Why Hybrid Work Works

As someone who lives an hour and a half from my London office, I love working from home. I can help my teenagers out of the door in the morning, and I am present when the family comes home. I can have coffee with my wife Ellie before we start work. I prepare dinner during my lunch break, and receive deliveries. I can contribute more effort during my day to Cherrypick, free from distractions, interruptions and the long commute. I would struggle to work effectively five days a week in London.

I also love working from the office. It is an opportunity to spend real time with the people I work with. Communication is easier and I spend less time on screens. I can train less experienced colleagues much more efficiently than video chat. I can ask for and give advice and help in person, cutting down long feedback cycles. I would struggle to work effectively five days a week from home.

Much of the debate around hybrid working appears to be a zero sum argument about why working from home is “better” or “worse”, and why working in the office is “more” or “less” productive.

One is not better than the other; they are just different. I think we need both for a balanced life.

Here are some pointers for how to have a productive conversation about hybrid in your team.

Be honest

Companies struggle to communicate well about hybrid, which causes bad feeling amongst their team.

Plenty of organisations say staff do not need to be in the office, but they have a culture that insists upon it because it is the only way to get support or be noticed.

Other organisations insist on their team being in the office a set number of days, but do not help coordinate this so that it is actually productive. The team is not sure why this is important, only that they have to be there.

Worse, senior team members make decisions about how often their team must be in the office, but play by different rules themselves and spend more time at home than they allow their team. They see the benefits to home working but do not allow others the freedom to make good decisions for themselves or the company.

Be honest. If it is an office job, call it an office job. Five days a week in the office is fine, if the expectation is clear and everyone willingly agrees. If you are advertising a hybrid job, talk about how this will work so expectations are clear. Play by the same rules that you make for your team.

Have a values based discussion

There are often implicit assumptions on both sides of the hybrid debate. Managers can assume that their team wish to do the minimum, or will not be able to be productive from home. Team members can assume the request to be in the office is caused by a lack of trust in their commitment or ability to set their own working practice.

The cause is a lack of shared understanding of values between the senior team making the decisions, and the team that has to live them out.

There needs to be an honest conversation on the values behind the decisions being made, so there is clarity about what needs to be done. Talk to the team about the benefits of being together. Ask them how they feel about it, and what their assumptions are. Listen hard and make allowances for different temperaments.¹

Flex to suit the circumstances

There is not one set formula for hybrid success. I work from London one or two days a week, pre-agreed with my team. I make sure I am only there when there is a good reason. It will be different for every team and company. I am a mild extravert, so I gain energy both from being with people and from recharging on my own at different times.

For example, there are very high performing companies such as 37signals that work almost entirely remotely, only meeting a few times a year. For this to work, two things need to be true:

• the people must be comfortable with the level of remote working. This is best done through self-selection at the hiring stage, not imposed later. Note this is also true for mostly in-person work.
• the practices are intentional and supportive. A great example is continuous documentation as described well here by Gregory Brown.

If you are intentional, you can make anything work. Everyone is different, so the work/home balance should depend on the work, life stage and temperament. Figure it out with your team rather than following a playbook.

Make office days worth the effort

At Cherrypick, office days are special.

We make sure everyone plans to be in the office on the same days, so we maximise in-person time together. We then all spend the rest of the week at home: less meetings, more focused work.

When we’re in, we sit and have lunch together - we don’t work through lunch at our desks. We spend more time discussing nuanced topics and plan out our future strategy.

We go for walks along the river to St Paul’s Cathedral and back, discussing tricky topics or issues. I have spent several 1:1s wandering through the Tate Modern, chatting to people about their lives, thorny problems with their work, and their hopes for the future.

We make allowances for journey times and are flexible with when people arrive and leave. We pay for travel to get to the London area, so cost does not prevent people coming in. (To be fair to London-based team members, everyone pays for travel within London.) We have the same rules for Tom and I as everyone else.

If office days are special, and managed fairly, your team won’t mind them nearly as much.

Hybrid work works. It is not a zero sum game: with intentional setup, it can unlock your team hiring funnel and still allow for plenty of interaction.

Thanks to Olly Headey, Gregory Brown and Heather Hosler for feedback on earlier drafts of this post.