,” Bloom said during the podcast.
The second benefit, he added, is the “quiet or intense work” people can focus on by working from home on certain days. “So reading, writing, preparing presentations, writing documents, thinking about things, maybe one on one,” Bloom said.
Behind every CEO and executive calling for a return to office work is a handful of employees who argue that not only are they more productive working from home, but that commuting to the office often proves pointless : Meetings are still happening on Zoom, doing the same work they could do from home with more flexibility and convenience.
That’s partly because hybrid working models have been largely haphazardly demanded strategies, intended to return to some sense of pre-pandemic work “normalcy.” But Bloom’s organized hybrid work model seeks to make the most of productivity at the office and at home.
Businesses, he says, need to think more about why and what happens when employees are in the office, and allow them to do that “deep” work in quiet environments like remote ones and use their freed-up time to commute.
“When you add those two things together, you get about a 3 to 5 percent increase in productivity,” Bloom said.
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