What’s hybrid work?

Over the past eighteen months, the world’s understanding of the nature of work has changed dramatically. Work-from-home (WFH) practices alongside other flexible work arrangements have spread across the world, largely due to social restrictions implemented by countries globally in response to the covid-19 pandemic.

Now, as more countries begin to recognise covid-19 as an endemic disease, optimism has been rising about lifting restrictions and an imminent return to economic normality.

However, it appears as if the nature of work itself—the way we perform it—might never return to its pre-covid state. Many believe that a hybrid model of in-person and remote working is here to stay, despite consistently vague definitions of the term “hybrid work” and uncertainty about the relative benefits of each specific model. Organisations appear eager to leverage the benefits of remote work, such as tapping into a broad, diverse talent pool, even as they worry about losing the benefits of in-person, collaborative work.

Both the hopes and worries around hybrid work are valid, as demonstrated by previous flexible work adoptions. Indeed, hybrid work is not new. It can be traced back to the 1960s (and arguably earlier) and has taken on various forms. The uneven adoption (and occasional unwinding) of hybrid work arrangements over the past sixty years suggests benefits for employers and employees, but also risks and potential downsides.

Whether organisations can capture the best of both worlds—remote and in-person—remains to be seen. These outcomes will be determined to a large extent by how they design and implement their hybrid models.

Within this context, Economist Impact, sponsored by Google Workspace, is conducting a multi-phase research programme to assess the prospects for hybrid work around the world. By combining a literature review, expert interviews and a global survey, Economist Impact is aiming to identify effective practices, sidestep avoidable mistakes and ultimately develop recommendations for creating human-centred hybrid work models that will best serve organisations, employees and society at large over the long term.

This executive summary, the opening piece of this programme, is focused on defining hybrid work, contextualising current trends in terms of the history of work, presenting a mission for the research to come, and offering the earliest findings.

Benefits to many organisations include operational cost savings, such as from the reduced need for office space and improved human resource outcomes. Organisations have access to a wider talent pool, partly because they can use these policies to retain older and more experienced employees. Employees also tend to be more motivated by remote work policies and take fewer sick days. Workers enjoy greater autonomy, flexibility and in some cases better work-life balance and wellbeing from hybrid models. Society, meanwhile, benefits through a reduced carbon footprint (from less commuting) and a higher labour-force participation rate, as more people, including caregivers and individuals with disabilities, can work.

Downsides of past hybrid work models to organisations include the need for investment in telecommunication equipment and IT security; resistance by some workers to this equipment; and communication challenges (both technological and interpersonal) and the attendant coordination and collaboration difficulties. Workers also had to contend with heightened distrust between managers and employees.

Because of these challenges, some firms did not enjoy (the hoped-for) productivity boosts from hybrid work models, which were instead seen as undermining innovation. Some workers suffered too. When WFH policies have been firm-dictated rather than employee-driven, employee quality of life has typically declined rather than improved. This has been especially true of time-flexible models.