The Future of Flexibility at Work
by Ellen Ernst Kossek, Patricia Gettings, and Kaumudi Misra
AS ORGANIZATIONS TENTATIVELY PLAN HOW to get work done amid the uncertainty of the coronavirus, both leaders and employees are touting the benefits of flexibility. But what does flexibility at work look like in practice? And how can you know whether your team or organization is using it successfully?
We are researchers who study how organizations of all types—from professional services and IT firms to hospitals, retail stores, and manufacturing facilities—manage flexibility. Over the course of our work we have asked leaders to tell us how they do so (or not). Here is a range of typical responses:
I accommodate employee needs for time to go to the gym during lunch or take a class by allowing a special arrangement with respect to the work schedule.
If a family member is ill or someone has been in a car accident, it’s no issue to leave work.
Because of the way that the units are staffed and scheduled, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of flexibility.
I often resorted to mandatory Zoom meetings on Friday nights at 6 p.m. because that was the only calendar opening for key staff members.
We can’t get enough staff on the weekends to run the production we need to run—even with eight different schedule options. That’s not a good thing. I don’t want that to be the reason we can’t produce.
These responses may sound familiar. The variation among them is notable. The first focuses on special arrangements for nonwork activities. The second is contingent on dire circumstances. The third expresses frustration about the barriers to flexibility. The fourth is flexibility at its worst. The last shows that flexible scheduling is a critical (yet unsolved) competitive issue for many organizations.
This variation reflects the fact that the word flexibility is vague; its implementation can differ from organization to organization, department to department, and even within teams. It’s no wonder that managers struggle with how to let employees work when and where they do so best. Even companies that were early leaders in piloting extensive flexible working—such as IBM and Bank of America—began pulling back on those arrangements several years ago, because they felt their businesses weren’t benefiting.
Yet coming out of the pandemic, a growing number of companies have announced that they plan to “embrace flexibility,” particularly in a hybrid working model. This is for three key reasons: First, businesses believe that the 24/7 remote-work form of flexibility can be leveraged to support productivity. Second, employees—especially Millennials—are threatening to quit unless they’re granted flexibility. Third, some leaders assume that when employees are permitted to work flexibly, they automatically experience more harmony in their work-life balance.
But these rationales oversimplify the challenge in making flexibility core to an organization’s strategy and operations. As a result, most companies approach the task superficially. In reality, expanding flexible work arrangements entails more than sharing online tool kits, surveying workers’ preferences, purchasing self-scheduling software, or hiring consultants to become more “phygital” (physical plus digital). Despite all the hype about flexibility’s work-life benefits, studies consistently show that companies are better at creating flexible work options than at enabling the use of them. Leaders leave that to the benefits department or payroll consultants.
Employers also have strong biases regarding the types of flexibility. Research shows that if leaders believe that employees are telecommuting to increase productivity, such as by working long hours to meet job demands, then career benefits are likely to ensue. Those benefits are far less prevalent when individuals use flexibility for family or personal reasons. Evidence indicates that when women use flexibility more than men do, they face lower pay, stalled careers, and backlash.
Our worry is that these patterns will recur as organizations plow ahead with flexibility on a much larger scale. But there is a better way. In this article we provide insights on why traditional flexible working practices have not lived up to their potential. We also offer a path forward with what we call true flexibility—a strategy that aligns the interests of employers and employees and thus benefits both groups.
Traditional Approaches
Leaders have typically managed flexibility in one of two ways: as an accommodation around individual work-life events such as illness or childcare, which companies use to attract and retain employees; or as boundaryless working, which many leaders used to transition their organizations to widespread remote work during Covid-19. In the second case, employees are expected, explicitly or implicitly, to be available 24/7 to perform their jobs. Whereas accommodation largely offers flexibility for the individual, boundaryless working offers flexibility for the company. Neither is inherently bad, but both can have unintended consequences, particularly when used in isolation.
Accommodation
This approach is understood as a supervisor’s one-off response to an employee’s request for more flexibility in a schedule, place of work, time off, or workload to support personal or family needs. Such idiosyncratic, case-by-case approvals sometimes mirror parent-child dynamics, with the manager granting “permission” to the employee—whether it’s “exceptional flex,” as in the hypothetical car accident mentioned above, or a special reward to help retain a high performer.
Benefits can be derived from addressing unique worker needs, but that kind of flexibility may come at a cost if it creates two classes of employees: those who work “nontraditional” schedules and those who work “regular” hours. The latter rarely ask for flexibility but may well want more of it.
Further, many employers have trouble deciding—or are ambivalent about—whether and how to sustain flexible working accommodations, which are rarely implemented in ways that support cultural consistency or career advancement. In organizations where managers are the gatekeepers of flexibility (most often the case), employee access can be very uneven, with accommodation dependent on who one’s boss is rather than on the quality of one’s work or the equitable support of nonwork needs.
If work flexibility is viewed as an exceptional accommodation, it can also affect customers and clients. In one large North American study, a manager who had supported implementing flexible work commented, “Some clients are more (or less) empathetic than others. . . . You know: ‘I’m not paying [the company] to help your people have a nice workload. I need our work done.’ ”
Finally, we know that women—especially working mothers and caregivers—have historically been the primary seekers of accommodation and have faced pay and career discrimination as a result. Although a smaller number of men seek similar arrangements and may also face discrimination, they are more likely to advance in their careers. Work-life flexibility has long been gender-siloed, seen as a “women’s issue,” with women bearing the brunt of its effects on career and pay across occupations. This was especially true during the pandemic. For example, the publishing output and productivity of talented STEM professional women decreased dramatically while women handled most of the childcare, eldercare, and schooling.
Boundaryless working
We find that as a company becomes more comfortable with allowing and managing flexibility, leaders tend to move to a boundaryless approach, whereby employees work anywhere, anytime. Typically companies initiate this to enhance productivity and enable their businesses to operate efficiently around the clock while saving money. In the 1990s many companies, including IBM, Deloitte, and PwC, experimented with this approach, dispersing a mobile workforce globally across home office and customer locations. Leaders learned how to manage performance by relying more on outcome metrics than on face time.
