One thing we have learnt whilst we have been supporting our professional network of 14,000 global members is that how and where we work matters. We've had countless posts and discussions on remote working, long commutes, fieldwork, online work, childcare and disability that all require reasonable adjustments to achieve some semblance of balance as well as enable our career ambitions. Then Covid 19 came and this all became very much a reality thrust upon us. We must never underplay what was required of us, mentally and physically, to undertake this shift. Our network was receiving thousands of comments a month from members trying to figure all this out, what it meant for them and the learning required. Things feel like they have settled on the surface but now there is kickback about getting workers back to the office under some misinformed guise of reduced productivity; which is counter to numerous reports of work from home productivity gains. So where are we really heading with hybrid working and what could that look like?
What are the current challenges of hybrid work?
The advantages and challenges to hybrid working are incredibly complex and contextual. So many variables depend on your organisation, their I.T infrastructure, their virtual workspace as well as physical workspace and your own home/remote workspace. It is certainly not a one size fits all. However, recent reports tell us that racialised staff are more likely to have a positive experience working remotely as it reduces exposure to harmful racial microaggressions in the workplace. But we must be careful that this isn't then just sweeping workplace racism under a digital carpet.
Similarly, women experience the blessing and curse of hybrid work, whereby flexibility supports childcare but also can increase the domestic load and expectation that being home means you get rewarded with more housework! Additionally, women undertake much more of the invisible labour at work. The grease the wheels / office relationship building that keeps an organisation going. With more work undertaken virtually we risk this care and community building work becoming even more imperceptible as valued work and. therefore, contributing to burnout. This care work is work and it is leadership and we need to get better at surfacing that work in our built, remote and virtual environments so it can be appreciated and rewarded. I touch briefly on care as work and leadership in an upcoming book chapter 'Feminist Online Communities: The Story of the Women in Academia Support Network (WIASN) – a Tale of Resistance and Online Activism' (out 9th Feb 2023)
Where are employees working now, and where will they work in the future?
There remains an unhelpful hybrid binary of office or home and a sense from employees that their employers expect work to happen in one of these two locations. But there are lessons to be learnt here from the Higher Education sector where work can and does happen anywhere. Academics, are well known to catch each other for meetings whilst passing through airport lounges or writing your multi million-pound winning grant bid in soft play whist the 3 year old tires themselves out in the ball-pit. I have colleagues who regularly spend months of the year working from another country and joining remote workers collectives and there is a rise and increased interest in digital nomads who might attend the office only a few times a year whilst they travel the world.
To get away from the office/home binary the future will also mean a literal re-think (pun intended) of what work is to re-valuing and prioritising thinking time as productive and necessary and to move away from bussyness and transactional modes of working. Especially as AI disrupts what we think work is. I mean imagine if ChatPGT could write your board papers and office reports!
Hybrid (and especially the virtual remote part) will increasingly mean working in a digital space. In reality hybrid consists of numerous spaces; your workplace (office), the remote physical environment (your home, the coffee shop) and an array of virtual spaces (Teams, Zoom, Intranet etc). These virtual spaces are not necessarily set up/controlled by your employers. For example, of course I use my office laptop and Teams channels but I also conduct work over Facebook and WhatsApp. I've just co-authored a piece of work over a WhatsApp group and organised a two day international conference entitled 'Virtually Undisciplined' using Facebook as the workspace and YouTube and Facebook live to deliver it to 14K+ people across the globe; sharing conference presentations afterwards via a WIASN Conference YouTube Channel (Courtesy of the Royal Holloway Gender Institute)
I work a lot with Facebook. This WIASN charity I co-founded was funded by Facebook in a Global Accelerator, with a share of $7 Million dollars to support the delivery of our community goals, provide products and services to our professional network. As part of this we were invited to join international groups of Community Managers (that were owned by Facebook) and we even became accredited through Facebook/Meta in Digital Community Management; a qualification that centres digital communities as a business model. Community Management has and will continue to shape hybrid work through a focus on community and belonging as central to organizational success. The skills and expertise required to develop and sustain the online/virtual community aspect of hybrid working will become invaluable. For more on his read David Spinks 'Business of Belonging'
Coupled with this is the development of the Metaverse and AI working / avatars. Who knows what our virtual workspaces may look like and where will will need to log on to access them? AI cafes anyone? My workspaces are increasingly virtual and global; whilst at the same time increasingly local as I'm free to do that work from wherever and have opportunity to get out into fresh air. So absolutely working through a tricky work problem whilst on a run or taking an hour out on the beach to clear your head so ideas can have space is absolutely where we need to get to in the future.
What will the future workweek look like?
I think we are moving towards a state of hyperflexibility that focusses on what we do rather than where and when we do it. I think we might see more sprints of work and periods of less activity so we might have a month where we are very busy, followed by a month of little to no work. That is my hope but there is a danger that with more freed up time we might just fill it with even more work and perpetuate bussyness for bussyness sake! We will need to get more comfortable with irregularity and resist shoehorning working into tight bound units of time, place and activity. Asynchronicity and tools to enable that will be key. Hopefully this will also position thinking time as valuable and the increasingly digital / virtual nature of work could freed us to do that thinking and focus on quality - which could reduce our work hours. If we just stopped fearing inactivity and unhelpfully viewing it as un-productive we could, instead, appreciate how necessary it is to innovation and overall productivity. And only if we manage to put community and belonging at the heart of what we do so we don't get dis-engaged, lonely workers disconnected from their work. This means looking at and valuing whole new skillsets, which takes me back to the Community Managers. We already have these people amongst us but we do not readily commercially value their work in all organisations. Generally we still see being on Facebook as 'messing about on the internet' but we can learn a lot from those who run these huge behemoth digital groups and who drive engagement, connections and activity. We may scoff at the admin of our local community group but some of these digital Community Managers curate and lead communities larger than many of our places of work and towns and cities in which we live. They can and do influence business and commercial interests on a global scale. Global brands use digital Community Managers to develop products and drive sales and we can use them too for developing and curating hybrid working models based in community, belonging and sustainability. Check out the report from researcher at NYU on the power of virtual communities
Dr Kelly Pickard-Smith is an invited speaker on the future of work at the CIPD Hybrid Working conference (London and online) on 22nd February 2023.