Chapter 5:

Is hybrid work here to stay?

Takeaways

Employees continue to work from home in much larger numbers than prior to the COVID-19 pandemic; hybrid arrangements, where staff work partly from home and partly onsite at the organisation’s premises, seem to be the preferred approach.

No magic formula exists for successfully putting a hybrid approach into practice; organisations are defining it as they go along, adopting new management practices and adapting their arrangements based on experience.

Many issues remain to be ironed out. Differences in access is one: for instance, managers and professionals are more likely to have a hybrid arrangement than other occupational groups. There are also concerns that workers who work from home might be regarded as lacking commitment and may miss out on opportunities for advancement and training.

The main motivation that these organisations gave for going the hybrid route was to offer some degree of telework to enhance employee engagement, well-being and productivity without sacrificing the benefits that come from having people work within the same physical environment. These organisations believed that working in physical proximity and interacting face to face is critical to building the social relationships and culture necessary for knowledge-sharing, problem-solving and innovation.

Another motivation for adopting a hybrid arrangement was the recognition, especially by companies having difficulty recruiting staff, that offering telework in some form might give them an edge in the fight to attract new talent.

Some of the organisations in the study had begun to rethink the purpose of their office spaces in light of the changes taking place. Offices were being redesigned as places for physical interaction and making social connections. Meeting rooms and open spaces for collaboration were being added, and some had reduced the number of workstations as the premises became less a place for individuals to work on tasks. Office spaces were also being reduced in size to save on costs.

In response to the EWCTS 2021, which interviewed nearly 60,000 workers across the EU, 15% of employees reported they had a hybrid working arrangement (8% worked from home full time). Table 5 categorises these employees according to occupational group and sector. It shows a clear gradation across the occupational spectrum in who had access to hybrid working, with particularly high proportions of managers and professionals availing of this arrangement, even in the more blue-collar construction and transport and storage sectors. While the tasks of workers classified as technicians or clerical workers are, in general, equally or even more computerised than those of managers and professionals and therefore technically ‘teleworkable’, substantially lower percentages of these groups had a hybrid arrangement. Moving across the table into the less-skilled manual categories, the numbers of workers who have hybrid arrangements dwindle.

Table 5: Employees with hybrid work arrangements, by sector and occupation, EU27, 2021 (%)

Note: The occupational group of skilled agricultural workers in the agriculture sector is excluded due to low sample size.
Source: EWCTS 2021

As Table 6 illustrates, less-skilled and blue-collar workers overwhelmingly work from their employers’ premises.

Table 6: Employees who work exclusively from their employer’s premises, by sector and occupation, EU27, 2021 (%)

Note: The occupational group of skilled agricultural workers in the agriculture sector is excluded due to low sample size.
Source: EWCTS 2021

Many more employees could potentially work from home if the organisations that employ them were willing to support it; the EWCTS found that 25% of employees who worked only from their employer’s premises had a job that is teleworkable. While slightly over half were satisfied with that arrangement, 36% would have preferred a hybrid arrangement and 10% would have preferred to work from home all the time.

Without any clear guide on how to implement telework, many of the 80 organisations in the Eurofound study were feeling their way, trying out new management practices and adapting their approaches based on experience. Most had set rules covering the amount of time that staff were required to be present onsite – generally between one and three days per week. These rules were expressed in a variety of ways, for instance, as a minimum number of days per week or as a percentage of working time. In some cases, teams had autonomy to agree on the number and organisation of days in the office based on team-specific needs; in others, the decision was left entirely up to individual employees.

Rules had also been set regarding working time but based around flexibility. A financial institution in Hungary, for instance, allowed employees to allocate their working time between 07:00 and 20:00, while meetings were required to take place between 08:00 and 17:00.

Organisations also varied on the geographical location of telework. In some, employees were given complete freedom to work from anywhere in the world, while others required them to work within the home country. Some policies specified a certain number of days that people could work from abroad.

Organisations were conscious of the need to take deliberate measures to ensure that the hybrid approach would work. They put more effort into communication and information-sharing with staff than previously. Regular formal and informal communication practices and virtual events were implemented to ensure a sense of community and to maintain the organisational culture.

Training and guidelines were provided to smooth the process of implementing hybrid work: manager training on managing remote teams, employee training in digital skills and data security, and guidelines on health and safety when working from home. Several organisations gave staff allowances to purchase ergonomic equipment for their home office.

Much of the responsibility for successful implementation rested on the shoulders of line managers, and they had to develop new skills for managing dispersed teams. Organisations felt it was important for managers to be flexible and build trust with employees to support their autonomy. Managers had a major role in facilitating the development and maintenance of interpersonal relationships as well as the integration of new employees. It was also important for them to monitor employee experiences so that practices could be adapted to evolving needs.

There are still many issues to be ironed out with hybrid working. Questions remain over the issue of access – of who is permitted to work remotely – and this fractures along a number of lines. As noted earlier, the evidence so far shows that hybrid working is often a privilege that high earners in more senior positions have access to, while employees lower in the hierarchy are excluded. Hybrid working thus has the potential to become a new source of inequality in the workplace. At the same time, differential access is inherent in the arrangement insofar as it excludes workers whose jobs are not teleworkable.

From a different perspective, employees who work from home may be at a disadvantage if their absence from the collective workplace is perceived as evidence of a lack of commitment, and may find themselves as a consequence overlooked when it comes to pay rises and career advancement. This possibility has occurred to senior management: an overwhelming majority (87%) of the chief executives in the KPMG survey mentioned earlier believed that the pay and prospects of employees could be linked to their attendance in the office. This is a particular risk for female workers, who are more likely to opt for hybrid work (or full-time telework) than their male counterparts.

A patchwork of regulations covers workers across the EU at present. Much of it was put in place prior to the pandemic, before telework had mushroomed, so it does not address many current issues, such as prevention of discrimination and the health and safety risks associated with working from home. Countries are trying to catch up, drawing up legislation covering, for example, the right to request telework and the right to disconnect – the latter is discussed in detail in the next chapter.

With the level of effort that companies and policymakers are putting into the regulation of telework arrangements, it is hard to conceive that telework might contract to its pre-pandemic status as a marginal working arrangement. However, it has taken root post-pandemic in a context of a tight labour market where companies mostly include it as a benefit to retain and attract employees. This policy could change in a failing economy with rising unemployment. Companies that only reluctantly conceded to remote working may take such an opportunity to rein it in.

At the same time, many forces work in favour of the continuation of telework: technological advances that deliver an increasingly seamless telework experience; rising commuting times and unaffordable housing in the centres of employment; greater emphasis on workers’ health and well-being in an ageing labour force; and the efforts to revive rural areas. Only time will tell where this story goes.