This results-oriented, employer-driven flexibility does indeed yield bottom-line benefits. Studies show that teleworking professionals who are conscientious and highly identified with their jobs are motivated to work long hours, especially in the absence of commutes and watercooler chitchat. And the costs saved from reducing office space are a plus for employers. Yet boundaryless work can hurt employers in the long run, even if they don’t realize it. Companies’ talent pools may suffer. For example, recent news reports indicate that despite highly lucrative pay, investment banking jobs are now less popular with young professionals because of the long hours, lack of work-life balance, and work-anytime culture.
And although telework provides some benefits to employees, such as a shorter (or no) commute and the ability to integrate home tasks, the evidence suggests a lot of downsides when it is boundaryless 24/7. Boundaryless flexibility increasingly “passes the buck” by shifting the burden of matching customers’ schedule demands onto workers, depleting personal time, and—for teleworkers—transferring workspace and tech support costs as well. Employees are at greater risk for layoffs, lower ratings, and lower pay because they are less socially connected to colleagues. The work-without-boundaries approach may also increase isolation, symptoms of depression, overwork, and job creep into nonwork space and time.
What happens at home matters to the success of boundaryless working. Early studies that reported better work-life balance under its conditions typically held domestic and work hours constant, which may have hidden the gender effects. As recent reviews suggest, an employee (often a woman) who is teleworking is more likely to take on even more family demands and report greater work-life conflict.
This increase in work-nonwork multitasking while teleworking has become visible during the Covid-19 crisis, culminating in a global “shecession.” Even for dual-career couples, traditional gender roles persisted at home, aggravated by pandemic disruptions. A national study of woman scientists found that although their mostly male partners also worked remotely during the pandemic, the women ended up doing 90% of the domestic labor. Fathers were unable or unwilling to help, so working women managed virtual schooling, childcare, pets, cooking, and cleaning, and experienced higher work-family conflict and overload. This exacerbated the gender gap, which, the World Economic Forum notes, has increased by more than an entire generation’s worth: It will now take 135.6 years for women to reach parity with men, rather than 99.5. Gendered inequality will continue in the post-pandemic workplace unless organizations change their approach.
So, is hybrid the magic flexibility pill?
As companies move to implement a post-pandemic hybrid flexibility—a largely employer-determined mix of remote and office work schedules, incorporating a blend of unique accommodations and widespread boundaryless work with little or no structure—employees’ well-being and careers could actually suffer harm. We believe that women and those with health or family-care needs would be the most disadvantaged. That’s because the majority of these arrangements won’t effectively empower employees to align job and nonwork demands by controlling when and where they work. Our fear is that companies may end up offering inflexible flexibility, whereby employees have little choice about schedules and which days they may work remotely. At the other extreme, flexibility will be implemented without structures or norms, resulting in a “program” that is disorganized, scattershot, and reactive to work requirements. Expectations about where and when one should work may shift without warning, as work seeps into off-hours and employees struggle to live predictable nonwork lives.
True flexibility will require truly new thinking.
A Better Way
True flexibility aligns employers and employees to achieve mutual gain in meeting both performance and work-life needs: It is a means to compete in the market over the long term, and it gives employees a say and some choice in how flexibility is implemented on their teams and in their organizations.
This is both a top-down and a bottom-up process. Leaders listen, set goals, and provide resources to make flexibility possible. Employees choose flexible working that suits their needs while communicating with their managers and colleagues to ensure that team, client, and customer requirements are met. In other words, the company provides the scaffolding—flexibility options, equipment, and supportive performance-management systems—and individual employees and teams decide how to organize their work within it.
With this approach, employers benefit by retaining a globally diverse, sustainable workforce. Employees experience well-being, enjoy respectful team processes, and avoid burnout and health problems. But it requires moving away from old narratives and enhancing employee support and trust. To do that, leaders must first assess their current culture. How do they define flexibility? Has the company leaned more toward accommodation, boundarylessness, or a combination? What policies has it embraced, and for which jobs? Then they can assess which true flexibility principles should be further embraced. We detail those principles here.
Make flexibility available to all employees
Every job deserves some flexibility. Even if telework isn’t always an option, organizations should offer flexibility to both office and frontline workers. It cannot be viewed as a scarce or privileged resource. Yet all too often that’s what happens. Companies ignore the needs of essential and hourly workers, providing flexibility only to knowledge workers on technology-driven teams.
Consider a pharmaceutical company that was part of one of our studies. During a snowstorm, senior directors and managers could work from home, but secretaries were forced to drive on a busy (and icy) freeway to get to the office. Many leaders didn’t realize that they had such an unfair policy, because they were accustomed to administrative support in a hierarchical culture. The company gradually expanded its flexibility by experimenting with summer hours: A secretary could partner with a peer to cover each other’s Friday workload, enabling them to take every other Friday off.
Flexibility for all workers is indeed possible. As managers learned during the pandemic, a company can schedule hourly work flexibly and in shorter shifts and give paid time off at the last minute without penalty; in fact, those accommodations were necessary to support essential workers during the crisis. We know of an engine manufacturer that, even before Covid-19, regularly scheduled highly cross-trained “floaters” who could rotate jobs and shifts on teams and fill in wherever colleagues need help. That allowed its teams to function well during the pandemic, when workers had to care for children during school closures or take care of other personal needs. McDonald’s recently added paid time off and an emergency childcare program to attract mostly hourly workers. Another example comes from a busy metropolitan police department: Officers, including supervisors, were able to use predetermined compressed workweeks to create more-predictable schedules and allow for recovery time.
Increasing flexibility for frontline workers can help a company better support diversity and inclusion, because immigrants, people of color, and working mothers are heavily represented in service industries. Ultimately, all employees need to be supported in their personal lives. If your flexibility policies exclude a segment of your workforce, you’re doing something wrong.
Prioritize clear structures and policies
If you were to randomly ask leaders or employees at your company to describe flexibility, they should be able to give a clear answer—and their answers should be consistent. Flexibility policies will not work if they are difficult to understand, if employees or managers don’t know how to use them, or if they vary greatly in approach. Organizations benefit when they develop clear written frameworks with principles that can guide decision-making about and expectations for flexibility. These frameworks should be communicated widely.
