Ten Myths About Hybrid Work

Let’s break down some common misconceptions about what’s involved as organizations adapt to hybrid work.

Myth #1: Hybrid means everybody comes into the office two or three days every week.

Reality: Hybrid can describe any mixed location strategy between fully remote and fully onsite. The model where every employee (exceptions aside) is expected to be in the office two to three days per week is just one of many versions an organization could adopt. There are even subsets of this version. Some organizations will decide for employees which days of the week they need to be in the office, while others will let their teams decide.

One hybrid model that seems to be gaining popularity is what we might call the hybrid of hybrids approach — this model segments an organization’s workforce into fully remote, flex, and always onsite groups — options that employees can apply for or opt in to. Offering these cohorts provides a model that most closely matches employee preferences. In aggregate across industries, surveys tend to find that most workers currently working from home want to keep the option open — at least a few days a week — while a sizable minority (consistently around 30% across surveys of US workers) want the option to work from home full time. Only a small minority want to return to the office full-time.

While there truly is no one-size-fits-all approach to designing a sustainable hybrid-work model, you can expect to see the hybrid of hybrids approach gain popularity because it offers the most straightforward way to satisfy the broadest set of preferences. Indeed, if organizations simply were to let people choose how often they wanted to come into the office, this is probably the model into which they would settle.

Hybrid work can also involve flexibility not just in where work happens, but also in when it happens. Increasingly, leaders are empowering teams to meet transparent goals, and then trusting their workers to get the work done. The idea of managing “butts in seats, 9–5” will quickly become a thing of the past.

Myth #2: Those who want to remain remote full-time are anti-social introverts who are not committed to the culture of their organizations.

Reality: Managers who want to return to “office-centric cultures” would do well to ask themselves who benefits from those cultures, and why. Leaders are beginning to realize that some employees feel like remote work creates a level playing field, free of the subtle and not-so-subtle biases that can make social interactions pleasant for the powerful and painful for the rest. For those who are eager for things to “return to normal,” this time is an opportunity to reflect on how “normal” may have reinforced certain kinds of systemic privileges. From that perspective, workers and managers can re-negotiate what “normal” might mean in the future.

People in the US who currently work remotely, and who want to continue doing so full-time, come from surprisingly diverse backgrounds, roles, seniority levels, and incomes — and they all have different reasons for preferring this arrangement. Many would love to work with their colleagues in-person, if their offices were nearer to where they wanted to live, and free from bias and discrimination. Unfortunately, many offices are just not like that. People who want full-time remote may really value in-person, face-to-face time with colleagues; there may just be other aspects of their lives they prioritize more highly and could not have if they were required to be on site each week. Leaders who live comfortably near their offices are at risk of overlooking the economic realities that can push their team members into super commutes or leave them feeling trapped in places where they would rather not live. One recent survey found three out of four respondents would consider relocation if given permanent WFH. Another found that one third would consider moving, and of the rest, half already had.

If permanent remote work preferences were only about personality traits, we would also expect them to be distributed randomly across demographic groups. But this is not what we find. People who prefer more location flexibility are more likely to be women and people of color, more likely to have a disability, and more likely to have children at home. If any of these groups have different outcomes in performance evaluations or workplace inclusion, it could add to already existing inequities that many organizations are trying to correct.

The recent findings from the Future Forum survey are so striking that they are worth quoting directly:

“Black knowledge workers are more likely to say that working remotely is better for their sense of belonging than to say it’s worse, while the opposite is true for white knowledge workers.”

Diversity, equity, and inclusion leaders can take the return to office conversation as an opportunity to recast and challenge their organizations’ culture-preservation talk. They can then lead an important discussion about who an office-centric culture benefits, and why. By thinking critically about this topic, leaders may decide to push their organizations from thinking about returning to offices primarily through the lens of cultural preservation, to thinking about it as an opportunity for more expansive cultural transformation — towards a world where more people can love their work and life.

