Hybrid Workplaces Are Great, But May Feel Too Transactional

Serendipity is a very abstract concepts which suggests that innovation springs out of the white spaces of our lives — those chance meetings in hallways, at conferences, in lunchrooms, or even at parties. No one really knows how much serendipity contributes to the bottom line, and there is no way to measure it. Even more challenging is to try to replicate serendipity across virtual channels, which is a hit-or-miss proposition.

Nevertheless, two researchers out of the University of Oxford have taken a stab at measuring serendipity within today’s remote and hybrid workplaces. Their verdict: a mixed bag. Collaborative technologies do help bond hybrid and remote workplaces, but these tools and platforms still haven’t made the grade as far as replicating in-person settings, according to Jonathan Trevor and Matthias Holweg, both with Oxford, writing in MIT Sloan Management Review.

Organizations and the technology they employ have done a good job of keeping everyone connected and in tune with what’s going on, but still can’t fully replicate the innovation seen in face-to-face workplaces. Perhaps their most significant observations are how organizations face challenges getting people together in one place at the right time, and the fact that employees in the survey “complained that work had become more transactional and operational in the hybrid environment. They missed feeling engaged and noticed a decline in the infusion of new ideas.”

It’s not that remote or hybrid work arrangements aren’t working out — 90% of companies in the survey say productivity improved with moves to remote and hybrid. “The question, therefore, is less about whether to adopt hybrid work than how to do so,” Trevor and Holweg conclude.

At issue is how to capture and bottle serendipity, at least within digital settings. “Collaboration technology was relatively poor for fostering high-quality interactions, especially among people who didn’t know each other well and had loose network connections,” Trevor and Holweg say. “Forming meaningful relationships that engender shared ways of working and deep commitment was especially difficult.”

Relying entirely on digital collaboration tools also served to unravel corporate cultures, they also find. “With offices sparsely populated, chances diminished that the right people would experience the kind of creative collisions that ignite new ideas. The virtual environment is poorly suited for such serendipitous encounters.”

Managing hybrid organizations are balancing acts, Trevor and Holweg state. They make some recommendations for better capturing the spirit of serendipity in hybrid and remote workplace settings:

• Stop relying on electronic informal get-togethers: “Some managers in our sample tried to emulate spontaneity online with no-agenda virtual get-togethers,” the researchers state. “That, contrary to their purpose, required scheduling and often felt artificial. As the novelty disappeared, so did participants.”
• Calculate time: Calculate “the ratio of office work to remote work,” they urge. “Companies in our sample were approaching a still rough consensus on this. They expected that, on average, 60% of meetings would remain online — a dramatic increase over pre-pandemic levels.”
• Prioritize meetings: “There was a clear bias toward holding meetings to perform collaborative creative tasks — those associated with innovation and culture-building — in person,” Trevor and Holweg state.
• Separate and distinguish between “virtual” and “in-person” tasks: “Managers estimated that an average of 40% of employees’ work requires a physical presence,” they observe. “Those in-person tasks include problem-solving and unstructured exploration, which is similar to brainstorming, as well as things like serendipitous encounters and conversations. The remaining 60% of tasks could be performed remotely, using virtual collaboration when necessary. With careful scheduling, most knowledge workers would return to the office at least two days a week.”
• Get rid of corner offices — and other wastes of office real estate: Companies see remote work as a way to cut real-estate costs — but at the same time, need to maintain facilities that can accommodate employee gatherings. While companies in the survey planned a 40% reduction in floor space, that also means remaining space needs to be used more efficiently. “These smaller, less-populated offices also will be configured differently, and employees will operate differently within them. The top planned changes cited by our sample are additional social areas (80%), creativity spaces (75%), meeting rooms (74%), shared offices (74%), and hot-desking (71%). Corner offices are on their way out.”

Again, it’s difficult to measure the impact of in-person serendipitous exchanges of ideas of information. But hybrid arrangements need to keep all doors open.