As an example, here’s a brief checklist that draws from the employee assistance program at LifeWorks (formerly Morneau Shepell) and can serve as a starting point for any company’s flexible work arrangements:
Develop a written policy that clearly lays out expectations.
Communicate with all employees about the possibilities for flexible work and aim to achieve equality.
Ask employees to document their planned versus actual work hours to foster work routines and increase transparency about when they are working and when they are off.
Use clear metrics to evaluate employees on the quality of their work, not the timing or quantity of it.
Manager checklists like this one are becoming widespread. Consider this example from Canada, where, as in the United Kingdom and Australia, the right to request a flexible schedule is gaining legal ground.
Within these guidelines, the manager’s role is to match flexible work processes with customer, product creation, and service demands. Thus leaders must understand how each type of flexibility—schedule, place, continuity, workload, and mode—aligns with the job at hand, their employees, and policies. As the exhibit “A flexibility primer” shows, various combinations of flexible arrangements may have bundling synergies. For example, location and schedule flexibility sometimes work well in combination.
A flexibility primer
A look at five different types of flexibility your organization can consider and how they might be bundled.
Source: “Flexible Work Schedules,” by E. E. Kossek and J. S. Michel (2009); “A Review of Telework Research,” by D. E. Bailey and N. B. Kurland; and “Balanced Flexibility,” by E. E. Kossek, R. Thompson, and B. Lautsch (2015).
The choices made must be viewed as fair by both leaders and employees. Studies show that when they are, workers who experience work-family conflict nonetheless remain committed to their organizations.
How can managers cultivate this kind of environment and roll out flexible policies fairly? One way is to develop a team charter, as the financial services firm Northern Trust did for units migrating to a flexible work mode. Questions that leaders, team members, and other stakeholders might discuss include:
How has the company decided to manage location-based pay equity? For example, will all fully remote workers who perform the same jobs, regardless of whether they live in Tulsa or Los Angeles, receive the same base and merit pay?
What are fair criteria for how the team sets core hours—say, from 10 to 3—when members will be available for collaboration, meetings, and communication?
What is an equitable way to set limits on employees’ availability, and what are norms for respecting time off?
Although clear policies and consistent implementation are important, overly restrictive policies are not the answer. Processes should be adaptable.
Empower employees to create and manage their own flexibility
Although leaders must help shape the structures and policies for flexible work, they don’t need to have all the answers. Instead they should facilitate conversations with workers to unpack all the ways in which people interpret flexibility—from where one works to the construction of one’s work schedule. It may be helpful for managers to give employees a list of considerations to reflect on and address.
How might my clients’ experience be affected by my flexibility? In what ways can any negative impact be mitigated?
How might my interactions with team members be affected? What actions can I take to ensure strong collaboration and working relationships?
Do I have, or can I develop, the skills I need for the proposed flexible work arrangement? For example, do I have the self-discipline to manage attention and boundaries for telework or to maintain the energy and focus for a compressed workweek? Have I talked with my manager and clients to ensure that my part-time job is designed and scoped realistically so that I can perform it effectively within my reduced hours?
Do I have the right work and home resources (tech support, an internet connection, space, family support, a backup work location) to ensure that I can accomplish my job?
Sometimes managers also provide checklists to employees who are using specific types of flexibility. Some examples are the Australian government’s tips for working out of the office, Salesforce’s guidelines prior to a leave of absence, and Tettra’s onboarding tips for remote workers.
The next step is to create organization-wide structures for self-scheduling and shift-swapping to empower employees. Rather than making supervisors pivotal in managing the everyday implementation of flexibility, some industries are setting up employee self-management processes that give workers greater control over their schedules and hours without penalty.
Health care organizations in particular, with their large female workforce, have been early adopters of self-scheduling. In one study of self-scheduling among nurses in five comparable medical and surgical units, a key component was educating them about self-scheduling and negotiation skills and when to adjust guidelines to meet needs such as determining holiday coverage. Employee satisfaction and retention increased as a result.
Another example comes from Delta, a large nonunionized U.S. airline that employs a “bidding” process whereby employees pick their own shifts using a software program, with choice increasing according to seniority. Workers may swap or give away shifts as long as overtime doesn’t increase and health and safety rules are not violated.
In both these examples the role of leaders is to establish guidelines regarding what works and what doesn’t in a way that is facilitating but not controlling, ensuring that workers understand their accountability for guaranteeing staffing mandates and, in the case of health care, the quality of patient care. Companies moving to widespread flexible remote-work systems can learn a lot from them.
Remove disincentives for use
Policies that enable employees to take vacation when desired or sick leave when needed—even when that time off is unlimited on paper—are often accompanied by disincentives for using them. (Consider the “unlimited vacation time” that no one actually takes advantage of.) A common barrier is chronic understaffing. In a study we conducted of frontline workers, only one in four employees at a continuously running oil-production company could use available vacation time because of it. As a result, employees suffered burnout. One manager reported being unable to get time off to attend a niece’s wedding, even though he was supposed to walk her down the aisle in place of her late father. We also see structural disincentives in health care, where nurses are increasingly unable to use paid vacation and sick time earned, and we have encountered leave incentive programs in which employees can actually make more money by not taking time off.
Many organizational cultures disincentivize the use of time-off policies for nonwork needs as well. In one case, a department chair celebrated a male professor for attending a faculty meeting during parental leave, whereas a female colleague, who had just given birth, missed the meeting to nurse the baby and recover. The message to employees was clear: You are rewarded for showing up even when the official policy says you’re not supposed to.
Leaders must remove both types of disincentives. One tactic is to publicly recognize top talent who work flexibly and achieve high performance. In one of our studies, a lawyer who was working reduced hours won an Employee of the Year award by discovering a way to save the firm a great deal of money.