Looking back, it is probably safe to say that few would argue for a return to “boy’s club” cultures that dominated — and in some cases continue to dominate — corporate life around the world. While there were undoubtedly men who benefited from these cultures and warned that moving past them would hurt their business and lead to a loss of camaraderie, we know they were wrong. Inclusive cultures correlate highly with better business outcomes.

While office-centric cultures aren’t necessarily exclusive, they’re not necessarily innocent, either. We need to more systematically ask who they do and do not benefit, and why. Return-to-office decision-making is stronger when it takes these imperatives seriously.

Myth #3: Remote workers won’t be promoted at the same rate as their co-located peers.

Reality: Even if there were ample social scientific results from the past two decades suggesting this myth was true (there are not many), and even if they’d been shown to be reliable through meta-analyses and randomization (which they haven’t), there are so many confounding factors with this kind of research that it’s hard to extrapolate from these results with any kind of certainty.

Perhaps the most important confounding factor is that the environment in which these historical studies were done was pre-COVID — a time when remote work was an exceptional thing, and something very few had experienced themselves. That environment no longer exists. Because of the pandemic, most workers with a job that can be done remotely have already had that experience. The scale of this experience fundamentally alters the playing field, and that’s just not a variable these historical studies could account for. If the result persists across multiple kinds of organizations with different performance management practices, that would be interesting; until then, there’s no telling.

That said, it would certainly be worth designing hybrid return-to-office strategies to mitigate this risk — in case it’s a real threat. One way to do that is by re-examining performance management practices to make them more outcome-oriented. Another way to do it is to allow more managers to work remotely — and for senior leaders to commit to working remotely a few days a week — at least to avoid creating centers of gravity around themselves. After all, if the boss is not in the office either, that undercuts much of the frantic hand-wringing about hybrid creating a two-tiered system.

In the end, the patterns we see emerge will likely have more to do with the ways organizations re-shape and re-imagine their office work cultures than with limitations in remote working itself.

Myth #4: 2020 was just a speed bump; things are going to go back to the way they were.

Reality: Current trends suggest that this won’t be the case. Of course, any organizational leaders are welcome to try and force their employees to return to working a certain way — to “put the genie back in the bottle” as some have said — but they do this at their own competitive risk. For the majority of knowledge workers who have worked remotely, there is no going back to a world where the memory of flexible work does not exist. Expect this to create the conditions for persistent, broad, and unified worker demands for permanent flexibility going forward.

Because the overwhelming preference is for at least some location flexibility, there will be a significant talent arbitrage from the less remote-friendly organizations to the more remote-friendly ones. Many organizations are already experiencing this, as they are beginning to see attrition or beginning to see applications skyrocket for remote job openings. The fact that some of the most powerful buyers in the market for knowledge work have pivoted from less to more remote-friendly policies are a testament to the bargaining power that knowledge workers currently have. This pattern has likely just begun.

Even for organizations that do return to an office-centric culture, it would be a mistake to forget all the lessons the pandemic taught us about how to work together effectively at a distance. For business continuity purposes, and to enable even better in-office collaboration, the insights we gained over the last 18 months should not be forgotten.

Myth #5: Organizations that have experienced both fully onsite and fully remote work will be able to easily adapt to hybrid work, because it is a mix of both.

Reality: First, recall that hybrid can mean many things (lesson from Myth #1). Some hybrid models (like a “remote-first” version) will feel a lot like working for a fully remote organization, even if a lot of people happen to be in the office. Other models (those that are more “remote-fine”) will feel a lot like what we were familiar with pre-pandemic (e.g., many uncomfortable hybrid meetings). The thing that will feel unfamiliar and new — the thing that will ruffle a lot of feathers and be the subject of endless internal meetings and team retrospectives — will be the “remote friendly” hybrids that try to straddle both in-office and remote worlds in relatively equal parts. This culture negotiation will happen whether or not employers plan for it and take a leadership role in directing it. The questions will be around what kind of cultures enable sustainable hybrid work and the performance management practices needed to drive those cultures.

