The fact of the matter is this: it is way harder to manage a hybrid workforce than an office-based workforce. Many firms have failed to get to grips with some / all of the challenges – and many employers have seen workforce productivity and standards fall as a result. Hybrid is not the same as working from office (WFO); it requires specific, fit-for-purpose solutions to solve specific challenges – not “string and sticky tape” adaptations of what went before.
The Hybrid Working Challenge: More Problems Than Solutions?
January 2020 was when Covid-19 really hit the headlines, the world panicked and, for many employees, the reality of work changed overnight. Suddenly – if you were lucky enough to remain in employment – working from home (WFH) became normalised. Now, in 2024, many firms are still operating under a Covid-19 legacy, with some still WFH but the majority operating some variation of a hybrid model.
I have no axe to grind one way or the other. At Elephants Don’t Forget, we operate a hybrid model at our Head Office in Dublin. We also operate a 100% WFO at our Nottingham Sales Office in the UK, and many of our staff are full-time WFH, depending on their role.
On the whole, our customers operate hybrid models, and some have already taken the decision to migrate all employees back to the office. Hybrid (it would appear) is an acquired taste and, depending on who you ask, is either the best thing since sliced bread or a productivity, governance, and oversight nightmare!
Convenience vs. Effectiveness: The Debate Around Hybrid Work
One of the arguments put forward by pro-hybrid employees is that work-life balance is great –they are way more productive when they WFH. This would also appear to be a view favoured by many managers; many of whom have children and find hybrid much easier and much more convenient than the obvious restrictions of daily commuting to an office. This may well be true for knowledge workers, but to be honest, many knowledge workers had the luxury of hybrid working or WFH way before Covid-19 came on the scene.
Despite the positive arguments put forward though, I have yet to see a substantive body of statistical evidence to support the argument that hybrid models are more effective for more traditional office-based roles, management or otherwise. In fact, what I have seen is a lot of evidence to suggest that the opposite is true. One of the most telling being the fact that standards of UK customer service and satisfaction have fallen year-on-year post-Covid-19 and are now at an all-time low in the UK according to The Institute of Customer Service’s (ICS) UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI) – which is regarded as the leading barometer of average UK CSAT across 13 sectors.
What I also see is a steady stream of senior executives of major brands continuing to announce the dilution of hybrid or out-and-out return to office policies (Boots, the Civil Service and Manchester United FC, spring to mind recently).
If one looks beyond individual employee / manager convenience preferences, there are some fundamental challenges to managing a hybrid workforce over managing an office-based workforce. A point of fact that has rather become known over time, as opposed to being recognised on week one of Covid-19 when the great migration happened more or less overnight.
Managing a Dispersed Workforce: Key Challenges
Presenteeism is an obvious challenge when junior managers / supervisors are also hybrid working – it can be very difficult to hold employees to account. While there are tools available to track remote employee productivity, it’s unclear how widespread their use is. Even if companies are using this technology, it’s not always clear if they’re acting based on the data they collect. This leaves the question unanswered: are employees held accountable for getting sidetracked by personal matters during work hours? It is not for me to say. But if you collect the data and don’t subsequently use it to manage your business, why bother collecting it in the first place? And if you don’t collect it, why not? You certainly track the comings and goings of your employees when they work from the office, so why the double standards?
Oversight and Governance in Regulated Industries
Oversight is another huge challenge for regulated firms. Trust plays a big part in any governance and oversight strategy, but so too does proximity and peer pressure. There is some very interesting academic work that looks at how employee attitude to rule-breaking changes (for the worse) very quickly when they are removed from working proximity with their peers. For some light weekend reading, I would suggest: ‘The Impact of Remote Work on Employee Productivity and Well-being: A Comparative Study of Pre- and Post-COVID-19 Era’. This study examines how the reduced social monitoring inherent in remote work environments might influence employee deviance (which can include rule-breaking). It explores the concept through the lens of social control theory, suggesting that a lack of physical presence from colleagues weakens informal controls that typically discourage misconduct. Also, ‘An Examination of the Roles of Trust and Functional Diversity on Virtual Team Performance Ratings’, explores the relationship between trust, accountability, and employee performance in a telework setting. It suggests that strong trust between employers and employees is crucial for successful remote work arrangements.