We’ve also seen some companies use flexibility as an incentive to reduce excessive overtime and burnout and increase productivity and cost savings. One pharmaceutical company offered employees workweeks of four 10-hour days with job security in return for a no-overtime-payment agreement. The company saved money and saw improved performance as the team became self-managing and supervisors transitioned out of boss roles and became team members themselves. The former supervisors responded positively because they no longer had to manage the overtime needs of the organization, could work just four days a week, and felt more integrated and supported on their teams.
Remember that leadership matters
True flexibility that meets business and personal needs is unlikely to succeed without support from the top. An example comes from GM CEO Mary Barra’s post-pandemic call to “work appropriately.” “Where the work permits,” she said, “employees have the flexibility to work where they can have the greatest impact on achieving our goals. . . . It is up to leaders to focus on the work, not the where, and we will provide the tools and resources needed to make the right decisions to support our teams.”
The jury is still out on how successful GM and other firms—such as Google—that take similar approaches will be, but it’s encouraging to hear CEOs strategically setting the tone for flexibility by making it the rule rather than the exception. Top leaders can also recognize and reward supervisors who encourage their teams to get the work done without burning out.
Leaders must be careful how they talk about various forms of flexibility. For example, when teleworking is framed as an initiative to improve work-family balance, it often becomes a gendered phenomenon, leading men to assume they can’t take advantage of it or to conceal that they’re doing it for work-life reasons to avoid being stigmatized. So it’s important to communicate examples of increased flexibility’s effectiveness for all kinds of workers in all kinds of jobs and at all levels.
Leaders must also explain the organization’s commitment to flexibility to outside stakeholders. For example, if a company is practicing flexibility but its clients still expect 24/7 responses, the company’s policy simply won’t work. One way to address this issue is to bake client expectations into flexible work plans—for example, by staffing key accounts with several employees who can tag-team and then presenting that as a benefit to clients.
Experiment and measure outcomes, including equity
True flexibility is an ongoing process requiring that management be open to experimentation and new ideas. Some arrangements may not work at first and will need to be adjusted. That is normal and an important part of the process; evolution does not equate to failure. For example, Microsoft found that when a large team initially moved to remote work in 2020, employees worked an average of four more hours a week, sent more messages at nonstandard hours, and spent more time in meetings (albeit shorter ones), risking burnout. Leaders soon realized that this pace was unsustainable—for themselves and for employees—and encouraged teams to develop guidelines to ensure both work and nonwork time (clear-cut shifts, daily breaks, and dedicated solo work hours, for example).
At the same time, evidence suggests that gathering data and making changes can pay off. Northern Trust migrated entire job functions and teams to hybrid remote work (with at least one day in the office and at least one day at home) years before the pandemic. It used pre- and post-evaluation tools to assess whether jobs could be done securely and teams could work effectively regardless of location. Migrating, piloting, and evaluating departments one at a time, the company shifted its culture toward more-flexible working by systematically accumulating data confirming its approach while fine-tuning for each work unit. It saved millions of dollars by reducing office space around the world, and employee stress plummeted as a result of fewer commutes.
Consider the impact of flexibility on your global workforce
In interviews at an oil company headquartered in the EU, we found that employees in one of its Asian offices preferred a 3 p.m. to 12 a.m. workday. That allowed many workers to pick up their children from school beforehand. It also facilitated communication across time zones and increased employee productivity and engagement. For example, no one had to get up in the middle of the night for a conference call, since 3 p.m. in the Asia office was 9 a.m. at the company’s headquarters. Such localized flexibility practices can help maintain equity among employees in different parts of the world so that team members work at mutually convenient times.
To ensure fair access and results as your company experiments, start by taking race and gender into consideration while conducting an audit to see whether heavier users of work-life flexibility have pay equity. There’s evidence that inequity can and does occur. For instance, in 2019 the bonuses of senior female employees at the Swiss bank UBS were not restored to previous levels when the women returned from maternity leave. Some of them eventually resigned. Another example comes from Nike, which cut pay for star athletes who went on maternity leave. (After a backlash, the company adjusted that policy to avoid penalizing mothers.)
We also caution against establishing a policy that offers employees the option of remote work only if they take a pay cut, or creating a pay structure that’s based on location. Talent is talent, and compensation shouldn’t depend on where employees are unless their location is vital for the people they’re serving (say, in government) or required by licensing rules (say, in law). Such policies are also likely to make the shecession even worse and increase the gender pay gap, because women are 50% more likely than men to apply for remote work. They also use flexibility more often, take on more school and childcare logistical management during the workday, and are more likely to be the trailing spouse when couples coordinate dual careers, thus trading geographical location for remote work.
Finally, remember that implementing flexibility involves a learning curve
The leader’s role is to make performance expectations clear and resources to support flexibility and performance consistent across people and teams. If someone is falling short, put that person on a performance-improvement plan and assess whether skills, motivation, or some other issue is getting in the way. Don’t assume that flexibility is the main reason that work isn’t getting done.
The pandemic has led many employees to rethink the importance of work in their lives and to change their relationship to it. Many are demanding more flexibility. In response, leaders need to stop viewing flexibility as an HR policy and regard it as an opportunity for organizational transformation that will benefit both their employees and their businesses.
12 Questions About Hybrid Work, Answered
Advice on inclusivity, onboarding, performance measurement, and more. by Tsedal Neeley
Extensive data across surveys indicate that most people want hybrid work arrangements—that is, a mix of in-person and remote work—as we continue to move through the pandemic. For example, Microsoft’s 2021 Work Trend Index, a study of over 30,000 people in 31 countries, found that 73% of respondents desire remote work options. FlexJobs surveyed more than 2,100 people who worked remotely during the pandemic and found that 58% would leave their jobs if they weren’t able to continue working from home at least some of the time.
The reasons aren’t surprising. Remote work has allowed people to eliminate stressful commutes, reduce daily expenses, and increase quality time with family and friends. At the same time, many workers miss their colleagues, the camaraderie of the office, and the learning opportunities that come from serendipitous interactions. Questions about whether physical presence in the office is necessary for career advancement loom large as well. And ultimately, shifting to hybrid work marks a radical change for most organizations.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I answered HBR subscribers’ most pressing questions about the sudden shift to remote work. Recently I called on readers again to send me their questions about transitioning to hybrid work. I’ve answered the most frequently asked ones here. They cover everything from inclusive hybrid planning to onboarding; measuring performance to fostering connection and trust; and using digital tools effectively while also fortifying cybersecurity and transforming physical spaces. It’s an essential guide for any leader managing this transition.
