Hybrid working in practice

The first article was about choices, what you want to achieve with hybrid working and which model fits. The real challenge only starts after that, though. A model on paper is one thing. Making sure people really meet without frustration or leaving it to chance is another.

Many organisations now have their agreements in place, and yet attendance remains mostly a matter of chance. One day the office is packed, the next it is almost empty. Teams miss each other or get in each other's way. That feels inefficient, and it is.

This article is about that step from policy to practice. How do you organise attendance so that collaboration happens naturally, without hybrid working becoming a control mechanism?

If you do not organise attendance, a pattern emerges by itself. People come in on the days that suit them, and those are often the same days. Tuesday and Thursday are bursting at the seams, while Monday and Friday stay quiet.

Logical in itself, but it makes collaboration dependent on chance. Do you happen to see the right colleague today and is there room to sit together, or does the conversation have to go online again after all?

Do not forget the social effect either. It is precisely the short encounters with colleagues from other teams that make the office valuable. A quick catch-up over coffee, a face to a name. You do not plan that, it only happens when people are there at the same time.

If attendance is too much a matter of chance, those moments disappear. Teams mostly see themselves and other teams remain abstract. Working together becomes more formal and distant as a result, even when the work itself goes fine. After all, collaboration needs repetition and continuity.

The most important shift is from individual attendance to team agreements. Instead of everyone deciding for themselves when to come in, you agree together when you meet in person.

That does not mean the freedom disappears, by the way. Outside those agreements there is still plenty of room for flexibility, only the most important moments of collaboration are fixed.

Teams that work this way mainly experience calm. A meeting is quickly planned, because you know when everyone is there anyway.

A common mistake with team days is that only the team knows about them. The rest of the organisation has no idea who is at the office when, with the result that teams still miss each other or all choose the same days.

Visibility is therefore crucial. Not to check up on people, but to be able to plan. If teams know when the others are there, you prevent peaks and create room for collaboration between departments. That calls for an organisation-wide overview of attendance, without it becoming complicated.

Besides when people come in, where they work matters too. Many offices are fully flexible but lack cohesion. People are there, but spread throughout the whole building.

With team zones or recognisable areas, more connection arises naturally. You know where your colleagues sit, new employees find their place faster and conversations start more easily.

Hybrid working almost always means sharing desks. That goes fine as long as expectations are clear, but without ground rules small frustrations quickly pile up. How should you leave a spot? Can you leave your things behind? And what do you do when someone is sitting in your usual spot? (Grrr, I always sit here.)

They seem like small questions, but they shape the daily feel of the office. Make them explicit and you prevent a lot of unnecessary irritation.

In many organisations booking meets resistance, because it quickly feels like surveillance. That resistance disappears as soon as booking is presented as what it is, a tool.

Booking gives certainty. You know there is a spot and who else is coming, and you do not have to be the first to rush into the office to claim your favourite spot. Without booking, uncertainty arises instead. Should I go in or not? Is there room? Do I have to go elsewhere?

The difference is not in the system, but in the intention with which you use it.

As soon as several teams share the same office, tension arises by itself. Not because people want it, but because space is scarce. Without shared rules some teams quietly take up more space than others. That often goes unspoken, but it does chafe.

You do not get a fair distribution with individual bookings, but with agreements at group level, by recording per team or department how much space is available on which days. That way you prevent the same teams from always grabbing the best days and you spread occupancy evenly over the week. Teams no longer have to compete, they simply know where they stand.

Especially when you use hybrid working to make smarter use of office space or to gradually reduce it, group agreements like these are indispensable.

Attendance is not only about desks, by the way. Meeting rooms, lunch spots and parking spaces shape how a day at the office feels just as much. An office with enough desks but no free meeting room still feels full. So look at the whole picture, otherwise hybrid working is well organised in one area and keeps causing friction everywhere else.

Hybrid working works when attendance is predictable without becoming rigid. Teams see each other without coercion and the office invites collaboration instead of causing stress.

The signals are simple.

If you do not recognise this yet, chances are attendance is still too much a matter of chance.

In the next article we look at the last step. How to keep improving hybrid working without extra complexity, which insights really help and how to prevent decisions from being made on gut feeling again.

Wendel, AppjePlekje