Back In The Office? Why Your Company’s One-Size-Fits-All Approach Is Destined to

Many organizations adopt a broad-brush approach to hybrid work that fails to differentiate between various departments and roles. For example, Comcast told every employee to come to the office every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and work remotely Monday and Friday. Apple asked all of its employees to come in on Tuesday, Thursday, and one more day that each department gets to pick.

Such indiscriminate treatment generally indicates the leadership of a company did not adopt hybrid work willingly. Instead, their hand was forced by employees threatening to leave without at least some flexibility. Indeed, both Apple and Comcast employees explicitly threatened to quit over the heavy-handed return-to-office plans, and some did so. For instance, the head of Apple’s AI team resigned due to Apple’s lack of flexibility.

As a result of being dragged kicking and screaming into allowing at least some work from home, the leadership of such companies fails to optimize their approach to hybrid work, undermining its potential for a major boost to productivity, retention, and cutting costs. Having worked with 24 organizations to help them transition to hybrid work, I can attest that getting the true benefits from hybrid work requires creating a customized decision framework for different departments and roles.

With 79% of all companies switching to hybrid work, according to the EY Work Reimagined Employer Survey, such poor decision-making around this work modality both harms the bottom lines of individual companies and also causes a harmful drag on the economy as a whole. Not surprisingly, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, productivity decreased significantly in the first quarter of 2022 when workers returned to in-person work environments with a drop of 7.5%; that fall marks the largest reduction in productivity since 1947. The second quarter also saw a large productivity decrease at 4.6%. By contrast, productivity increased sharply in the first two years of the pandemic, and that boost occurred specifically in the industries where much of the work can be done remotely such as IT and finance, as found by a recent National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study; while industries that require more in-person work fell behind in productivity measures.

Related: Why Hybrid Work Will Win Out Over Remote and In-Person — Whether You Like It or Not.

The basis for the hybrid work model decision framework

The basis for the decision framework centers around two distinct questions. First, what kind of work is best done remotely, and what in the office? Second, what type of work is done in each department and by different roles within them?

To answer the first question, we need to recognize that extensive investigations illustrate workers are fine with the office itself. What they don’t like is the commute, which takes many hours per week and costs many thousands of dollars per year.

So the tasks that employees can easily and productively do at home should be done there. And those tasks include the large majority of what many employees do: individual-focused work, asynchronous collaboration and communication, and videoconference and phone meetings. By contrast, the office is best suited for more intense and synchronous collaboration and communication, challenging conversations, cultivating team belonging and organizational culture, mentoring, on-the-job learning and leadership development.

Answering the first question shows the problematic nature of decreeing a fixed number of days of more than half the work week in the office for all staff, as did Apple and Comcast. Staff in various departments and roles have a different balance of the kind of work they do; their time and efforts are wasted if they do the wrong work in the wrong place, such as coming to the office and doing videoconference meetings. According to Stuart Templeton, the head of Slack in the U.K., “making a two-hour commute to sit on video calls is a terrible use of the office” and kills productivity. Moreover, it breeds staff frustration and resentment, leading to retention problems and higher costs due to replacing talented employees.

Instead, a decision framework needs to factor in the specific kind of work done in different departments and by specific roles in each department. For example, consider the finance department. Most of the activities of individual accountants involve solitary number crunching, with occasional asynchronous communication and collaboration. However, the end of a quarter, and especially the end of the fiscal year, usually involves more intense and synchronous collaboration. Thus, my clients find that it works best to have accountants come in once every couple of weeks during much of the year. But then, for the last week of a quarter and for the last two weeks of the year, accountants come in nearly every day.

While this pattern fits…