Will Remote Workers Get Left Behind in the Hybrid Office?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I was at a company that tried to mitigate this by forcing in-office employees to do their meetings and collaboration digitally even if they were right next to each other. It wasn’t fun. We ended up having clandestine meetings and being worried about being caught talking to each other about work, as ridiculous as it sounds. There was even some question about whether we were allowed to go to lunch together because it might make the remote employees excluded, so we’d have to eat lunch secretly together. Not a great solution.
Unfortunately it’s a difficult topic because it requires a tacit admission that remote work has some disadvantages. Forcing everyone remote is the brute-force solution, but giving up those in-person benefits for the sake of leveling the playing field isn’t great for the company or team.
It works remarkably well, and there's no real appreciable change in office vs. remote. We definitely had a leg up because we were destributed previously, but I feel like this is a good model, as it makes you feel like you're not alone and you see your colleagues all day just like you do when you are in person.
That's quite unavoidable. This is also the consequence of trying to please everyone by going 'mixed', hybrid', etc.
The best, and perhaps only, way to avoid these issues and have everyone on a equal footing is to enforce the same for everyone in the team: everyone remote or everyone in office, or everyone remote x days a week and on site y days a week.