1. What’s the best way to approach hybrid work designs?
Leaders need to design plans that combine the preferences of their workforce and the core work that their organization needs to do well—and they need to be prepared to adjust as they go. Here’s how.
Survey everyone anonymously about preferences and intentions to leave
Ask questions that will help you gather insights about tasks employees believe require in-person versus virtual presence, and gauge the number of remote days people might want each week. In addition, assess whether employees would want to relocate if they could work from anywhere; this will help you anticipate whether you need to consider developing a policy for it.
You should also pose questions about people’s intentions to leave if work arrangements aren’t in line with their needs: “To what extent are you thinking of leaving this organization? To what extent do you plan to ask people about new opportunities? To what extent are you planning to look for a new job if you’re unsatisfied with your work arrangement?”
Identify the principles for hybrid guidelines
Based on your data analyses and the core work of the organization, determine and convey the operating principles for your hybrid policy. Examples of guiding principles may include expectations that in-person days are needed for onboarding new hires, specific collaboration efforts, periodically enhancing connections with coworkers, and performing select innovation activities. Of course, some companies may find that those very activities can be carried out virtually depending on their culture, products, and services. The point is that each organization should identify the approach that best serves its stakeholders. As you develop yours, keep in mind that people resent having to go into the office to stare at a screen or be on video calls that they could have taken from home.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all path, but having principles centralized from the top will ensure equity and consistent planning across groups. Teams will then have to interpret the policy for themselves—though their interpretations must be equitable and in line with the organization’s principles and needs. For example, PepsiCo’s Work That Works program is designed to give teams that kind of autonomy.
Convey that the new work approach will be adjusted over time
Hybrid implementations will be subject to change as people learn what is effective for all stakeholders in a fast-changing societal landscape. Accordingly, set expectations that adjustments will be made through trials and learnings. Doing so will allay anxiety about the permanence of suboptimal arrangements. Some companies’ recent adjustments include suggesting overall percentages of in-person or remote days per week rather than prescribing a specific number (Uber) and offering permanent remote options in addition to hybrid plans (LinkedIn).
Likewise, ideal in-person activity choices for a given group will crystallize with experimentation. For example, it might work best for a team to meet for several consecutive days in person for the launch of a product and then work remotely for the subsequent weeks. People will inevitably test and improve on their approaches.
2. How can we be as inclusive as possible in hybrid work designs?
Hybrid work can create inclusion issues for organizations. Leaders have to think creatively to enable on-site-essential employees to work remotely some days. Even medical doctors have been able to do this. Here are two options that can include the most people.
Pooling and rotating
If workers have similar tasks that must be done in person, one approach is to pool and rotate the work to reduce the number of people who have to be on-site simultaneously. This requires appraising the responsibilities of a group as an interdependent system. For example, if there are seven IT professionals responsible for the operations of control rooms, enabling each person to work from home one or two days per week while the others provide coverage can maximize opportunities for everyone.
Once this paradigm shift is in play, it often becomes apparent that everyone has some tasks that don’t require in-person presence. In some cases, organizations have enhanced their technical capabilities to allow the remote execution of tasks that had traditionally been tied to buildings. For example, many digitized analog materials that were previously available only on-site and implemented VPNs to enable their access virtually.
Providing remote learning days
For team members whose jobs are inextricably tied to physical spaces, allotting remote learning days—that can be used for either online or in-person classes, as well as other skill-building apprenticeships—has proven to be a powerful act of inclusion. The number of remote learning days each year will vary by group or organization, but the idea is to ensure that everyone has days for remote self-development. The added bonus is that organizations are investing in all employees, which increases people’s capabilities and loyalty.
3. How can we help people transition to a hybrid work environment?
All teams transitioning to hybrid work have to start with a formal launch by explicitly planning the team’s journey. Managers should hold launch discussions that can last up to two hours to get everyone aligned in four areas:
Shared goals that make clear the aims the team is pursuing
Shared understanding about individual roles, constraints, and potential to contribute
Shared understanding of available resources, ranging from information to budgets
Shared norms that map out how the group will collaborate effectively with digital tools, as well as how the group will remain connected personally and professionally
And since hybrid collaborators are dispersed, you also need periodic relaunches to drive performance. A relaunch appraises how the group is faring while also addressing what can make it better. I recommend a cadence of every six to eight weeks to stay abreast of evolving dynamics, such as integrating a new digital tool, responding to a sudden shift in the market, or onboarding a new team member.
4. What are best practices for remote onboarding?
Starting a new job away from a collocated office can be isolating for new hires, whether their teams are hybrid or full-time remote. That’s why having a robust, monthlong plan to onboard and integrate employees is essential. Of course, bringing in a cohort together can offer an enduring shared journey for newcomers. However, a single newcomer can still feel well integrated with deliberate planning.
Welcoming and acculturating new employees is a team effort. During this monthlong period, the new hire should never be left alone—each day they should have activities with others in the company. Managers need to provide a diverse list of key members of the organization for the newcomer to meet beyond their immediate team, as a way to establish their internal network. Assigning a virtual onboarding buddy, often a peer, who checks in regularly and can answer any questions a new hire may feel uncomfortable asking the boss has proven to be very effective. Group learning opportunities also promote bonding with existing members of the team.
Ensure the new hire has sufficient tech, too. Although it may sound obvious, a company that has not invested in the technology necessary for onboarding new hires and committed IT support throughout the process may make a poor first impression. Technology is a primary engagement channel to a company, and poor deployment for new hires can be fundamentally alienating.
5. How do we ensure that proximity bias doesn’t affect career advancement?
In order for hybrid work to actually work, managers have to understand that out of sight doesn’t mean out of mind. Remote members of a hybrid team will often wonder whether they fare differently than collocated workers who can catch the boss’s ear in person. For example, they may worry they will be evaluated more harshly or given lower performance reviews than their in-office peers. It’s incumbent upon managers to ensure that these fears are not realized.
