As the pandemic has worked its dreary, disastrous way with us over the past couple of years, the talk in communication circles has been about the new hybrid nature of the workplace. Meaning, of course, that we can now handle a mix of in-person and virtual interactions, from one day to the next, and even within one meeting or conference to the next. Eight hours of back-to-back Zooms with people in many different countries and time zones? It’s something you can do, if you need to – or want to.
And that’s a good thing, on the whole. We humans have been making the world smaller for centuries, as we’ve speeded up communications, from bonfires on hilltops, to the Pony Express, to flight. After that, came email and then the Internet, and we started to realize that instant communications around the globe was a thing.
In many ways, widespread use of virtual communications is less of a development than email or the mobile phone, because we already could communicate virtually. It’s just that it happened at top speed, and to a large swathe of the working world, in March 2020.
But where are we left? How’s the hybrid world working? I’ve been talking to various executives, conference organizers, and scientists in the past couple of months in order to see how we humans are adapting to the virtual hybrid world. The answers surprised me, as we virtual communicators like to say.
The general consensus is that hybrid communications solve a few problems, but cause a whole lot more, and few people in a position to comment on it actually like it much.
First, there are the obvious benefits. You solve access, timing, and reach problems in one stroke by streaming your meeting, conference, or plenary session online. You save tons of money on travel, potentially, and you’re kinder to the planet. And you get to be seen as a technologically up-to-date organization.
For all those great benefits, why aren’t the folks who run organizations and conferences more enthusiastic about hybrid?
It’s the insidious problems that hybrid communications create that worry the great and good and those who are thinking about the issues.
You may solve access issues, for example, but no one should pretend for a moment that virtual access is the same as being at the meeting or conference or wine tasting. The hybrid access comes with second-class citizenship, in all the possible meanings of that term. If you’re a junior person, you look even more junior. No one in the room will take you seriously. At best, you’re a disembodied voice. At worst, you’re an annoying interruption in the flow of things.
Executives to a person don’t believe in hybrid because, it turns out, the old ass-in-the-chair mentality is proving much harder to overcome than everyone thought. I was talking to a CEO about hybrid work recently, and he spoke for many when he said, “I had one employee who kept coming into the office throughout the pandemic. It was the two of us in person, and everyone else online. Guess who I gave all the raises and promotions to over those 2 years?”
Executives worry a lot about culture and esprit de corps, as they should, and it’s very hard to do either well virtually. It’s not impossible. It’s just hard.
There are ways to insert “work from anywhere” deep into an organization’s culture. But it takes time and real commitment, and if the executives don’t believe in it, really, that commitment won’t happen.
I’m watching one company I work with go from 3 days a month in the office to 3 days a week. It’s a brutal adjustment for some, but I suspect the end result will be 5 days a week in the office and sooner rather than later.
For some people, people with introverted personalities or work that requires deep concentration, or both, or some interesting mixture of each, the hybrid world has been a wonderful experiment in saner working conditions. But for the rest of us, hybrid is gradually going to shrink to some manageable minimum where we hardly notice it or the people online.
All of this misses an important point that I fear will get lost in our general displeasure with the pandemic, not hybrid communications per se. Each organization and each industry should be setting up a task force to find the optimal mix for that culture, workforce, and jobs-to-be-done of in-person v virtual work. It’s an enormous opportunity to increase efficiency, environmental awareness, and global reach. But only if it’s done in a thoughtful, serious way. Not as a reaction to a crisis.
Virtual communications can work very well for small groups of passionately committed people focusing on a shared cause, problem, or subject. For everyone else, it risks becoming a new form of channel surfing. Each organization, industry, and communications ecosystem needs to figure out what is optimal and what is acceptable in hybrid communications.
We’re missing a huge chance to create a better communications world with benefits for many people. And that is another sad result of a terrible pandemic.
Nick, I believe you are conflating hybrid meetings with hybrid working. The latter involves working some of the time in an office with other people and some of the time somewhere else, often by oneself at home. Reams of quantitative research (including my own), as well as much anecdotal evidence strongly shows that most workers love having the flexibility to work from home and an office. They are more productive, engaged and less likely to leave. Granted, balancing individual, team and business needs can be challenging, but many companies I’m studying are trying to find workable solutions. They recognize that the work world has changed forever. It is no longer 2019. We are not going back to that time, regardless of what some leaders would like. Forcing people who use digital technology to do their jobs to commute every day to work in an office is a relic of the 20th century and we are not going back. The fact that it took the first two decades of the 21st century and a global pandemic for this to happen doesn’t change this fact. Many people want to still work in offices, but less frequently, and not to do work they can get accomplished better from home. Hybrid meetings are a whole other story. I agree they suck, as do virtual ones some of the time (and as do some in-person ones). But in today’s world, where many of us work on geographically-dispersed teams, hybrid and virtual communications are the only economically feasible means of performing group work on a daily basis. The solution to this challenge, is not to turn back time, but to create a new way of working better suited to the realities of today’s businesses and workplaces. I wholeheartedly agree with your recommendation: “Each organization and each industry should be setting up a task force to find the optimal mix for that culture, workforce, and jobs-to-be-done of in-person vs. virtual work. It’s an enormous opportunity to increase efficiency, environmental awareness, and global reach. But only if it’s done in a thoughtful, serious way. Not as a reaction to a crisis.” This is the approach my most thoughtful clients are taking, and I’ve been advising others to adopt it. Regarding, the CEO you said gave all the promotions and raises to the guy who was in the office every day during the pandemic – this is proximity bias on a criminal level. Does he/she really believe it smart to measure and reward employees by the number of hours they are present, not their performance, or the value they deliver to the business?
Thanks, Tony, for your expertise and great clarifications. I was indeed talking about hybrid communications, and implying that they are unsatisfying despite their undoubted advantages in some ways. You are right — employees love the flexibility of working at home (or from anywhere). Most executives I talk to, on the other hand, are being dragged kicking and screaming into a world where hybrid communications are the norm, precisely because they don’t like not having their people in front of them, in person, since communicating in hybrid ways is still inferior to in person. The CEO I referenced surprised me because he saw what he said as a no-brainer — “Of course I rewarded the person who was in the office.” It wasn’t irony, or a comment on how he knew he should have done otherwise but couldn’t help himself. It was a straightforward acknowledgement that he preferred people who came into the office, no matter what. He had to, after all, so true-blue employees should do the same!