The Transition to Hybrid Work: A Thought Starter

Like many organisations, Google has decided it is time to move towards a hybrid work model. With it comes the need to begin working in the office again and it has impacted everyone differently. Yet, given the social and collaborative nature of work, the change seemed inevitable.

The quest for productivity and performance

As the company begins wrestling with the ‘new normal’ of post-pandemic working life, it is worth remembering that the search for the most productive ways to work is ages old. Indeed, it can be traced back almost 1,500 years to the monasteries of Europe and Asia.

Long before the printing press was invented, there is evidence that medieval scribes were choosing to do their intricate handwritten work in small rooms or cubicles (called scriptoriums). They did this to limit distractions and presumably, to enhance their accuracy and productivity.

By the late 15th century, writing workshops had developed where professional scribes would stand at desks and work on customer orders. However, this early form of modern office work did not last very long. At around the same time, German Johannes Gutenberg succeeded in designing an effective mechanical printing press, which greatly reduced demand for the services of scribes.   

The evolution of the workplace

Fast forward 450 years and the search for the most productive ways of working was still alive. In the aftermath of the industrial revolution, management science began to develop and was shaped by the ideas of people like American Frederick Taylor.

According to Taylor, a mechanical engineer, optimising productive capacity meant creating a constant workflow, by giving workers repetitive manual tasks and organising them into production lines. Whilst his ideas greatly influenced factory work, they also influenced office work. His principles of scientific management shaped office design in the early 1900s, with large communal workspaces that seated many, many clerical workers into the same room. 

From the office to the home

The 20th century has seen the organisation of work change many times. After the widespread application of Taylorism, organisations experimented with many ways of coordinating workflows, configuring workspaces, and organising workers. These included open plan offices, action offices, cubicled offices, casual offices, and activity-based offices.

Since the turn of the millennium, companies like Google have continued to evolve the workplace and accelerate the movement away from early command and control models, and towards workspaces that are more informal, collaborative, empowering and creative.

But no one saw COVID-19 coming, nor could anyone have anticipated how dramatically it would alter the organisation of work. As the governments of the world issued their health orders, non-essential workers around the globe suddenly found themselves working from home.

Putting the balance into work-life balance

There is no other way to put it…life in lockdown was an incredibly devastating and disruptive experience for most people. Despite this, the reality of working from home was also something of a welcome change.

Whilst the idea of work-life balance has existed since the early 1980s, most working adults struggled to approach it. Although flexible work arrangements helped, nothing has put the balance into work-life balance quite like the pandemic!

Naturally, work-from-home has not been ideal for everybody. Not everyone has the same domestic situation – homes have different amounts of floor space, not all have private working spaces, some have better internet connectivity, etc. More importantly, some homes are simply busier than others.  

But many of these challenges were offset by the advantages of not having a daily commute, spending more time with family, self-set working hours, having more opportunities to exercise, and a general feeling of safety.

The evolution continues

Unfortunately, no matter how much we might like things to stay the same, life never stops changing. And that change tends to have a rhythm…sometimes slow, sometimes fast. When it’s fast, we rely on our ‘surge capacity’ to get us through. This is our combined physical, mental, and emotional reserve – or buffer – that helps us to cope and adapt.

But this reserve is not limitless. So, when the change is big, we need a chance to restore and recover. Fortunately, the de-intensification of the pandemic over the past 12-months, along with the inevitable adjustment to work-from-home, has allowed some recovery to take place.

Yet here we are again, face-to-face with another change. The working world is – once more – seeking an answer to the question: What’s the most effective way to work?

Towards Google Workplace 3.0

There is little doubt that working from home can work. We know it can. Organisations all around the world have reported positive impacts on productivity. 

But is that all there is to work? Scholars have long noted the importance of social bonding and human interaction to work performance and job satisfaction. As such, the workplaces of the future will need to be organised in ways that make them ‘worthy’ destinations. A place that attracts employees for reasons other than just productivity because so much can be done from home.

In this regard, Google has advantages other companies don’t have. It has been innovating in this direction for almost two decades, with the chance to lead the way again.

However, for that to happen, there needs to be acceptance of the need to change and a willingness to consider the virtues of the hybrid model. And, like anything that happens in an organisation, that’s always going to depend on quality conversations…the quality of the conversations we have with ourselves, and with each other.