Providing adequate feedback, and developing and promoting people without proximity bias, is crucial. Working remotely won’t have a negative impact on relationships or the task dimensions of job performance so long as managers’ evaluations of remote workers are as fair as those of collocated ones.
6. How do we measure the performance of remote or hybrid employees?
The great remote work experiment disrupted companies’ reliance on butts-in-seats presenteeism to measure performance. When managers aren’t in the same space as their teams most of the time, they instead have to measure performance based on outcomes, group cohesion, and individual development.
First, assess whether people are delivering results—in other words, achieving expected goals. Second, ensure the team is operating as one cohesive unit. Learning how to work together as a group, rather than as individuals in silos, is what creates a successful hybrid team. Finally, support individual growth as a function of being on the team. When team members have the space to grow, expand their knowledge, acquire new skills, and learn new perspectives, their job satisfaction increases and they become more capable.
Once goals in all three areas are clearly in place, managers have to empower, equip, coach, and assess performance according to outcomes instead of micromanaging every single task.
7. How can we foster trust among teammates who seldom see one another in person?
Just like groups, trust comes in many shapes and sizes. In-person teams start from our more natural mindset of being cautiously skeptical and building trust over time, but hybrid or remote groups have to flip the script: Start from a mindset of having confident trust in one another, and work from there. Sure, challenges could arise that shake our trust, in which case we need to adjust our expectations. But it’s much more likely that people will prove us right, because trust inspires trust. It’s a virtuous cycle.
Two types of trust have proven to be most effective in groups of people who don’t share the same space routinely: cognitive swift trust and emotional trust. Cognitive swift trust is the willingness of team members to depend on one another based on sufficient evidence of reliability and competence. While swift trust isn’t as complete as what’s built when people are able to get to know one another over time, it’s sufficient for completing shared tasks effectively.
By comparison, emotional trust is grounded in the belief that coworkers and managers have care and concern for us. When that kind of trust is present, people feel connection, a sense of closeness. As Theodore Roosevelt famously said, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Empathetic words, actions, and self-disclosures that occur in meetings, emails, chats, or online posts can nurture emotional trust.
Managers of hybrid groups can also feed trust with activities during structured unstructured time that make members more familiar with one another’s personalities and values. These exchanges may occur more informally when everyone is colocated, but they can still be facilitated through virtual lunches, happy hours, coffee chats, or online games.
8. How can we eliminate tech exhaustion?
Leaders designing hybrid and remote work options have to understand that different tools support different goals and come with distinct benefits and limitations. Complaints of depletion, headaches, and even the slurring of words can occur if employees are going from one video call to the next. Just because videoconferencing is a good option for remote meetings doesn’t mean you should use it for most occasions, and just because video tools allow you to fully pack your calendar doesn’t mean you should.
It’s crucial for managers to mix up the digital tools they use, as well as to create periods of transition between meetings and to consider reducing their length. Remember Parkinson’s law: We fill the amount of time we allocate to meetings. If we plan to cover a topic in an hour, we will fill that hour to meet our goals. If we cut that number in half, we will achieve our goals in that reduced time frame.
9. How do we match digital tools with work needs?
Tech experts place digital tools on a spectrum from lean to rich media and from synchronous to asynchronous.
Lean media, such as email, convey less information and context, whereas rich media, such as video and face-to-face interaction, convey more information and context. Lean media tend to be asynchronous and are more effective in situations that require the straightforward transmission of information. Rich media are usually synchronous and are appropriate for situations with more ambiguity.
Lean media tend to work well for teams with close relationships, because they already know one another and don’t need added context, and for teams with tension, because they can minimize exposure to potential conflict. Newer teams without any history, on the other hand, benefit more from rich media’s added context.
Lean media are also great for routine tasks, such as record keeping, while rich media are usually better for nonroutine tasks, such as brainstorming and creative development (writing, designing, and so on).
Deciding which mode is best for which items in the workday—whether it’s a quick question, a project proposal, or a brainstorming session—is an ongoing process. Managers must include the whole team in discussions about which to use going forward.
10. How should leaders rethink office spaces for in-person work?
Hybrid work is transforming the physical design of office spaces to promote connection, collaboration, and innovation. The key question of workplace design is: What kind of space will bring people out of the comfort of their home desks and into the office?
The answer, according to Meena Krenek, principal and interior design director of architecture firm Perkins and Will in Los Angeles, is a holistic approach that seeks to create experiences that allow people to thrive at the intersection of people and technology. As a first step, Krenek says, understand people’s evolving perspectives, needs, and preferences in the workplace through survey data collected by the company.
Broadly, however, Krenek emphasizes that the hybrid world requires our offices to become a destination, not a default. To make the commute worth it, these workspaces emphasize form over function: less office cubicle and more café lounge, with amenities like cozy furniture, gourmet coffee, natural light, good ventilation, and outdoor patios. Optimal conditions for video calls, such as state-of-the-art monitors, headsets and speakers, and studio lighting, will also be key differentiators.
These hybrid spaces will look different from the familiar grid of personal desks and meeting spaces for small groups. Their key feature is fluidity: Rooms become hackable spaces that people can reconfigure to accommodate a specific meeting or task, from 12-person brainstorming sessions to private client meetings. A bookcase on casters or a semitransparent curtain can become a movable wall. Smart boards that function as writable surfaces float in and out of spaces as needed. Whiteboards, on the other hand, may be a thing of the past because they don’t enable the digital capturing, storing, and reusing of collective work. Pilot programs for these kinds of office spaces can help leaders learn employees’ patterns and preferences when using them.
11. How do we keep our data and systems safe when people are working from anywhere?
A recent HP study of over 8,000 office workers revealed that around 70% are using their work devices for personal tasks and vice versa. As a result, employees working from home are increasingly targeted by hackers; global cyberattacks increased a whopping 238% during the pandemic. Phishing and scan-and-exploit attacks are greater threats when people aren’t within the physical walls of a firm. The old “moat and castle” approach, in which companies secure the perimeter of their office’s local network, is no longer sufficient for remote and hybrid teams. In fact, it’s been counterproductive for years. Long and innumerable passwords and VPNs that bring internet speeds to a crawl are impediments to people’s productivity when they’re remote. In turn, they use unauthorized devices and find workarounds that make them prime targets for cyberattacks.
