From remote work to hybrid work: what lessons to learn to prepare the return to the office

On 17 March 2020, faced with the seriousness of the health situation caused by COVID-19, the French government introduced unprecedented national lockdown measures within a few days. Faced with this unprecedented situation, companies had to adapt at short notice by introducing remote work to ensure a degree of business continuity.

May 2021: as a gradual reopening begins, what lessons can be learned about remote work as employees prepare to return to the office? How can this model be built into a winning hybrid work strategy, and in what forms?

Here are a few answers.

Remote work, once unloved, has become a necessary tool for business resilience

Before this forced generalisation of remote work, very few companies had made this way of working part of their daily habits. When it was allowed, remote work was mostly applied as an exceptional measure, for the employee’s temporary convenience (medical appointment, home delivery, etc.) or to deal with occasional difficulties (transport strikes, etc.).

At the time, the main obstacles seen by companies were:

• A feeling of losing control over employees’ activity: “Out of sight…”,
• An exceptional convenience solution to help the employee out,
• Reduced productivity, because conditions at home did not guarantee the ability to work in good conditions,

In November 2019, only a few months before the start of the COVID-19 crisis, 7.2% of French employees worked remotely on an occasional basis¹, whereas nearly a quarter of them (including 75% of managers) have done so since the start of the health crisis².

After an imperfect rollout at the start of the crisis, companies showed innovation and adaptability in addressing the main difficulties encountered, gradually improving the employee experience and trying to keep a semblance of normality in daily activity.

Initiatives therefore multiplied:

• Rolling out unified communication and collaboration tools to stay in touch with employees and allow them to share information and work together despite the distance,
• Setting up virtual events, activities, coffee breaks and “drinks” to maintain a sense of belonging to the company and preserve informal moments of sharing,
• Adapting the methods and ways of managing teams used to working and living in close proximity, who had to adapt to remote collaboration (planning and monitoring work progress, identifying HR difficulties, maintaining team cohesion and employees’ sense of belonging, etc.).

Remote work has managed to earn a place among the ways of working that companies consider, despite a hesitant start. While it has been greatly appreciated for the work-life balance it can bring³ and for the productivity gains observed⁴ (less commuting time, flexible working hours, better concentration, etc.), this way of working still raises questions about its impact, notably physical and psychological, on employees and managers because of the isolation it can create.

As people start returning to the office, how can the necessary hybrid work model be built into the company’s fundamentals?

Coming out of this third lockdown, and despite clear benefits, the adoption of remote work has slowed down, even leading to a trend towards a return to the pre-crisis set-up. According to a government study, as of 5 February 2021, the proportion of employees working remotely fell back to around 30%⁵, whereas it had reached about 45% at the height of the crisis.

As a result, and beyond integrating remote work, the major challenge for companies is to manage the transition to hybrid work as well as possible, the main challenges being:

• The wish of some employees to make remote work part of their activity, at least part-time, in line with a new life balance made possible by it,
• The necessary review of organisations and processes to anchor operating arrangements that combine on-site and remote work while improving the management of working time and guaranteeing optimal productivity,
• The need to rethink professional and human interactions within the company and to support managers through this transition, in order to preserve ties between employees, combat isolation and ill-being, give meaning to work and maintain the sense of belonging to the company,
• The mandatory adaptation of all or part of employees’ equipment, the application portfolio and/or infrastructure services to support the development of this new, mobile approach to work while guaranteeing the security of information systems and suitable support for employees,
• The evolution of the workplace design strategy, as workspaces will have to adapt to better match new uses.

None of these challenges should be addressed through a strategy of mandatory on-site attendance, but rather on the basis of employees’ need to come back to the office, for example for:

• Maintaining social relationships with colleagues,
• Holding meetings or hosting clients or partners,
• Benefiting from services or resources (technical or otherwise) that make daily life easier,
• …

Beyond the constraints and costs involved in putting these adaptations in place, the company can, with a suitable strategy, reap the following benefits:

• Optimised premises costs, by reallocating workspaces to other uses such as hosting clients or partners, social spaces or incubating start-ups,
• Higher output and lower absenteeism⁴,
• An improved carbon footprint through less travel,
• Recruiting talent beyond the company’s natural catchment area,
• …

In a hybrid situation, management under strain must adapt its practices

Middle managers were among the groups that suffered most from the effects of remote work during the health crisis, because they lost their bearings but also because their operational role in team management was called into question.

Indeed, beyond their objectives of steering and organising their teams’ daily activities, managers had to face, most often without support, many management and also personal challenges within their teams, such as tracking progress and allocating daily activities, detecting situations of isolation or distress at work, managing conflicts, recruiting talent, etc.

For the integration of a hybrid work model to succeed, and also to last, it is therefore vital to support and train managers in the evolution of their role, to help them improve interactions with their teams in order to:

• Clearly formalise the rules on the organisation and arrangements of remote work within the company (who is entitled to it, how often, with what obligations, etc.),
• Put in place transparent communication with all their teams, on the basis of “say what you do and do what you say”, so that everyone has the same level of information about project news and the life of the company and the team,
• Make themselves more available to their employees for formal exchanges (appraisals, help, career follow-up, etc.) or informal ones (the situation of the employee working remotely, coffee breaks or other virtual team events), thanks to the time freed up by process automation and the introduction of digital or informal tools,
• Adapt objectives and the assessment of results to the constraints of remote work, based on SMART assessment (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound),
• …

Articles in the same series

Hybrid work in companies: the key challenge on the way to a new balance

In this new perspective, we look at the main factors to take into account in this thinking:

How can employees be brought on board in defining this new balance?

What are the important factors to take into account to make hybrid work last within the company?

How should communication be adapted to address the challenges related to the impact on employees?

1 DARES study, November 2019 – which employees are concerned by remote work? (in French)
2 ODOXA study, February 2021 (in French)
3 86% of remote workers want to continue, notably for the flexibility this practice brings – Annual Remote Work Barometer 2021 – Malakoff Humanis (in French)
4 22% average productivity gain observed – Institut Sapiens study (in French)
5 2.5 million employees who could work remotely do not do so – France Info (in French)