The pandemic looks to be turning into an endemic, as I write this. It’s about two and a half years since I left my studio to head home to work remotely for a couple of years and I’ve now been regularly going back into my work studio again for the past six months. As most companies are contemplating post-pandemic work arrangements, the most common term that’s being used is hybrid work. I’d like to share my thoughts on the signals I’m seeing and hearing and the observations I’ve made that I think should factor into thoughtfully designing hybrid work, especially as it relates to mental health.
We’ve all just spent two and a half years in a huge experiment that we should learn from. You can think of it as a prototype of ways of working that we should seek feedback on and use strategic foresight methods to detect and factor in the signals we’re experiencing of what an emerging future may be telling us. And let’s use these to inform what the benefits are of each form of work in order to design the optimal mix for our hybrid work.
Let me just acknowledge that this post is relevant to people for whom the location of their work is a choice and this naturally doesn’t apply to people for whom the nature of their jobs requires them to be in-person all the time.
I’ve been asking my friends and colleagues about their experiences, ran some polls with the designers in my Canadian studios, held open-ended video conference calls with studio members and staff to talk about their experiences. I’ve also spoken at length with colleagues at other companies. I’d like to share what I’ve learned from those interactions as well as from my own experience with these different modes of work.
Let’s consider in-person work first because most of us have spent our lives working that way prior to the pandemic.
The In-Person Work Experience
Most of my friends and colleagues worked in studios prior to the pandemic, as I did. Studios are characterized by open spaces, flexible work areas, and places to get together with colleagues for meetings as well as for informal gatherings. The real positives of in-person work include meeting face-to-face with people in three dimensions, having engaging serendipitous interactions, being able to have multi-hour meetings because you can move around the room and stay engaged in what’s going on and not be glued to a screen, and being freely accessible to everyone and everyone else being freely accessible to each other. You can also go to have a coffee, lunch, or dinner with your colleagues and experience a special kind of closer connection. Being face-to-face can enhance mental health and also fosters a sense of belonging which is especially important for people new to the team. Of course, you only experience these benefits of in-person work with people you work with in the same geographic location.
The negatives of in-person work are often the same as the positives but as they relate to different modes of work. While being accessible to everyone in a studio may be a positive when you’re catching up on email, it may be a negative when trying to do some involved heads-down work that requires undivided attention. There are also individual differences with regard to this with people who are more introverted having a harder time working in a studio environment. All of this has an impact on people’s mental heath. Working toward a deadline in the open environment of a studio when you have to do heads-down work that requires concentration can be extremely stressful, especially for introverts.
The Remote Work from Home Experience
Almost all of us have been experiencing remote work from home during the pandemic, spending many hours on video-mediated communication using Webex, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams. Everyone’s home situation is a little different with varying degrees of appropriate support for working this way. I optimized my setup right at the beginning of the pandemic. I described my setup in a blogpost and shared my advice for amping up the way we show up while working remotely. The real positives of remotely working from home include saving the time spent commuting to and from a work location, being able to focus uninterrupted on work that requires it (assuming that you have a home environment that is conducive), being able to communicate with staff, colleagues, clients, and friends equivalently when all are using video regardless of whether they’re local or anywhere else in the world. You’re also able to be more connected with your family and pets if you have them with you at home. Surprisingly, you can also get to know others you work with better and getting to know their family, human and animal when you’re both at your homes on video. People also report fewer sicknesses due to being around fewer other people, more flexibility to be a caregiver, and a lessoned need to be “on” all the time and truly spend some time working solo.
The negatives of working remotely are again similar to the positives except for particular modes of work involved and depending on your home situation. While being able to join meetings using video conferencing has its positives, having every meeting so technology mediated and having to be on video camera all day can be taxing and a real negative to mental health. Some people also don’t have a home situation that is conducive to remote work and having interruptions or even the worry about interruptions can be stressful too. Many people also report not having a clear boundary between work and home life with a tendency to also keep working thereby cutting into non-work time to recharge.
The Hybrid Work Experience & Challenge
We’ve all talked a lot about hybrid work but few of us have had deep experience with it. We’ve likely all experienced working with people in other locations who were remote from the local team and previous to the pandemic, we likely experienced working from home the odd day. Very few of us though have worked with part of our local teams being remote while also working with people who have always been remote in distant locations. Very few of the people I know work with only people who are local to their place of work.
For the seven years prior to the pandemic, I was a remote member of a leadership team on which typically only two or three of us were remote, while the rest of the team was in one location together. That experience wasn’t great. A lot of the conversation would happen in the room in the main location and the remote members wouldn’t have optimal audio or video into that room and we therefore didn’t feel like we were truly equal peers. That of course changed during the pandemic when everyone on the team was equal all in a video screen and with balanced audio on our Webex calls.
My staff is currently spread out all in groups from a few team members to 50-60 in a location over the world. We can’t just “go back to the office” because there is no single co-located office for us to go to. In addition to my global role, I also have responsibility for our design studios in Canada. However, each of the people who work in those studios work with some others in the same studio but they also work with people all over the globe on their teams. So, “going back to the office or studio to work with all their teammates isn’t possible”, in fact, it never has been. We’ve done hybrid work before even if we were based in physical studios because we worked remotely with people all over the globe.
Designing the Hybrid Work Experience
Before the pandemic, we all knew how to work in-person, appreciated the positives of doing that, whether we acknowledged it or not, because we simply assumed that it was the default work arrangement. It was also pretty easy to do. However, we typically had remote members of our teams whose experiences typically weren’t great. During the pandemic, we all learned how to work remotely and we also appreciated the positives of doing that. And, on reflection, remote work was pretty easy to do too when done with everyone being remote.