In a remote-hybrid world, the access point for bad actors can be employees themselves (think phishing emails), not just the network architecture (think viruses getting past a firewall). All nonwork devices used at home are potential attack vectors, especially for executives. This demands an approach that addresses the full range of access points individually, from corporate laptops to personal smartphones. Centralized policies have to be clear to everyone and flexible enough to secure many different devices while maintaining a baseline for protection. For some, corporate-owned devices may be the only means to access critical data; these people should get priority on security patches.
Cybersecurity policies must also provide visibility into user behavior while at the same time balancing the impact on employee experience and privacy. Security experts urge a regular review of who has access to data and for how long. This is what’s called least privileged access, which sets clear boundaries for each employee’s minimum access to data.
Finally, hybrid leaders have to prioritize training employees in cybersecurity so that everyone knows how to spot and avoid attacks.
12. What might the future of hybrid work look like?
Hybrid work is not just about changing the location of the workplace. It’s also about changing our most fundamental routines to become more efficient and optimized.
This will include evolving from leading and collaborating primarily with people to doing so with machines as well. It means thinking further into the future about how to use emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotic process automation (RPA). It also suggests that the nature of work will evolve to include the automation of everyday repetitive tasks that steal time away from the more open-ended, higher-concept work of innovation.
In that sense, hybrid work will increasingly be defined by how we work with machines. Everything is up for grabs. I anticipate that the processes that are most ingrained in a company’s workflows today will be taken apart and rebuilt from the ground up with new tools and goals.
Sidney Madison Prescott, global head of intelligent automation at Spotify and coauthor of a how-to guide for RPA business solutions, refers to the automation of repetitive tasks as human augmentation because it ultimately gives us more time to do the things that only humans can do: thinking, ideating, creating. As she puts it, human augmentation begins with reexamining the most routine processes we’ve long accepted as just part of the job. And this goes for every single role, from engineers to business analysts to salespeople. For example, the accepted workflow for an accountant might include many hours spent consolidating countless reports and triple-checking for human errors that inevitably creep in. An RPA tool can automate the whole process, freeing the accountant up for other work, significantly reducing the rate of human error, and making the task more shareable with teammates. Once the tool has proven effective, it could then be adapted to automate similar processes.
Migrating to hybrid work is often cast as a question of in-person versus remote options, with time and space being the core elements of concern. The mindset shift that hybrid work requires, and the changes we make because of it, will serve us well as the digital revolution further changes the nature of work through data and technology.
A Guide to Implementing the Four-Day Workweek
Working less can reduce employees’ stress—without sacrificing productivity. by Ashley Whillans and Charlotte Lockhart
In June of this year, Kickstarter became the latest in a string of organizations to announce they are experimenting with a four-day workweek. Its employees will be working 32 rather than 40 hours per week, while being expected to achieve the same productivity levels and earning the same pay. Though some recent studies on the efficacy of the four-day week have been overblown in the media, research suggests that reducing work hours can decrease employee stress and improve well-being without impacting productivity—but only when implemented effectively.
So, what does that look like? One of us (Ashley) is an academic researcher focused on time, money, and happiness, and the other (Charlotte) is the CEO of a global nonprofit that funds research on four-day workweek practices and the future of work. We’ve created a six-step guide to help organizations plan and roll out a reduction in working hours. While our focus in this piece is on office-centric knowledge jobs, we believe our recommendations can apply to any company where adjusting work hours is possible.
Step 1: Shift Your Mindset
Psychological research suggests that most of us are “medium maximizers”—we tend to focus on objective, easily quantifiable success metrics such as hours worked, rather than more qualitative metrics such as productivity or well-being. As a result, many companies use immediate responsiveness and time at the office as proxies for employees’ commitment levels, even when those measures seldom correspond to actual value added to the organization.
For a four-day workweek to be successful, leaders must shift their mindsets to value actual productivity, not just hours worked. They must ensure that employees aren’t worried they will be penalized for prioritizing work-life balance, and that starts with modeling a healthier work-life balance themselves. Ashley’s research has found that explicitly framing a reduced-work initiative as a companywide policy rather than an informal or optional project can go a long way in encouraging this critical mindset shift.
In addition, leaders must embrace the uncertainty that comes with trying out a new initiative. The first mistake we’ve seen many managers make is attempting to anticipate all possible problems and eliminate all possible sources of risk before the pilot even begins. While planning is important, falling into decision inertia helps no one—and real problem solving is only possible through trial and error, not in closed-door conversations among leadership.
This also means accepting that some people won’t like the changes and some might even quit as a result. That’s OK. Managers should openly acknowledge that the new plan might not work for everyone. Remember: When one employee leaves, it creates room for others who buy into the new culture, ultimately strengthening the team and the business.
Step 2: Define Your Goals and Metrics
Once you’ve decided that your organization is ready to make a change, it’s time to start planning. Both employees and leaders should be actively involved in a number of critical decisions. One company Charlotte and her team worked with formed an employee-driven subcommittee to spearhead the rollout of its reduced-hours program. The small working group (lovingly nicknamed the “pessimist committee”) met for an hour each day for six weeks to discuss potential problems before launching the pilot.
Based on this and other case studies, here are some questions that we’ve found can be helpful to consider:
Questions for employees:
Should we work four eight-hour days, or reduced hours on five days?
Which days or hours should we take off?
How can we keep the change from negatively impacting our clients, customers, and other stakeholders?
What steps can we take to increase our productivity?
How will we share our ideas for process improvements with one another?
How will the organization measure productivity?
What support will employees need to make this pilot a success?
How long should the organization run this pilot?
Are there any legal concerns we should be aware of?
As a part of these conversations, it will be critical to consider how you will measure the success of the program in relation to the goals you identify. That includes outcomes you hope will change, such as employee happiness, as well as outcomes you hope won’t change, such as client satisfaction and productivity.
