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What is Hybrid Working?

What exactly is Hybrid Working?

It is, essentially, the process of using various places of work to conduct business. It is a practice that many businesses have engaged in for years and is now growing in popularity post-pandemic. We have produced this article https://sites.google.com/view/hybrid-workplace-solutions/home that explains the history of hybrid working, the terminology, it discusses which companies are looking to move towards a hybrid workplace model, or not, and looks at the potential future of the practice.

So, we know that hybrid working is the use of various places of work and that these can be:

  1. The Home
  2. Satellite Offices or Workspaces
  3. The Main Office

We produced this video which provides a basic visualisation of what hybrid working is:

 

 

When a company is engaging in ‘hybrid working’, it is said to be operating within a ‘hybrid workplace model’, or utilising one.

This practice adds flexibility into a business in various ways – it allows for the use of distributed teams which also means that it can employ from a more geographically diverse talent pool, it can be flexible in the locations that it uses as offices or workspaces, and it may also mean that team members may work flexibly.

Flexible working is usually defined as an employee working somewhat outside of the fixed Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm working week model, but can also mean working outside of the main or headquarters office.

Both hybrid working and flexible working look differently for every business, teams within a business and for different employees.

The concept actually dates back to the 1960s – long before personal computers, computer networking, and broadband so has been experimented with by companies of various sizes and in many sectors for decades.

But as we posted in September 2020 , the global Covid-19 pandemic acted as a major catalyst in businesses re-visiting how they may best incorporate hybrid working and flexible working into their operations models in the future.

In October 2021, PwC told its 40,000 US employees that they can work remotely permanently and others are looking to adopt a similar strategy.

As we discuss in the article (referenced at the top of this post), companies such as Nationwide and Twitter are following the same path as PwC, however, companies such as Amazon and Netflix want their staff to return to the office as soon as possible.

Others, such as Apple, are embracing the hybrid working concept and will only require staff to come to the office 3 days of the week, however, these days should be pre-agreed and correspond with other team members’ in-office days to facilitate face-to-face collaboration.

The article also defines some of the terms associated with hybrid working – from WFH to WFB, and also investigates what the future of hybrid working may look like for businesses, employees and job seekers.