However, truly hybrid work has been and will continue to be hard to get right. That’s why we need to understand the benefits of in-person work and remote work while also acknowledging the challenges of doing both together and then intentionally designing hybrid work right. Doing this with mental health in mind is critically important. Many companies are encouraging their staff to spend some days in the office and some days working remotely at home. So, we definitely need to design hybrid work intentionally and optimally for different modes of work.
Top 10 Tips for Designing Hybrid Work
Get input from the members of the team who you work with to determine their personal work styles and preferences. This is best done using a shared electronic whiteboard like Mural. The findings could be put into a team social contract, e.g., we all agree to go on camera to increase our engagement with one another but also agree to give grace if someone needs an off-camera day every now and then.
Get input too on those whiteboards from your team to determine what sorts of things they believe will be best done together in-person. If you have multiple work locations around the world, you may also want to determine what the co-located team members may find optimal to do together in person.
Managers should synthesize all of that input and work out which days may be the most optimal for the co-located team members to come into the office or studio. This might not even be a set day of the week, e.g., we all come in on Wednesdays. it might be certain days in a sprint cycle when it makes the most sense to be working together collaboratively.
Once the days are selected and communicated, it would also be wise to schedule one-on-one in-person meetings during the in-the-office/studio days with co-located staff. It’s also good to schedule team meetings with co-located staff members on those days. The team should plan to do something special on some of the in-the-office/studio days like going out to lunch together. Refer to my post on fostering an awesome studio culture for more ideas.
Try to not schedule meetings with remote team members on the in-person days so that you can maximize the time with co-located team members.
Leave time blocks during the in-person days for spending some time walking around having impromptu discussions with colleagues at the coffee machine or snack area.
Plan your heads-down work time for your remote work-at-home days.
Schedule your calls with team members who are in separate offices/studios far away from yours on your work-from-home days so that everyone can have the benefit of all being equally remote.
Make sure that you have an appropriate setup at work for the times when you will need to do hybrid videos calls with some team members co-located and others remote. Everyone locally should have good audio and each person should appear on video the same as remote members do rather than having one camera on the entire local group which shows that there are people in the room but it doesn’t provide equal facial video presence to everyone in the meeting.
Develop a wellness commitment that’s appropriate for the team to ensure that mental health, including a healthy work-life balance, is valued and focussed on while pursuing whatever form of hybrid work the team pursues. It could include wellness days off work, guidance on not contacting other team members outside of their working hours (especially for people in different timezones), and an acknowledgement there are days you shouldn’t be expected to go on as business as usual, and that’s ok.
Individual Differences
Some team members will prefer to work in the office/studio most of the time while others will prefer to work most of their team’s not-in-person days working remotely from home. People’s preferences may also change over time. They did for me. During the pandemic, I thought that I would definitely want to work remotely from home most of the time in the future. However, after going back to the studio about six months ago, I now prefer to spend more of my work days in the studio.
Other Parts of Life
Not only has our experience of working through the pandemic changed primary work experiences, it has also changed conferences, education, and even interactions with friends.
I used to be asked to give keynote and other presentations at conferences prior to the pandemic and the decision to accept those was predicated on where the conference would be held in the world and whether the conference organization or I would be required to pay for the travel to the conference city. The pandemic changed all of that. Conferences during the pandemic were all remote and I could easily present at whatever conference wanted me to. As a result, I presented at about ten times the number of conferences. Now that things are opening up, some conferences are in-person again while others are still fully remote while still others are hybrid. The benefits of the latter are that attendees can enjoy the positives of networking and serendipitously meeting others with similar interests but having keynote speakers from all over the world being streamed in through technology.
University education has been similarly transformed. I teach in university EMBA, Health Leadership, and Director’s College programs and I give guest lectures at universities all around the world. These of course went completely remote during the pandemic but are now, similar to conferences, either remote or hybrid with similar benefits.
Boards of directors have changed. I serve on two boards and they are mostly remote but hybrid when we need to workshop and interact with each other in person. And remote meetings are now incredibly well organized with everyone with their video on, organizing the discussion with a digital raise of the hand, and sharing relevant links in the chat. In-person meetings are more effective because they are intentional and designed to take advance of being in the same place together.
Even interactions with friends went through a similar transition with interactions being entirely technology mediated during the pandemic but now either being in-person but also at times still remote. I sometimes now have FaceTime calls with friends local to me but I’ve also significantly broadened the number of friends I have all over the world that I interact with almost entirely through technology mediated means.
The pandemic has transformed our lives I think permanently and we should work to amplify the positives of what we’ve learned.
Our Attitude to Mental Health has Changed
The beginning of the pandemic was scary for most of us and devastating for those directly impacted by it. Most people and I believe most organizations (certainly the one that I work in) paid way more attention to checking in on each other and supporting each other. I scheduled regular video conference calls with no agenda other than to check in on each other and compare notes on coping strategies. The episodes of my podcast during that period had the same theme.
Talking about mental health has been normalized and largely de-stigmatized. We should embrace that and keep a focus on checking in on each other and being sensitive to the mental health of those around us. I think that’s another positive of the pandemic.
Technology and Our Use of it has Changed
Video conferencing technology has significantly improved because of the pandemic. Background noise cancellation is now amazing on most platforms for example. We also now use that technology better by mostly being on camera and only occasionally still hearing “you’re on mute” during calls.
Streaming conference technology is amazing now and we more affordable. We’re also better at using the chat features of it as well.
I’ve even noticed a transition in people out and about no longer speaking on audio only phone calls with their smartphones up to their ears to now being on video calls and involving the friends they’re with in-person.
The pandemic has changed the way we live.
Continue to Evaluate Over Time
I mentioned above that it was like we were living through an experiment during the pandemic with our forced work from home model. However, we’re still living in the experiment of the new reality of hybrid work. We need to continue to collect data and insights during this period and make changes as necessary going forward.