Step 3: Communicate Internally and Externally
Next, think through your communication plan. There are a number of concerns that are likely on the minds of internal and external stakeholders, and it’s important for leaders to be proactive in addressing them.
Internally, the biggest questions will probably be around how the change will affect people’s jobs. Be clear about your reasons for trying out the four-day workweek, and assure your employees that they will not be laid off, experience a pay cut, or lose out on other benefits like paid vacation.
In addition, it’s likely that reducing work hours will necessitate changes to some internal processes and norms, so it’s important to discuss that up front. For example, at one organization we worked with, employees introduced weekly 30-minute meetings to cover everything that had previously been discussed in less efficient, ad hoc meetings, which reduced interruptions and thus increased “heads-down” work time. In fact, Ashley’s recent research found that the pandemic made some knowledge workers more efficient, in part because it forced them to be more deliberate in scheduling collaboration time.
Every organization is different, so encourage conversations about how to get more done in less time—whether that’s by implementing new tools, eliminating unnecessary meetings, or making existing meetings more effective.
The same is true externally. Many companies worry what their clients will think if they reduce hours, but those worries can often be assuaged with a simple conversation. Identify which customers, partners, or other stakeholders might be affected, and work with the appropriate internal representatives to ensure the scheduling change is communicated clearly.
In many cases, you’ll be surprised by how receptive the external party is. During one of Ashley’s studies, employees engaged in a time-blocking experiment that made them unavailable to everyone, including their clients, for hours or even full days at a time. Despite managers’ fears, both the employees and their clients reported higher levels of satisfaction than before the shift.
Step 4: Run a Pilot
You’ve decided, you’ve planned, you’ve communicated—it’s time to act! Remember that in the pilot stage, the goal isn’t to get everything right from the start, but rather to identify the tools and processes your organization needs to make reduced work hours possible. You will likely need at least a few months to implement a full-scale pilot study. During this time, problems will arise. Try your best to address them as they happen, knowing that full-scale solutions might have to wait until the pilot is over. View any issues not as indicators of failure, but as opportunities to improve and fine-tune your implementation plan. Some questions we’ve seen come out of pilot programs include:
What are the boundaries I need to put in place for myself and my team?
What assistance do I need from leadership to accomplish a reduced work schedule?
What will happen to team activities like “cake Fridays”?
Creating an environment in which people feel safe asking these questions—yes, even about your workplace dessert rituals—is an essential ingredient for a successful pilot. Trust that your employees are doing their best to make good decisions, and support them as they try out different methods to increase their effectiveness.
Step 5: Assess the Pilot
Once the pilot is complete, there are a number of ways you can analyze the results. First, there are both qualitative and quantitative metrics that can help you understand how the pilot impacted employee well-being.
Qualitatively, group interviews can provide insight into employees’ experiences with the four-day workweek, and more-formalized job satisfaction surveys can identify trends and changes in self-reported levels of stress, work-life balance, and quality of life. Quantitatively, there are other metrics you can look at. For example, did employees take fewer sick days during the pilot? If so, this might suggest that employees felt less burned out.
As far as productivity, the relevant metrics will depend on the team. On sales teams, it might make sense to focus on the number of deals created, conversion rates, or average closing times. On creative teams, you can monitor subjective areas of performance, such as the quality of internal and external content, by conducting 360-degree reviews or collecting data on the number of click-throughs for online posts.
Data can also help you understand how employees are optimizing their work: Are they working more overtime, cutting meetings, taking fewer breaks, working faster? You don’t want people sacrificing breaks, rushing their work, or being on the clock longer, so if you see evidence of these behaviors, you might need to have conversations about reducing individual workloads or finding ways to make the work itself more efficient.
Most importantly, there is no need to reinvent the analysis wheel. While the specifics will be unique to your organization, there are numerous white papers, reports, and case studies you can look to for inspiration when making sense of your results. It can also be beneficial to partner with an academic or other specialist who can help you identify the most useful metrics and crunch the numbers.
Step 6: Scale Up—but Don’t Stop Iterating
After you’ve evaluated the pilot and addressed any issues that emerged, take steps to make the schedule change permanent. Leaders will need to work across the organization to embed new practices into their workplace culture, ensure that people don’t slip into old habits (no emailing on days off!), and remain focused on productivity—not hours worked—as the metric of success.
At the same time, it’s critical to track success metrics over the long term and to adapt your processes according to what they show. One effective strategy is to maintain employee-led working sessions and focus groups even after the initial pilot results are analyzed, to help identify and overcome ongoing challenges. For example, after rolling out a four-day workweek, one company Charlotte worked with discovered that employees were suffering from a challenge known as the mere urgency effect: They became overly focused on urgent but less important tasks at the cost of long-term, more important ones. Based on this insight, the company scheduled monthly meetings to discuss long-term strategic plans, helping to keep priorities aligned.
The company also found that existing incentive structures were not as effective with the new working schedule. Specifically, sales teams, which were rewarded based on the number of deals closed, began prioritizing smaller accounts in order to close more deals in less time, rather than focusing on larger, strategically important accounts. As a result, the company reorganized the sales teams into dedicated small and large account specialists to ensure that equal resources would be spent on both areas of the business.
Of course, it’s not just about productivity. Another company Charlotte worked with found that employees had begun working 10-hour days to fit work into a four-day week, significantly impacting job satisfaction and well-being. To address this, the leadership team restructured some divisions to make sure employees were focused on the right tasks, created new positions to focus on tasks outside the scope of existing teams, and used temporary contracts to ease the burden on full-time employees during rush periods.
Every organization will uncover its own challenges when it comes to scaling up a reduced work hours policy. Constant experimentation and iteration will be essential to any successful long-term rollout.
Workplace norms have fundamentally shifted over the last year and a half. Today we find ourselves in a liminal period: We now have the chance to remake our models of work before things go back to the way they were—and that’s an opportunity leaders must not squander. While no change comes easily, leaders willing to embrace models like the four-day workweek will find the experimentation well worth the effort.
Originally published in September 2018. Reprint H06L8C