With this week’s return to office announcement for all federal public servants (noting many never left), I couldn’t help but spend the weekend diving deeper into the research on hybrid work available outside of government.

One being this great podcast by Adam Grant with guests Nick Bloom and Tsedal Neeley. Within it are a few key highlights I think are incredibly important as we move forward with our own plans requesting employees to be in office 2 to 3 days a week.

Here’s what they are:

– We’ll need to understand interdependency to determine the number of days onsite (while days can’t be challenged, the interdependencies can be mapped out to improve these onsite days across a department, more specifically a branch or team).

– collecting feedback remains key, organizations need to continue to collect data, and evaluate what’s going on to ensure they can respond accordingly (or potentially pivot).

– we’ll need to confront the challenge of choice versus coordination (will employees choose which 2 days to go in, or will teams take a coordinated approach with fixed days).

– we’ll need to understand and prevent various biases that can arise from hybrid work (e.g. proximity / unconscious biases – to name a few). This will be especially important as we evaluate the individual experience and truly try to address equity across the public service.

– when it comes to equity, real equity, we’ll also need to understand employee feedback and what this reveals and how can we use the various tools that we have today in order to have more diversity, more representation and more inclusion.

– the office should no longer be a destination. It should be a tool (thinking of the office in this way will shift it from a place to an organizational enabler where the benefits can be maximized when used or reverted elsewhere if the benefits are minimal).

– employees will need to feel both your digital and your physical presence (this may require new training for many leaders and managers, consider this as part of your change management plan).

– leaders have to develop emotional trust. People have to believe that leaders see them, that they care about their difficulties, that they care about their preferences, that they care about their careers and career development. They’ll need to convey all of those things through their actions and deeds.

– we’ll need to be explicit around the rules of engagement in hybrid (and pay particular importance in equipping managers with this information as they’ll maintain these rules directly with employees).

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These are just a few of the many findings you’ll find in this podcast and many considerations we’ll need to be mindful of as move into implementing this approach by March 2023.

While many have questioned this approach, though we may not be able to shift it we can improve how it’s rolled out with effective change management. This will be extremely important in addressing the large resistance we’re already seeing.