Intentionally designed, hybrid team norms are going to take time and thoughtful discussion to work out. Without intentional pre-return guidance and messaging, on-site people will fall back into familiar patterns. They will innocently find themselves discussing team projects without documenting the results, or having impromptu meetings around the coffee bar that aren’t accessible to their distributed peers. Remote team members (who happen to be remote that day, or who are remote for longer periods) will complain, and everyone will have to figure out a better way of working.

Eventually, they may decide to explicitly set out team norms, such as:

• No hybrid meetings: everyone joins virtually no matter where they are, to level the playing field. If one person in a meeting is remote, everyone should be.
• Our team’s HQ is our chat channel, our wiki page, our document library, and our recurring meetings. HQ is in the cloud — not an office.
• If you have an impromptu conversation about a project that affects other team members, document the upshot in a central digital place and if they have questions, commit to catching remote team members up in a timely manner.
• Limit team project talk at in-person happy hours/lunches where not everyone can attend. Other work-talk or personal-talk is encouraged; get to know one another!
• If you’re feeling excluded or left out while remote, say something — don’t let it fester. Being honest and vulnerable is a way to build trust and will make us a better team.
• If we say we’re going to be remote two to three days a week, don’t be that person who comes in five days a week to try and “get ahead” — this is not the culture we want to create. If you need to be in the office more often, talk to your manager about switching to the fully on-site cohort. If you’re the manager, lead by example.
• Leaders should post opportunities for new work or side projects in our team’s digital HQ or in a virtual meeting or chat.

These examples are just illustrative, others can be found here, here, and here.

Myth #6: Once an organization has announced its plans about returning to offices, there’s no turning back — even if they might want to later.

Reality: Plenty of organizations have pivoted; it’s part of the COVID-19 narrative. People expect and can tolerate a little whiplash, as long as they receive it well enough in advance and they’re given sufficient recourse should it significantly impact their health, safety, or well-being.

The pressure from candidates and employees can be so strong that even some of the strongest brands in the labor market have had to publicly pivot toward more remote-friendly policies. If they can do it, others can too.

For most organizations, the effort required to transition to post-pandemic ways of working will not be complete once the RTO date rolls around. It’s far more likely that it will take several quarters to settle into the mindsets, processes, and toolsets that will enable the right kind of hybrid for any given organization. It might seem like the finish line is close, but prudent leaders will guard against the temptation to sprint towards it because they know they will have to keep running even after workers begin to return. Transitioning into effective and desirable hybrid work will take time; this is especially true given the way new variants continue to upend 2021 return-to-office plans.

To deal with the expectations involved in this elongated and experimental transition, some leaders recommend communicating specific dates and intake processes to employees about when hybrid policies and programs would be re-assessed. Then, employees would know that things can change and understand how they can contribute ideas or, if they desire, help with that change.

Myth #7: Remote work is less innovative and collaborative than co-located work.

Reality: The evidence for this claim is mixed at best, though it has taken on the character of dogma in public discussion (which is to say, it is expressed without the felt need for subsequent defense or justification).

For example, some recent results suggest that proximity of inventors to headquarters can predict their patent rates. But this research is complicated by the non-random distribution of inventors and capital in or around urban centers. It is also complicated by the existence of “lock-in” effects that can result when individuals are too proximal, and by meta-analyses, which find that group brainstorming sessions actually produce fewer and lower-quality insights than individual alternatives. Finally, it’s important to remember there are a number of other dimensions of proximity which can predict collaboration and innovation — beyond geographic proximity — including cognitive, social, institutional, and organizational ones. Teams that innovate effectively learn to strike the right balance between these proximity dimensions, as well as between synchronous and asynchronous work. On the other hand, teams that transpose synchronous, meeting-first cultures into digital or hybrid environments risk increasing meeting fatigue —which might stifle innovation and effective collaboration.

Managers should also be aware of the effect that forced return to offices may have on workers who would rather continue working from home. People are unlikely to be effective innovators or collaborators if they feel like they are forced to return to offices more often than they would like to. The “collision theory” of innovation has likely run its course.

