How should leaders manage hybrid working relationships?

What do employees really want?

Overall, many employees indicate they have enjoyed the benefits of working from home, including less travel times and easier transfers between their work to their personal lives.

For others, it continues to be a notable challenge to combine work, household, and family. For example, people with smaller living spaces notice that working and living at the same table has its limitations. On the other hand, many employees acknowledge the value of working onsite in terms of connection and collaboration.

We can expect some employees and managers will be relieved by the “new normal” and returns to the office. Many leaders may falsely assume that because they often want to return to traditional working arrangements, their employees will share the same expectations.

However, it seems that most others will want lasting changes. A short survey from UNSW Sydney, for example, indicates that only three percent of all employees want to return to the traditional form of work of nine to five, five days a week. Employees globally share similar sentiments, with a World Economic Forum survey of 12,500 workers across 29 countries finding two-thirds want to work flexibly post-pandemic while almost a third were prepared to quit their job if they were forced to go back to the office full time. Collectively, employees seem to want to continue to work flexibly, and perhaps be present at work a few days a week, but certainly not all five.

How organizations should approach hybrid working

Some key questions are pressing. How will these considerations be balanced, and how can employees participate in setting up these new working arrangements? What do we actually know about the specific expectations and preferences of different groups of employees?

Instead of starting from assumptions, managers should research preferences and offer employees the space to indicate their preferences and concerns. After all, it may be that employees will return to previous ideas around desired working arrangements in the coming months. That is why (scientific) research is needed, and managers should take the time to follow the preferences of their employees.

Here, we consider some important factors of managing hybrid working arrangements for different groups of employees (factoring in the likes of gender, age, and caring responsibilities) and the relationships that exist between the preferences for hybrid forms of work and employee outcomes (such as wellbeing, performance, and turnover).

When answering these questions, it is important to note that sufficient opportunities should remain for building a constructive culture, attracting the best people, optimizing workspaces for the best employee outcomes in terms of productivity and wellbeing, and maximizing opportunities for employees to learn both formally and informally from each other.

In this sense, the current changes in the work environment offer a once-in-a-generation opportunity for researchers to understand the influence of rapid changes on people’s preferences. Collecting longitudinal data offers researchers the opportunity to develop insights and new theories. To answer these and other related questions, UNSW Business School in Sydney, Australia, has established a new research and knowledge centre under the name Hybrid Work Leadership, led by the School of Management & Governance’s Dr Andrew Dhaenens and Professor Karin Sanders.