My name is Dave, and welcome to Beyond Hybrid. Each month I’ll be “peeking around the corner” in a humble attempt to deliver the latest insights about the next chapter of work straight into your inbox.
Together, we’ll wrestle with the changing landscape of work as we seek to understand what might lie beyond this undeniably “hybrid” moment. We’ll dive deeper into the biggest online conversations and further explore insights from thought leaders on the future of work so you and your company can continue to have fresh ideas to explore.
Sound good? I hope it’s a marked difference from where we all were when the pandemic hit. Back then, we got thrown into an experiment and we’ve only just managed to find our feet. Let’s not make that same mistake again.
I’ve just got back from Running Remote – a conference in Lisbon focusing on how companies can make remote work successful. What’s my big takeaway from that event? They can’t. Or if they can, it’s just not going to be as successful as the hybrid solution. Since the beginning of the pandemic, big companies resisted full-on remote work (understandable). But now, more and more of us are sobering up to just how hard the mass adoption of remote work truly is.
Running Remote
I’ve just got back from Running Remote – a conference in Lisbon focusing on how companies can make remote work successful. What’s my big takeaway from that event? They can’t. Or if they can, it’s just not going to be as successful as the hybrid solution. Since the beginning of the pandemic, big companies resisted full-on remote work (understandable). But now, more and more of us are sobering up to just how hard the mass adoption of remote work truly is.
Leaders are starting to accept that even if remote work at scale results in a much better society at scale, we can’t will it onto Fortune 100+.
Sure, Sam Szuchan might go viral on LinkedIn every day preaching the good word of remote—but that doesn’t mean his “sermons” are the reality of the present moment.
We had our moment of revolution (which we REALLY needed!) but now we are settling back into evolution, albeit with the veil having been lifted—a very clear before-and-after moment.
This is a Hybrid Moment
On a panel at Running Remote, I said ‘This is a hybrid moment. Period.’
Office-First is dead and, at least for now, so is Remote. Returning to the past is now a quantifiable business and talent risk. The stock performance of in-office companies lagged behind their fully flexible peers by 16% between 2020-22. And while companies like Atlassian are operating on the other end of the spectrum (their remote hires have increased 4x since 2020) it’s completely unrealistic to expect average enterprises to adopt what they define as Distributed Work.
Companies like Atlassian and Dropbox not only don’t have the resources but also the know-how to shift the “tectonic plates” of work. As time goes on, more and more companies will fit this newfound company ethos but for now large enterprises need to focus on incremental change. They need to shift from in-office to hybrid. They need to shift from top-down mandates to team-led agreements.
Now, that doesn’t mean we should sit in neutral and accept a “structured” approach to hybrid work (ie. everyone comes in Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday) as a final destination. Far from it.
But it does mean that we have to recognize much like the pursuit of personal growth, the future of work is going to be a game of inches. Step by step, we can explore together what lies beyond the traditional hybrid model. Think no mandates, human flourishing, optimal rhythms of digital and in-person experiences.
We exist in strange times—we were shown what the world could look like in 10+ years but it was revealed during a period of massive trauma.
So it feels important to get back to more realistic, incremental change while also exploring what lies Beyond Hybrid.
Will you join me? I hope so.
Stay tuned for more insights about the next chapter of work, straight into your inbox next month!
Dave
Dave is Kadence’s Future of Work Strategist. He foresees what’s unfolding in the world of work and advises our customers on how to prepare and adapt to the latest trends easily.
