Andrew Neal, Chief People Officer at Nash Squared, looks at what needs to change to make sure hybrid working is effective for everyone. A version of this article first appeared on thehrdirector.com

Hybrid working has been the big, generational change in working patterns that historians will probably look back on in the future and regard as one of the enduring legacies of the pandemic. We have all got used to mixing traditional in-office working with connecting through screens from home.

But is it actually working? While dividing time between home and the office is a sound model in principle, there are clear signs that it’s not delivering all that it could.

A mixed picture

We see evidence of this in our Nash Squared Digital Leadership Report. Only a quarter of respondents in our 2023 research say that their model is working ‘extremely well’. In 57% of cases, it’s a more underwhelming verdict of ‘quite well’. For nearly one in five, it’s working quite or very poorly.

This is despite the fact that businesses have been developing and adjusting their models over time. Organisations have moved firmly away from the fully remote model of the pandemic period and are pushing up the number of days employees should be in. If we compare the 2022 and 2023 Digital Leadership Report findings, this is clearly visible. In 2022, 27% of respondents said they asked staff to be in the office two days a week and 26% asked for three days. A year later, those figures had grown to 36% and 37% respectively. Whereas in 2022, around one in five businesses required staff to come in only once a fortnight or less (including 12% who said ‘never’), in our 2023 research that proportion shrinks to negligible levels.

Hybrid working uncovering the disconnects

Before I get onto solutions, it’s worth standing back and asking: why is hybrid working not fully delivering at the moment? In my view, the reason is that traditional five days in-office working covered over the cracks of what we might call broken operating systems. Companies may have had inefficient processes, sub-optimal task management structures and poor communication flows – but this was compensated for through those in-the-moment, often impromptu meetings and side-of-desk conversations in the workplace. Things were discussed in-flight and resolved almost by osmosis. It may have been an imperfect system, but one way or another things got done.

Hybrid working has made those cracks in the operating system visible. People simply aren’t physically co-located as much of the time and this creates disconnects and slows decision-making down.

Read the full blog here

Crimson is part of Nash Squared, the leading global provider of talent and technology solutions.