Hybrid Without Intent: The Silent Risk Undermining Your Team
I’m Exploring the benefits, the missed opportunities and increased risks of remote work: Expanding on the benefits and opportunities through strategic and intentional hybrid arrangements.
The other day, I came across a company planning to monitor employees closely to enforce their three-days-in-office rule. It saddened me—not just because of the lost potential, but also the frustration it’s bound to create. It made me reflect on the real pitfalls of hybrid work policies that lack intentional design.
“Traitor?” An inner voice of suspicion questions my thinking. As an early and very happy adopter of remote work (last millennium), it has provided me the opportunity to dive down rabbit holes for concentrated, uninterrupted, and very productive work. I get a lot done: my productive-monster is content, and I can close the laptop before dinner and leave it closed!
“remote work provided extra time to focus and achieve outside of meetings”
Building and leading a team through the pandemic, remote work provided extra time to focus and achieve outside of meetings. Yes, adjustments had to be made to build and enable a collaborative and engaged team, and to ensure the team members understood, accepted and maintained their individual accountability through a very large and highly complex implementation. It was definitely more effort, so the remote-bonus, for me, was re-purposing the almost 2-hour commute into focused, productive work.
“observations are mounting that the potential for growth, collaboration and resilience are being lost ”
So I admit a bit of a struggle now, trying to maintain my perspective of those benefits of remote work, with what I am recognizing as risk, particularly in these times of uncertainty: While remote plus intentional, strategic and well planned hybrid arrangements can be immensely productive, observations are mounting that in Remote + blanket Hybrid arrangements the potential for growth, collaboration and resilience are being lost: Organizations may not be experiencing issues at the moment, however, they may be exposing themselves to considerable risk.
I wrote in September 2024 (recently re-posted) about Intentional Hybrid working policies, skating lightly over some of these topics from the benefits perspective of planned on-site-time together. Now I’m looking at the risks to the organization and teams of remote work. To be clear, I believe many of these could be mitigated when coupled with Intentional Hybrid arrangements. (Vs. hybrid without clear intentions: blanket policies such as “employees must be in the office 2 days a week” – without set specifics or intention for the use of time on-site).
I have identified what I believe are 10 inter-related risks which I have clustered into 4 categories:
Productivity
Creativity to Resilience
Culture, and Talent Retention
The elusive value of spontaneous, high-impact micro-conversations—those unexpected encounters with colleagues, leaders, or rising stars that spark insights and drive connection.
I’ll be exploring each category in coming posts, and also explore how Strategic and Intentional Hybrid solutions may mitigate these to some degree.
I am a leadership coach: And the Leader of Impact Program may also help you address many of the risks I’ll be exploring.