For months, the miniature golf course was unused. The couches were empty. The kitchen whiteboard, where the keg used to be, read in faded ink from a happy hour in March 2020: “Beer on tap.”
But on a recent weekday, there was a sign of life in the common area: fresh bagels.
As employees at CommonBond, a fintech company, got their COVID shots and started freaking out in their apartments, they started heading back to the office.
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–“We call it ‘Work-from-Office Wednesdays,’” said Keryn Koch, who manages human resources for the company, which owns a nearly 1,400-square-foot, sunlit building in New York City’s Soho neighborhood. .
At one point, fall was seen as the “Grand Office Reopening” across the board for America’s corporations. The delta variant intervened and mandatory plans to return to the office became optional. Still, many people chose to report back to their desks: The portion of employed people who worked remotely at some point in the month due to COVID, which peaked in May 2020 at 35 percent, fell. in October to 11 percent, the lowest point since the pandemic began, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
A closer look at the New York workforce, a November 188 survey of top employers indicated that eight percent of office workers in Manhattan are back in the office full-time, 54 are back. remotely completely and the rest – almost 40 percent – are in a hybrid mode.
To few it seems like a gradual transition period. Some companies used their tentative back-to-office dates as an inadvertent excuse to avoid questions about how to balance the needs of their remote and on-site employees, according to Edward Sullivan, an executive consultant.
That has resulted in an imprecise middle ground: video calls where remote workers have trouble hearing, a feeling that people working from home are missing out on some perks (teammates), while those in the office they miss out on others (pajamas). And what is at stake is not just who interrupts the other during meetings, but whether flexibility is sustainable, even with all the benefits it has.
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–“A lot of companies will go wrong doing this,” said Chris Herd, an entrepreneur and hybrid work expert.
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–Recently, Brett Hautop, vice president of work experience at LinkedIn, sat in a boardroom listening to a presentation from a global vendor. The firm wanted to sell its services to LinkedIn to help facilitate effective hybrid work. However, the people giving the presentation had turned their backs on the camera, so LinkedIn employees who joined via video conference could not see them.
“As they talked about how difficult it is for people who work remotely to keep up with the conversations, they covered the camera,” Hautop said. “People on my team were texting me to say, ‘I can’t believe they’re doing this.’ I would apologize and say, ‘Hey, I’m sorry this is happening; apparently they don’t realize it. ‘
Last summer, LinkedIn told its 16,000 employees around the world that its plan to return to the office announced in October 2020 had been scrapped and that individual departments would decide where their members could work, thus becoming a from more than 60 large companies that have promised some permanent form of flexibility.
Hautop and his team took stock of the difficulties generated by this strategy. They revamped audiovisual equipment in conference rooms and considered distributing rings of light to face-to-face workers at their desks so that their faces were not poorly lit during calls. They planned strategies so employees could remember what it was they loved about the office.
“Ultimately, the hybrid method is more complicated than totally face-to-face or completely remote work,” Hautop mentioned. “It takes more foresight and no one of us, or in any company, has figured out exactly how it’s going to work.”
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–If the hybrid form is challenging even for the folks at LinkedIn – the connectivity gurus, the masters of networking – what can everyone else expect?
Asana, a company that makes collaboration software, recently brought its executives together to discuss plans for the official reopening of the office. Half of the participants were at the headquarters in San Francisco and the other half joined via videoconference. Remote workers, including the company’s chief executive, began to lose patience as people in the room broke off and made separate comments.
“We were joking because if we didn’t like what someone was saying on the screen, we could just silence them,” said Anna Binder, the company’s chief of staff.
“It was such a terrible experience that, at the end of that meeting, we made the decision that all executive meetings from now on will be face-to-face or completely remote. We will not do something by halves, “he said.
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–Binder cares for the teammates most likely to suffer from the complications of the hybrid mode. Many executives said that employees with the responsibility of caring for someone were more likely to work from home when offered the possibility. A survey by the employment platform FlexJobs found that 68 percent of women preferred their jobs to remain remote in the long term, compared to 57 percent of men. Another study, from Qualtrics and theBoardlist, found that 34 percent of men with children had received promotions while working remotely, compared to just nine percent of women with children.
“If you give people total choice about what they do and where they work, women are more likely to take advantage of that flexibility to work from home. Which means that, instead, they will be less in the room where things happen ”.
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–It’s not hard to imagine all the ways remote workers could be looked down upon: silenced in a heated discussion, deprived of ties at lunchtime. However, Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University professor who has studied hundreds of hybrid companies, said that in many workplaces, face-to-face employees feel just as ignored.
“It is the rule of the American in Europe: when an American travels abroad, you look around the room and everyone is speaking English for your benefit. If one person is working from home, everyone in the office connects to be in the meeting. “
This is the case with Zillow, the real estate company that is currently facing a wave of losses and layoffs, where a quarter of the people are hybrid workers and almost two-thirds work entirely remotely. The company’s “One Zoom all Zoom” rule stipulates that if even just one person participates in a meeting virtually, all office members must join together on separate laptops. Zillow went so far as to remove audiovisual equipment from the conference room walls.
Zoom’s rule is in keeping with Zillow’s broad attitude toward telecommuting, which included the announcement that its headquarters has moved from Seattle to the cloud.
“I go to the office every day,” said Meghan Reibstein, vice president of product management and flexible work, who moved to Asheville, North Carolina, during the pandemic. “But it’s in the attic of my house.”
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–But when the attic becomes the office, and the office becomes a place for bagels and weekly jokes, executives are forced to answer: what is the point of paying rent? For many entrepreneurs, the luxurious spaces occupied by just a handful of office stalwarts have become a reminder of the real costs associated with the ambiguity of hybrid work.
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–Court Cunningham felt that sense of unease recently, as he was touring the buildings of New York to rent a new office for Orchard, his online home buying company: If only 15 percent of his employees worked from the office, was it worth it? is it worth paying a rent that represents two percent of income? He thought twice. So he signed a new rental agreement in October, in a bid for a future where people will want to be in the office.
“Two years from now this will be a master play that allowed us to secure a long-term fee in the depths of the pandemic, or the world will be working entirely remotely and we will have this sword of Damocles hanging over our heads.” Cunningham said.
Meanwhile, experts helping companies through this period are hopeful that the difficulties of hybrid work are not permanent. Or at least manageable: Some advise their clients to be explicit with their staff about whether to prioritize the needs of office workers or remote workers, especially when it comes to facilitating meetings.
“In Vietnam, the POWs who accepted that they had no idea when they were going to be saved were the ones who survived,” said Sullivan, CEO of the advisory firm Velocity Group, drawing on a reference – what’s known as the Stockdale Paradox — removed from the circumstances of the office cafeteria. “The companies that accepted that this is going to be difficult and communicated it clearly to their teams, are going to prosper. No more waiting for Christmas or Easter. We accept that this is going to be difficult. “
And after acceptance comes decision making. So Asana opted to label itself an “office-centric hybrid,” with bosses articulating that at some point most people are expected to return to their desks. CommonBond defines itself as “remote first,” with its CEO farther from the Manhattan office than the junior workers who come to the office on Wednesdays. (“Our center of gravity is the Zoom Sphere,” said David Klein, CEO). Both companies rejected the “choose your own adventure” approach, in which people have no idea where their managers want them to be.
“Imagine if people could choose to drive on the left or right side of the road,” said Bloom, the Stanford professor. “There would be accidents all the time. You need coordination ”.
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