Myth #8: Remote workers who relocate to lower cost of living areas will have to take a pay cut.

Reality: Some organizations are doing this, but it appears most are not. Either way, it is important to remember that organizations typically base these location-specific compensation practices on the cost of labor, not the cost of living in the region where they source a role. For remote knowledge workers, this region will be broad enough to encompass many different cost-of-living areas. It might be national or international, and span a few adjacent time zones.

Whether employers decide to pay different salaries to remote employees who are in the same role, based on their local cost of living, will depend on many factors, including how competitive the practice makes them in the labor market where they’re sourcing talent. Here, employers will have to navigate a tension between legacy and emerging expectations from labor market participants. On the one hand, knowledge workers have grown used to a world in which the cost of their labor correlates tightly with their local cost of living. On the other hand, some are beginning to question whether it is fair and equitable to use fine-grained, location-based compensation practices for fully remote workers if employers agree that there aren’t specific location requirements for the job. Employers, after all, do not typically pay people differently based on the cost of personal decisions that have no relationship to their job requirements, like whether to send children to private schools or drive expensive cars. So, some may wonder why a remote worker’s personal location decisions should be treated any differently in pay negotiations. After all, employers might say, if a remote worker wants to live in an expensive area, that’s their choice — it’s not a job requirement.

What fully remote knowledge workers consider fair treatment, and what employers are willing to pay, will be one of the defining features of this competitive landscape. Whichever way it goes, it seems safe to say that the cost of fully remote knowledge work will be in flux for some time. This is especially true given the tight labor market and the coming great resignation. In the end, some compensation and workforce strategy experts predict that the market for remote knowledge work will trend towards a national or regionalized model.

Myth #9: Returning to offices just means getting the elevators and spaces ready.

Reality: This may be true for some organizations. But for most, returning to offices will involve a lot more than just making physical preparations.

To understand everything at stake in planning a return to office and hybrid program implementation, consider the ETHOS framework that enables organizations to navigate this journey with a holistic approach — one which considers needs spanning Engagement, Talent, Health, Operations, and Systems. As a framework and assessment methodology, ETHOS helps organizations navigate their hybrid and return-to-office journeys in ways that go beyond workforce planning and space re-design.

Prudent organizations recognize that, even if they’re making significant investments in their spaces (touchless entry! phone booths for uninterrupted work!), the elements that will affect the success and sustainability of hybrid models the most will be the intangibles: the expectations they set for people; the example set by senior leadership; and the norms teams adopt for collaboration. The intangibles are what make it difficult to shift ways of working, but savvy leaders recognize they have been handed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape their organizations — for generations to come. People know that change is in the air and are expecting more than moderately revamped office spaces.

Myth #10: Future-of-work strategizing is done when an organization has announced its return-to-office plan.

Reality: Planning for the future of work involves more than thinking through whether and when organizations will allow remote work.

Sourcing strategy will be equally (if not more important). Finding the right mix of short-term, contracted, consulting, rotational, project-based work, and long-term employment work will be critical for organizations to stay agile and succeed over the long run.

Upskilling strategies will also be a vital ingredient in meeting tomorrow’s work demands. In addition to broadening their training investments, leaders can develop internal talent marketplaces to match people to the stretch roles or projects where they can develop the competencies needed to drive tomorrow’s work and engaged.

Ideally, the decisions leaders are now making about location strategy are undertaken in a way which actively considers the spectrum of what work means at an organization, how it will be done, where it will be sourced, under what terms, and how it will remain responsive to the skill demands organizations face as they grow and innovate.

Stay curious

Articulating these ten ideas and calling them “myths” is less about proving things wrong than it is about deepening and enriching a conversation about the ways people can love their work and life. Like the journey many organizations are on as employees return to their offices, this conversation is still in its early days. There is more to learn — and ultimately, curiosity, humility, and empathy will prove critical to achieving the outcomes employees, employers, and customers desire.

Slalom is a global consulting firm focused on strategy, technology and business transformation. Learn more about our ETHOS approach to hybrid work and reach out today.