The New World Of Work: Home, Hybrid Or Office?

Here’s what organizations should consider

Fifty-eight percent of the 25,000 Americans participating in a spring 2022 survey said they had the choice of working from home at least once a week, including 35%, who could work from home all the time. The respondents were drawn from all types of industries and jobs across the country.

While the need for a new (read hybrid) working model is near-universal, the solution is anything but. The nuances of the arrangement will depend on the specific context of the organization and its business needs.

Counterintuitively, productivity is not a factor in choosing between on-site and remote work. In fact, 57% of respondents agreed that remote work improved the productivity of their knowledge workers, but a similar number – 53% – said the same about in-office work. It appears that employee productivity when working from home or in hybrid mode depends on the industry: high-tech and telecom report good productivity with remote work, whereas manufacturing and retail say their knowledge workers are more productive when they come to the office.

Factors That Matter

Organizations should consider things such as employees’ skills and their own business needs to decide the scope and structure of their work model. Here are some possibilities:

Formulate Work Policies Based on Skills

Skills, both what enterprises have and what they need, should be a primary consideration in the on-site versus the remote decision. In the words of Dr. Alanah Mitchell of Drake University “Going forward, work is not going to be where you are, but what you can do….” Companies, whose employees have digital dexterity and good communication skills, are likely to function effectively in remote work situations. On the other hand, organizations looking for specialized or hard-to-get talent, or to improve workplace diversity, may have to adopt a remote working model, if those candidates are unable to come to the office daily.

Indeed, in the new world of work, skills are precious, in some cases even more than academic qualifications. For example, the majority of companies (64%) prioritize skills over degrees when recruiting new employees; manufacturing (69% favor skills, 46% favor degrees), telecom (66% versus 50%), energy and utilities (64% versus 50%), and high tech (69% versus 55%) were the sectors, where this was most pronounced. Many also emphasize critical skills, instead of critical roles, while planning the workforce. These trends are likely to get stronger in a hybrid work scenario.   

Provide Purpose to the New Workforce

In another survey, 68% of over five million respondents from 95 countries preferred a hybrid working arrangement, and 24% said they wanted to work remotely all the time. Younger workers, who value flexibility and mobility, are especially in favor of remote work. Unlike old-school workers for whom compensation and career growth matter the most, millennial and younger employees seek purpose and meaning in the work they do. Hence organizations seeking to build and sustain a young workforce should offer at least some remote working opportunities and a chance to fulfill a purpose bigger than maximizing shareholder returns. Further, they should align purpose and values with talent strategy by factoring both in employee performance evaluation and recognition decisions. This realization was reflected in the survey, where three out of four respondents said their recruitment strategy and employee retention activities were very or extremely aligned with their organization’s purpose.

Make It Worthwhile to Come to the Office

Enterprises know they cannot roll back the remote work choices introduced during the pandemic. However, a significant number believe in-office work is best for business. Leaving aside productivity, which as mentioned earlier, depends a lot on the industry, other organizational gains of bringing knowledge workers back into the office include better collaboration (47%), spontaneous interactions (45%), improvement in performance (45%), opportunities for innovation (44%) and maintaining corporate culture (43%). The last is particularly significant because, before the pandemic, visibility in the office was highly valued in many organizations, especially by their business leaders.  

Companies asking employees to return to the office will need to back that demand with superior on-site work experience. Hence their work model should allow for things, such as communication boundaries for employees working in different modes or direct incentives for in-person work.

Summing up

Globally, businesses acknowledge the reality of the new world of hybrid work. But opinion is still divided on whether this should be the way forward. In the WSJI survey, only high-tech industry respondents supported remote working for their knowledge workers going forward (63% supported this). In industries, such as manufacturing and retail, where in-person work is important, the work-from-office versus home decision causes a fair amount of ambivalence. Ultimately, the choice is not this over that, but what combination works best for each organization, given its specific business and skilling needs, strategic goals, and culture.

Author Bio

Srikantan Moorthy is the EVP, Head - US Delivery Operations and Global Head of Education, Training & Assessments at Infosys and possesses over three decades of experience in the IT industry. Prior to his current role, Moorthy served as Senior Vice President and Head of Education & Research at Infosys, where his primary responsibility was talent development through competency building, an initiative to which he was a key contributor. He has worked in several facets of the business encompassing both strategy and operations during his career in the professional services industry. Connect Srikantan Moorthy