How to fix your hybrid work mess

Hello and welcome to Working It.

Last week I walked into a huge room full of people . . . and realised I knew nobody. Absolute social dread 😰.

This was a drinks party for alumni of my college (St Catherine’s, Oxford), and while I did find a couple of near-contemporaries, who were charming, I had to chat to new people, too.

I waylaid a friendly looking stranger, Alice Sheldon. And then got into an engrossing conversation, as opposed to a superficial networking one, about her innovative work. I’ll write more about it in a future newsletter. Sometimes, the scary unknown can bring serendipitous connections 🍀.

Read on for the very latest on the future of hybrid and flexible work from an expert on the topic — ie not me — and in Office Therapy I advise someone with a low-energy team member.

Flex your hybrid: what is the latest thinking on work?

Last week’s newsletter about the need for a “4+2+2” balance in our working days (four hours of focus time + two of collaboration time + two of rest and connection time) prompted me to go deeper into how and where we work. Specifically: what’s the state of play in the RTO/hybrid/WFH debate? What trends are around the corner? (And will there ever be an end to these acronyms? 🤷‍♀️)

I took some time out at the FT’s Women in Business Summit this week to ask one of our speakers about all of this. Brian Elliott, formerly of Slack and Google, is now a leadership adviser and co-author of the bestselling How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams to do the Best Work of Their Lives. I asked him to describe the most common workplace problem that he sees with clients, and more generally in the US work scene (he’s San Francisco-based).

“People take the ‘one size fits all’ approach,” to where and when staff work, he told me. By this, Brian means the very common practice of employers demanding that staff be in the office on certain days, usually Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday 📆: a pattern that has come to define hybrid work. “This gets a lot of resistance,” he went on. Instead, Brian asks leaders to go beyond their annoyance at the non-compliance of the people who stay away — and look deeper. “Let’s not focus on the potential solution as being getting people back in the office more often. We have already seen that causes people to have a negative reaction to you. Let’s look instead at what is the underlying business problem that we are trying to solve.”

So if your business is struggling with non-compliance in terms of office attendance, one answer might be to distract the senior leaders from surveying the lack of occupied seats and their associated worry that people at home are spending “four hours a day walking the dog 🐕” (a real concern).

Instead, you can suggest refining and defining clear output and performance-driven goals for everyone, at individual and team levels, as well as for the whole organisation. “Trust isn’t a one-way street. It only works if you hold people accountable to performance and you have to know what your performance standards are. You all have to know what the top three priorities are as an organisation.”

That’s not to say there is no need for us to spend time with colleagues. Far from it. The next stage of hybrid is already under way: some companies are spending money internally on employing (and this is my definition, not Brian’s) corporate party planners 🎊. He cites the example of US online estate agency Zillow, which has cut the number of its offices, so more people work remotely in more widely distributed places. But it now “funds gatherings for teams on a minimum quarterly basis. They have a central team that helps organise these things.”

In this scenario, Zillow will bring different teams together — the finance and people departments, for example — and offer them a three-day agenda with a mix of separate and joint sessions. “It really builds a deeper sense of belonging,” Brian said.

Have you cracked hybrid work? Email me: isabel.berwick@ft.com.

This week on the Working It podcast

If you are overwhelmed by AI, we have the answer: Working It has a mini-series exploring different aspects of generative AI at work, and how it’s likely to impact us. This week’s episode is the first of three on the subject, and we kick off by talking about something that’s already happening: digital assistants. Do you ever wish there were two of you doing your job?

Some people are programming themselves into a digital twin, who can answer emails, go to meetings and has total recall of all the data you’ll ever need. I talk to Iliana Oris Valiente, Accenture managing director for Canada, and to her digital twin, Laila. Then I speak to the FT’s AI editor, Madhumita Murgia, about some of the big picture questions and concerns.

Office Therapy

The problem: What to do about a colleague who is competent but has zero energy and doesn’t really interact? They have worked in the organisation for years, and have always been like this — we’ve just had a reorganisation and they’ve ended up with our team. While not miserable or pessimistic, they operate in a languid bubble. We end up finishing their sentences 🥱. Their outlook affects us all.

Isabel’s advice: This is such a nuanced issue because you say their performance is fine, so you haven’t got anything concrete to address. In your next one-on-one, mention that you’ve noticed they’ve been quiet.

Nobody should be forced to disclose personal details — and if this team member doesn’t wish to do so, I’d put this down to “everyone has something going on” and be clear that you are always available for a chat, emphasise the resources your employer offers for confidential support, etc.

Then focus on building morale. It’s summer: what about an event, like a walking tour, outdoor theatre/gig or cooking class? Preferably something where there’s a clear focus on the activity, rather than just socialising- which favours noisy extroverts. Organised fun can be hard and alienating, but as long as you do practise inclusion — in the actual sense of the word, meaning including everyone — then you’ve made a positive intervention.

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Silent lay-offs are rarely as quiet as bosses hope: PwC asked employees who accepted a buyout to use approved wording in emails announcing their departures — and it backfired. Andrew Hill examines better ways.

2. Meetings in the Metaverse: new tech draws workers to virtual offices: The metaverse hype has flopped, but as Hannah Murphy points out, there is still plenty of workplace virtual activity going on out there. Don’t write it off.

3. If staff don’t want to work any more, leaders should step up: Staff are disenchanted and disengaged. Stefan Stern outlines some of the ways in which business leaders and managers can get it right.

4. The fading allure of the foreign posting: Working abroad used to be a very coveted adventure — but, as Pilita Clark points out, the rise of both dual career couples and tech that makes it easy to work with global teams has put demand for these jobs in decline.

5. Employers seek to ease pressure of fertility treatment for staff: It used to be very hard to get time off for IVF and other fertility appointments — that is changing fast, as employers start to introduce more flexibility and employee benefits, Emily Herbert writes.

One more thing

Have you seen the FT’s video series about democracy? It was commissioned for 2024, this strange year when nearly half of the world goes to the polls. (France has just joined us 🇫🇷.)

In the videos, four famous women — including Margaret Atwood, the novelist, and (my favourite) Aditi Mittal, an Indian comedian and actor — address the importance of democracy, and the threats it faces. The project, created by the FT’s head of new formats, Juliet Riddell, has taken on a life of its own: it inspired a fantastic live event last week, part of the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT). And there’s a book, too: Eleven Writers and Leaders on Democracy: What it is and Why it Matters.

And finally . . .

I met lots of readers at FT Live’s Women in Business Summit in London, where a lively panel about flexible work (and its possible downsides for women) included insights from Microsoft’s Colette Stallbaumer. She’s co-founder of the company’s WorkLab and general manager of Copilot, its AI chatbot, and reminded us that generative AI will transform everything about knowledge work, flexible or otherwise. (I take this opportunity to give another mention to this useful Microsoft and LinkedIn research outlining the current state of AI affairs.)

It occurred to me that AI may also reshape the focus of every panel and keynote that happens at workplace events such as the FT summit. Maybe we will have very different-looking conferences in future. (Sorry, conference planners). I don’t think the bots will replace actual panellists, though 🤖. Feel free to disagree: isabel.berwick@ft.com.