This post was originally published on this site
My colleague Ranya Nehmeh and I have an article out now in the Harvard Business Review—“Hybrid Still Isn’t Working”—about problems with hybrid work arrangements and how leaders can fix them. (Editors pick headlines, by the way.)
For employers that retained remote work after the pandemic, the idea that they could simply tell employees to work from home three days a week without doing anything different and that it would be problem-free seems like magical thinking.
Pointing out the problems with hybrid work
The most obvious problems now are employees just not coming in on “anchor days”—with three-fourths of employers reporting that challenge—and spending more time on meetings that are even less useful than when they were in the office. Leaders could fix issues like these quickly if they tried.
The bigger problems stem from the fact that a lot of how we got work done in offices before the pandemic involved personal ties and interactions. We ask someone we know for help, we pick up what people now call “weak signals” in water cooler conversations about work issues, we look after new hires when they are lost, we go to someone we know if we can’t get something done, we
