The perils of getting your hybrid policy wrong – and how to avoid them

Earlier this year, Boots’ CEO told head office staff to return to the office five days a week after several years of hybrid. Despite the offer of better food and free parking, the backlash was severe, with HR experts saying the move was led by leadership bias rather than data. And yet 64 per cent of CEOs think full-time in-person work will be the norm again within two years, according to KPMG. It begs the question: what working structure will come up trumps

A short (and troubled) history of hybrid

This isn’t a story just about Boots, though. That a touted return to office work is causing such a furore shows how widespread working landscapes have been. It’s still just four years since the pandemic sparked a jump, albeit for health and safety reasons, to where almost half the population was working from home – up from 5 per cent at the start of 2020. Now, CIPD stats from last year show that 83 per cent of organisations offer hybrid work. It’s not all one-way traffic, though. The Boots set-to is emblematic of broader concerns; Microsoft data shows only 12 per cent of employers trust that remote employees are being productive, and other leaders worry about culture, engagement and development in hybrid settings. Even for those that don’t hold concerns, there’s confusion around whether to write hybrid policies, and whether to mandate days in the office or base work location on business need.

What’s more, a glance at headlines can make it seem like working structure vogues change weekly. It’s a confusing picture, often with HR in the middle. To cut through the noise, People Management spoke to HR practitioners, business leaders and legal experts to learn how to make everything from fully in-office to totally remote work as effective as it can be for both people and their organisations.

Legal ducks in a row

Be it remote, hybrid or in-office, businesses still have to follow the law – from health and safety considerations to the Equality Act. This includes the new Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Act, which allows employees to make flexible working requests from their first day on the job. Matt McBride, employment partner at Freeths, says companies need to think carefully about declining a request (which could be for remote or hybrid work) as it could demotivate workers or count as indirect discrimination.

Elsewhere, if there are more significant changes, businesses should consider updating contracts, think about international tax implications and concern themselves with how changes impact employees’ living circumstances; ie, whether they afford to commute into the office.

Making it in a remote world

2023 stats show there is a year-on-year decrease in remote vacancies. That said, fully remote work is still double what it was pre-pandemic: from 4 per cent of roles to 8 per cent. And brand name employers are still running with it: GitLab and Dropbox run virtual-first, asynchronous models, and Airbnb allows living and working from anywhere. But at clothing brand Passenger the business is more traditional, explains CEO Jon Lane, despite having been a remote-first company since its 2012 inception. Passenger expects employees to take part in daily catch-ups, and come into head office once a month for culture-underwriting get-togethers. These meetings help ground staff in core principles, says Lane, which align people to business goals. Lane notes that it’s this principles-first approach that helps when employees aren’t together as they know that the firm encourages trusting each other to get on with the job.

Just because the company has been working remotely for more than a decade doesn’t mean it’s standing still. As Lane says, effective remote work means tweaking. “It’s part of our ‘evolution not revolution’ approach,” he says, “and we actively seek out feedback from employees and look to implement it.” Reflexively, asking for feedback has empowered staff and encouraged managers to delegate so the business can chase opportunities rapidly. “Our approach… is about trusting the teams’ work away from HQ and letting them decide,” Lane adds.

Vista, the printing firm owned by Cimpress, has a different story. The 6,700-employee firm first went remote in 2020, keeping the structure as employees reacted so positively and productivity didn’t drop off. But transitioning from a ‘needs must’ to a long-term remote model has required considered management, says Kim Lanza, director of remote-first team member success at Cimpress and Vista. Vista ensured leaders visibly led the long-term change and explained the logic behind the structure. Alongside this, they have a dedicated remote success team, which runs pulse surveys, gathers quantitative and qualitative data and looks at how to adapt the remote structure going forward. This has resulted in using money saved on real estate to fund remote-first collaboration and development opportunities, creating an intensive, 100-day onboarding process to incorporate new hires successfully and understanding where in-person still plays a role. “We are remote first, not remote only, which means in-person collaboration is still an important element of our culture,” Lanza adds, explaining that the company takes its remote structures as seriously as every other part of HR practice. And while business goals remain unchanged, Vista has reimagined what culture means in a remote world. “We have changed how we define our culture in terms of practices, ways of working and communication approaches,” she says.

Hybrid, hybrid, hybrid

Getting your head around hybrid is no small task. For starters, CIPD stats from 2023 show that almost half of firms have a formal policy, a quarter take an informal approach and 13 per cent are trialling and developing as they go. Furthermore, there’s a big split between those requiring workers to be in for a specific number of days (52 per cent) and those that don’t (46 per cent). The choice can be paralysing.

For Mathew Dutton, people director at Gumtree, the best way forward is to, like Vista, listen to employees. This can help understand the best setup. From here, businesses can run a long-term hybrid pilot to iron out potential issues. Critical, says Dutton, is knowing that choosing the company structure doesn’t mean having to have a one-size-fits-all approach. “We empower leaders and teams to decide when working outside of the office better complements their productivity,” he explains.

This doesn’t mean ignoring the importance of whole-company cohesion. At Gumtree, elements from prior full-time in-person working have been kept for the long term, such as all-hands meetings, now abetted by digital channels. This is all enshrined in policy – something Dutton says is fundamental and must balance individual autonomy with business need. “We have a clear set of guiding principles in our policy that are applied business wide with an objective decision tree to support the decision as to when a role will be deemed suitable for remote working,” he adds.

