This report by Tap’d Solutions focuses on the term “hybrid working” and how it has become part of our vocabulary, a key Google search term and in cases, a reason why we have stayed or left our job. Hybrid working is not new, even though some commentators seem to think it is. It was in our midst long before the pandemic hit yet, in most cases, it was ad hoc and informal in our approach to it.
But now in this post-pandemic world, many job roles and functions have been accelerated by pandemic lockdowns into a “hybrid first” working style expectation by current employees and applicants. Attempts to force workers into the office for the majority or all of their time has been often met with resistance and has soured organisation cultures and engagement levels.
One of the biggest legacies from the Covid-19 pandemic has been the accelerated change in working practices across almost all industries, job professions and global locations. The term “hybrid working” has become part of our vocabulary, a key Google search term and, in cases, a reason why we have stayed or left our job. Hybrid working is not new, even though some commentators seem to think it is. It was in our midst long before the pandemic hit yet, in most cases, it was ad hoc and informal in our approach to it. Home working was a day of admin catch up, not a day full of communication on video platforms.
But now in this post-pandemic world, many job roles and functions have been accelerated by pandemic lockdowns into a “hybrid first” working style expectation by current employees and applicants. Attempts to force workers into the office for the majority or all of their time has been often met with resistance and has soured organisation cultures and engagement levels. Before the pandemic I remember writing, like others, “future of work” blogs as we approached 2020, imagining what the world would be like in 2030. Little did we know that some of what we were writing about, such as flexible working and communication technology advancements, would be accelerated into being by 2021 rather than a slow evolution over a decade which would allow our “unwritten cultural norms” to adjust to new technology use, just like the noughties introduced smartphones into our lives where we learned new cultural norms as upgrades were made to our phones.
Well, here we are with hybrid working as a long-term activity for most of us, whether it is welcome or not. At Tap’d our recent observations, discussions with HR professionals and business leaders and research have highlighted to us that the substantial change our workplaces are undergoing will not be successful without support and input from organisation leaders. If we rely on happenstance to get us through then there is risk that employee engagement will fall, the loss of our best talent, leading to potential decreases in productivity and declining market positions. Indeed, a study by Toscano and Zappalà in 2021 showed that engagement level, along with hindrance stress, were the biggest predictors of intention to leave virtual working during the pandemic. We need to understand the drivers of changing engagement levels in our hybrid working teams.
For this reason, we at Tap’d, decided to create this report that brings together understanding of the shifting external cultural and political forces and observed changing employee expectations with employee engagement theories and some of the latest post-Covid research on engagement to try and help the reader understand why we are seeing some of the behaviours and reactions to hybrid working today. By doing this we hope to germinate new thinking and ideas that might enhance what organisations are trying to achieve around engaging hybrid, virtual and dispersed teams.