The past 24 months have offered an incredible learning
opportunity for any company in the technology sector, and specifically for the ones who have historically relied
heavily on co-location.

In this period, many companies have published playbooks and
guides that help operationalize hybrid work at scale. These are great resources for anyone interested in
operational guidance.

This guide instead discusses the challenges and
opportunities of hybrid work by providing perspectives which are not part of public discourse, with the hope of
fostering a conversation and helping the reader develop their own thoughts and approaches to the hybrid
workplace.

Let’s start by establishing that
there is nothing inherently
good or bad about hybrid or traditional work practices. How we work with one another is just a means to
an end,
and it’s important to remind ourselves that the goal of an organization is the to create an environment in which
both employees and customers can thrive.

Organizations and individuals alike should feel empowered to
experiment with different hybrid arrangements, and be results-driven instead of metrics-driven. While some of
the data published around alternative work
practices might feel alarming, metrics around the increase of digital communication (emails, IM) might not have
a detrimental impact to the company’s objective – as organizations are highly heterogeneous organisms and
heuristic evidence is what counts here.

Now that we have grounded our perspective, let’s continue by
defining what hybrid means.

This definition outlines
two different characteristics to
hybrid work: location and time. These two axis can work
independently from one another, or can be coupled with different degrees of proximity, resulting in different
kinds of hybrid work practices, which impact how individuals work with one another.

Location is the primary worksite where an individual
performs their work duties.

Centralized workers carry out their tasks from the same
location their workgroup operates from. This does not have to
be the registered address of the business (e.g. its headquarters), but any place of social gathering (e.g. a
coffee shop, or someone’s home) where people congregate to do their work.

Distributed workers are individuals who are not working from the same location, but are dispersed
across multiple locales (either business or non-business owned). An example of distributed work is when
individuals who are part of the same team work from different company offices across the country.

Flexibility in location has given employees the ability to choose where they do their best work.
While most of us have been forced to work from home in the past two years,
working from home is no longer going to be looked at as health safety requirement moving forward.
With this
additional mobility in mind, work location opens
to a new set of possibilities, which are no longer synonymous of wfh.

Employers should ask themselves what are the reasons workers
might want to find alternative places to work rather than their
assigned office desk? While some of the benefits are more difficult to offset than others (e.g. commute),
organizations have underutilized the opportunity of
learning more about how their own facilities can make people more productive.
For example, the rise of open plan offices established a pervasive new layout which
almost 70% of
every
office had adopted by 2010 , following the standards set by Google and
Facebook. At
the same time, some
workers find this architectural arrangement difficult to work in. Those individuals report challenges with
focusing on their work that can be attributed to the sensory overload typical of an open floor plan (noise,
people walking about, “shoulder taps”). Workers who have specific needs (e.g. neurological, cognitive or
mobility related) can also find it difficult to perform in a workplace that is not designed for them.

Work can happen either at the same time or at
non-overlapping times. Although asynchronous work is something that businesses have some historical references
to point to, as many companies have been collaborating across the world for quite some time prior to the
pandemic, it is still challenging to organize around how people
use time throughout their workflows.

On January 7th, 1927 the President of AT&T and the head
of the British General Post Office had the first transatlantic phone call. Since then, modern technology allowed
people to communicate across the world as if they were in the same room, effectively annulling the distance
between them.

Contrary to geographical distance, time difference is a
challenge which technology has been able to mitigate only partially. While a shift in work hours has
been
historically attributed to workers being located in a different time zone, in recent times workers have
expressed the desire to have more flexibility around their work hours regardless of their location.

Hybrid work has increased the need for a flexible schedule, as individuals have found themselves juggling
more and more every day. With more control over the way people
work, workers have opted in for a schedule that fits their needs better and allows them to cater to all of the
responsibilities they have in their lives. The opportunity to reclaim time has also been fundamental in personal
growth: more and more individuals have picked up new hobbies, or discovered long lost ones and
invested in
self-development during 2020 than in prior years.

As more teams chose flexible work-hours, the expectation of
synchronicity becomes less prevalent amongst workers. This enables morning people to be productive ear