Hybrid work brings together the worst of all worlds: office video calls

For months the minigolf course was abandoned. The “bag” seats were empty. The whiteboard in the kitchen, above where the keg used to be, displayed in faded paint “beauties” from a happy hour in March 2020.

But on a recent weekday there was a sign of life in the common area: fresh begals.

As employees at financial tech startup CommonBond were vaccinated against Covid and went crazy in their apartments, they began to head back to the office.

“We call it Labor Wednesday at Work,” said Keryn Koch, director of human resources at the company, which has 14,000 square feet of sunlit space in the SoHo neighborhood of southern New York City.

At one point, the fall was heralded across corporate America as the Grand Reopening of Offices. But the delta variant emerged, and mandatory back-to-office plans became optional. Still, many people chose to report to their desks: the percentage of employed people who worked remotely at some point during the month because of Covid, which peaked in May 2020 at 35%, dropped in October to 11 %, the lowest point since the start of the pandemic, according to the Department of Labor Statistics.

A closer look at the workforce in New York, from a November survey of 188 major employers, showed that 8% of Manhattan office workers returned to full-time workplaces, 54% are completely remote and all others —almost 40%— are hybrids.

Few are finding it a smooth transition period. Some companies have used their tentative back-to-office dates as an unwitting excuse to avoid asking questions about how to balance the needs of remote and in-person employees, according to Edward Sullivan, who is an executive coach. This has resulted in a mushy middle ground: video calls where remote workers have trouble listening, a sense that people at home are losing advantages (co-workers) and those in the office too (pajamas). And what is at stake is not just who is being talked about in meetings. It’s whether flexibility is sustainable, even with all the benefits it offers.

“A lot of companies are going to get it wrong,” said Chris Herd, an entrepreneur and specialist in hybrid work.

Recently, Brett Hautop, head of the LinkedIn workplace, sat in a conference room listening to a sales pitch from a global supplier. The company wanted to sell its services to LinkedIn to help promote effective hybrid work. But the people making the proposal turned their backs on the video camera, so the LinkedIn employees who were in the videoconference couldn’t see them.

“While they talk about how difficult it is for people from a distance to follow conversations, they cover the camera,” Hautop said. “People on my team would say to me, ‘I can’t believe they’re doing this.’

Last summer, LinkedIn told its 16,000 employees around the world that its back-to-office plan, announced in October 2020, had been scrapped and that each department would decide where its people should work, becoming one of the most of 60 large companies that promised some permanent form of flexibility.

Hautop and his team assessed the difficulties generated by this approach. They upgraded audio-visual equipment in conference rooms and considered distributing lighting rings to employees at their desks so their faces wouldn’t be dimly lit on calls. They planned online sessions so employees could remember what they liked about the office.

“Hybrid is definitely more difficult than completely in-person or completely remote,” said Hautop. “It takes a lot more planning, and none of us, or anyone else in any company, has figured out exactly how it’s going to work.”

If hybrid work is a challenge even for the LinkedIn folks — the connectivity gurus, the masters of professional networks — what’s the hope for everyone else?

Asana, which makes collaboration software, recently gathered its executives to plan the official reopening of the office. Half of the participants were at the San Francisco headquarters and the other half participated by videoconference. Remote workers, including the company’s CEO, began to lose patience when people in the room talked to each other and made sideways comments.

“We were joking that if we didn’t like what someone was saying onscreen, we could just silence them,” said Anna Binder, the company’s chief of staff.

“We had such a terrible experience that we decided at the end of that meeting that all executive meetings going forward will be face-to-face,” she said. “Or they will be totally remote. Let’s not make the middle ground.”

Binder worries which teammates are most likely to suffer the headaches of the hybrid system. Many executives said employees with caregiver responsibilities are more likely to work remotely when given that option. A survey by the FlexJobs job platform found that 68% of women prefer their jobs to remain remote longer, compared to 57% of men. Another study, by Qualtrics and theBoardlist, found that 34% of men with children had received promotions while working remotely, compared to just 9% of women with children.

“If you give people the freedom to choose what to do and where to work,” Binder said, “women are more likely to enjoy the flexibility of working from home. that happens.”

It’s not hard to imagine all the ways remote workers can be harmed: silenced in a heated discussion, excluded from socializing at lunchtime. But Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford professor who has surveyed hundreds of hybrid companies, said that in many workplaces, in-person employees felt equally slighted.

“It’s the American’s rule in Europe,” said Bloom. “When an American travels abroad, you look around the room and everyone is speaking English to help you. If there’s one person working from home, everyone in the office connects to the meeting.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves