Seven Truths About Hybrid Work and Productivity

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Seven Truths About Hybrid Work and Productivity

By Lynda Gratton  | MIT Sloan Management Review | August 14, 2024

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Our collective experience of the pandemic enabled us to conduct endless experiments with work. Initially, the experiments were about where work took place (the home becoming a viable option), and soon they became about when work took place (the rigors of nine-to-five morphing into more flexible arrangements). Even now, leaders are watching with some combination of unease, hope, and curiosity to see what effects these experiments are having on the organization, especially on workers’ productivity.

In mid-July, the author and her research team at HSM ran a research webinar on the topic of productivity, in part to explore how the definition and measurement of productivity are shifting and what these changes mean for individuals, managers, teams, and organizational design.  Seven truths about hybrid work and productivity have begun to emerge. 

1. Hybrid work is a continuum. Research indicates that there’s been a settling down of practices and implications since the end of the pandemic. Some companies are requiring the majority of employees to go back into the office. Some companies are implementing a “work from anywhere” policy. The majority are somewhere in the middle: We see language such as “majority office-based”, “team-led office days”, and “flexible arrangement”.
2. It’s crucial to communicate policies straightforwardly. My advice to senior teams about hybrid working: Make the “deal” clear. For example, don’t pretend that there’s flexibility when the culture is to be in the office and a failure to show up will be punished. 
3. Leaders need to be prepared for the trade-offs. Another piece of advice for senior leaders is to acknowledge that all deals have compromises associated with them. Now, with three years of hybrid experiments under our belts, it’s becoming ever clearer what these trade-offs are. Take the “work every day from the office” deal.
4. Acknowledge differing narratives about the impact of hybrid working on productivity.  Groups of leaders (like the fintech leaders) fret about the impact of hybrid — while the perception of the webinar group (more representative of the development and HR functions) was more generally upbeat that hybrid working is having a positive impact on productivity.
5. Productivity is usually challenging — and measurement is always complex. The axis of these differing narratives about hybrid are concerns about productivity.  Hybrid/productivity issue should be seen in the context. Productivity is a concept that is complex, little understood, and hard to move the needle on in a verifiable way. Nevertheless, three concepts emerge to measure productivity in hybrid environment collaboration, energy, and focus.
6. An expanded set of productivity measures needs to be part of the conversation. Too often, the move to hybrid work has been seen almost as an article of faith: You are either a true believer or someone who’s totally against it. What the author heard from the fintech leadership team was a more nuanced question about productivity. They wanted to understand, at a granular level, the impact of hybrid work on productivity and, importantly, to answer the question “Does it boost or deplete productivity?” This is an entirely reasonable question.
7. It’s useful to view hybrid work as fundamentally a job design option.

2 key takeaways from the article

1. Our collective experience of the pandemic enabled us to conduct endless experiments with work. Initially, the experiments were about where work took place (the home becoming a viable option), and soon they became about when work took place (the rigors of nine-to-five morphing into more flexible arrangements). Even now, leaders are watching with some combination of unease, hope, and curiosity to see what effects these experiments are having on the organization, especially on workers’ productivity.
2. From a study, seven truths about hybrid work and productivity have begun to emerge:  hybrid work is a continuum, it’s crucial to communicate policies straightforwardly, leaders need to be prepared for the trade-offs in hybrid work, acknowledge differing narratives about the impact of hybrid working on productivity, productivity is usually challenging — and measurement is always complex, an expanded set of productivity measures needs to be part of the conversation, and It’s useful to view hybrid work as fundamentally a job design option.

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Topics:  Hybrid Work, Productivity, Teams, Collaboration