Data Security and Wellbeing Concerns in Remote Work
In addition, not everybody lives in an environment ideally conducive to WFH. Data security risks and “shoulder surfing” incidents posed by shared living accommodation or working from the local coffee house are very real threats to organisational security and brand reputation.
Wellbeing also suffers. It is hard to support employees who spend more time working in their kitchen than in a traditional office environment. We know from two years of work with our customers on this topic that, despite wellbeing initiatives being offered and subscribed to by employees, few have found them to be effective at helping employers / employees to address the real root causations of wellbeing issues – especially mental health. This may explain why recent studies have found that more than one in seven UK adults now report that their mental health is currently either bad or the worst it has ever been. And new figures from the Department for Work and Pensions estimate that more than 20,000 people in the UK are absent from work every month because of poor mental health.
Fostering Workplace Culture and Learning
Workplace culture is also hard to manage and develop when the workforce is effectively transient. In fact, studies show that many employees recruited into hybrid roles report that they never really feel part of a team or any real affiliation to the brand that employed them – a cultural disaster for any employer. More light reading available here, this time courtesy of UK Parliament: ‘The impact of remote and hybrid working on workers and organisations’.
Perhaps though, the biggest challenge is workplace learning. Many firms have made some minor changes to their workplace learning strategy post-Covid-19 but have not implemented a genuine fit-for-purpose hybrid learning and development strategy. Why is this so important? Well, it is generally accepted that at least 70% of an employee’s in-role competence is developed “on the job” or via peer-to-peer learning.
If an employee is working hybrid and is in the office two days out of five, then they are only exposed to 40% of the peer-to-peer learning benefit they had pre-Covid-19 when they were 100% office based. And this calculation assumes the people they would be learning from are in the office on the same days as they are.
Recruits are failing to develop the competence required for them to fulfil their role and are leaving disillusioned. Many cite lack of support and poor training – the root causation of manifesting poor competence in the workplace. The most recent UKCSI report found that ‘poor staff competence’ is one of the top three drivers contributing to declining customer satisfaction in the UK in 2024, with around 20.1% of CSAT issues being attributed to this by UK consumers surveyed for the UKCSI. To put the escalating problem of competence into perspective, only ‘quality or reliability of goods / services’ and ‘late delivery or slow service’ were ranked higher by UK customers as the leading two drivers.
With inadequate training and competency development programmes – coupled with the growing complexity of customer interactions – it is probably safe to say that it is not a coincidence that some sectors are reporting record levels of new employee attrition during the first 180 days of employment. Employees are leaving because – to paraphrase the situation – they don’t have the skills, knowledge, support and confidence they need to do the job. It is simply not enjoyable and too stressful – and they can earn the same money or more in the gig economy.
If you cannot support your employees to ensure they learn and retain what you train them – and then ensure they develop the necessary competencies to do the job you employ them to do, they will leave. They will also likely develop wellbeing and mental health issues, which will largely go unaddressed. And, during their tenure, they will make lots of mistakes, which are expensive and need rectifying.
Conclusion: Hybrid Working Needs a Far More Sophisticated Approach
One could be forgiven for believing I was an anti-hybrid person. I am not. I am a pragmatist, entrepreneurial, highly experienced, corporate executive, and believe I have a balanced view that is influenced by the evidence available. The fact of the matter is that hybrid working presents perhaps more problems than it allegedly solves and requires specific fit-for-purpose strategies to deal with the challenges referenced above.
If you are still approaching hybrid as “it’s like pre-Covid-19 but a bit different”, you will likely be seeing falling productivity and service standards. If, however, you have embraced the changed operating environment and procured tools, practices, procedures, and policies that are designed for hybrid and are fit for purpose, then you are probably winning awards like our customers are.