While this has driven success by important HR metrics and leaders do have autonomy, Dutton is aware the Gumtree method might not work for all organisations, noting the firm is able to tailor jobs and network effectively, even with team variance in hybrid approaches, as they are small enough and managers can be easily empowered. Similarly, Kerrie Mooney, head of HR at marketing agency TrunkBBI, says the 70-employee company is small enough to engage all staff in decisions about working structures. The subtext: this approach doesn’t necessarily work for larger firms.

Yet, TrunkBBI’s size helped when staff and leaders were at loggerheads over remote work. After the pandemic, the company wanted employees back in the office, but they didn’t want to return. “So we consulted them,” explains Mooney. “Many were concerned about office distractions and wasting time and money on the commute.” As such, the firm found a hybrid compromise. Mooney emphasises this hasn’t resulted in a workplace free for all and suggests companies continue to make hiring decisions, and manage performance, based on business buy-in. “When you’re looking to hire, is the opportunity to work from home more important to the person than the work they do? If so, you may have a problem further down the line,” she says.

In hybrid models, Mooney says that while autonomy can help staff become more productive, it means the pressure is on for leaders to communicate effectively about what the business needs while laying out expectations regarding office attendance. That said, she says performance management will need updating. “Managers do have to base their assessment of an employee’s work on their impact on the business rather than on presence in the office,” she adds, noting that an assessment of whether hybrid is driving good outcomes needs to be measured analytically and not based on ‘gut feeling’. “This might mean measuring sales reputation or market share... and go back to consulting staff on the experience of hybrid working and how it influences their engagement,” says Mooney.

Under hybrid, purpose and values are perhaps even more critical, says James Cosser-Hindle, executive people director at GroupM. At the advertising giant, a principles-first approach means the hybrid structure can be maximally flexible and work to deliver what employees want, while being guided by business need. “Our structure not only fosters teamwork but also protects valuable remote work time for concentrated tasks,” he says. “Our hybrid model is about leveraging the best of both worlds, embracing flexibility while maintaining a clear focus on collective goals.”

Back to office success

Though a majority of CEOs want to return to the office, Max Dubiel, founder of Redemption Roasters, the social impact coffee business that mandates full-time office attendance, says this might not work for every firm. “We’re really happy with what we’re doing but we’re not going to preach and say it will be right for every sector,” he says, noting that, as a scale up, he thinks having a central office works as everything else can be so changeable, but that for a more mature, larger company, hybrid could work as it’s unlikely roles and business channels evolve so rapidly.

Dubiel explains that he thinks the in-office approach works for the business because they’ve never properly worked remotely, apart from a small part of the pandemic, and they wanted equality of working environment across all staff – from head office to coffee shop. “You can’t be a barista and work from home so we thought no one should,” he says. To make in-office work effective, Redemption has taken the structure seriously: it has invested in managerial training, chosen a central office location to enable easy journeys and ensured it is conducive to good work. Reflexively, Dubiel believes that has helped the company’s cohesion. “Management works so much better when you’re face to face with someone and the methodologies we’ve invested in are helping us grow people,” he adds. Yet Dubiel is aware that remote and hybrid are popular among workers and says being honest upfront helps manage full-time office dynamics. They run a probing, multi-stage recruitment process and are honest that flexibility isn’t really on offer. “It might not work for all employees but that’s absolutely fine. We’re looking for a certain type of employee,” he explains, advising other companies to not mis-sell themselves. Critically, it seems this honesty-first approach is working; with more funding secured, Redemption hopes to open five more outlets next year.

The expert voice

So, what do the experts say about which method works best? Claire McCartney, senior policy adviser at the CIPD, explains it’s important that businesses define working structures by their own strategic need and nature of work, with employees in mind. This can then inform policies and principles around work as well as responsibilities around these structures and practical support. This means HR should have a central role, she adds, foremostly in assessing what barriers exist to the preferred working structure and, crucially, if the business is culturally ready for the change. While the function needs to assess how any new working structures impact everything from EDI to performance, like Dubiel, McCartney says managerial training is paramount: “Training should also be provided to managers on how to manage hybrid teams… and it’s important to keep any hybrid working policies under ongoing review.”

Effective communication is also important, even if a working structure is only undergoing a small tweak, which should link the decision to business rationale. “It’s a ‘this makes good business sense’ rather than ‘we need everyone in the workplace because we don’t trust people’,” McCartney says. Of course, this rationale needs to be regularly reviewed to understand if it’s working. “HR should consider monitoring how hybrid work is influencing applications for employment, internal movement, promotion and reward, as well as any performance management ratings,” she adds.

Like McCartney, Gemma Dale, lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, believes that any vague leadership statements about the need to overhaul working structures do more harm than good. Rather than indicating if it’s remote, hybrid or in-person that is best, she says leadership decisions on working structures need to synthesise what all stakeholders need from the business. “Instead of being preoccupied with a pre-pandemic way of working… leaders should see themselves as initiators: see the need for change and enable it,” Dale says, adding that businesses need to be cautious of fighting the direction of travel. That said, she warns that firms need to do risk assessments before changing (including looking at how new structures impact certain demographics) and be wary of being overly flexible. “Employers cannot meet every [employee] need,” she says.

But, adds Dale, the indication for what working structure is suitable for an individual employer is likely already in the business. “Organisations will be better served by looking at their own data,” she says, “and with many organisations having implemented hybrid work post pandemic… they should undertake proper reviews on how it’s going.” It means, as Dale sees it, decisions on structures can then be reached in a rational manner: “If change is needed, make it evidence based rather than based on anecdotes and bias.”