Tag: hybrid

Hybrid work

I’m in a job that can broadly be described as “hybrid”. The mandate from HR is that we are are “expected to be in office three days a week, and live in the same city as the office”. Nobody really checks how often people go in to office, though I do end up going three times a week on average.

Of late, some tech “gurus” have taken on dunking on hybrid work. DHH of 37signals / Basecamp (I quite like his blog, in general) wrote that “hybrid combines the worst of in-person and remote“. Then, Paul Graham wrote some tweets on remote work. I quite like this one:

Back to hybrid work – I’m in a hybrid role now, where I go into office about three days a week on average, and stay home the other two days (in general, because Monday is crowded with long online meetings, and another day to do some “thinking work”). Different people in my company have different such strategies, and all come into office on their own schedules.

This is not the first time I’m doing “hybrid”. During my rather long independent consulting career, I largely worked from home but travelled to clients’ offices ever so often (once a week if in Bangalore; one week a month if not; on average). It was about getting the best combination of focussed work and collaboration. It worked then, and it works now.

In fact, as far back as 2007 I was in a hybrid office. I was in what is now called a “global capability centre”, and interacting with headquarters in Texas meant being available for calls later in the evening. Consequently, we could work from home a few days a week as long as we were available for these calls.

Coming as it did at the beginning of my career, it was a disaster. I slacked like nobody’s business. Less time spent in office meant less time understanding parts of the business not directly concerned with what I was working on. Most of my development in that period happened due to my independent reading and writing, rather than due to my work.

Now, once again, I’m in a company with “multiple headquarters”. This means that irrespective of where you are, you end up spending a considerable amount of time on video calls with people in other locations. According to DHH, video calls when you are in office is a waste of office time. I agree with him there. The way I manage is through my schedule.

Of course, it helps that I have a reputation in office that I don’t like to do unnecessary meetings – and all matters need to be resolved to the extent possible in text messages or email. This means I spend less time on video calls than many of my colleagues, and when I find a lot of them appearing on a day, i spend that day at home.

Also, I have an unspoken agreement with my (rather small) team on days of the week when we’ll meet in office, and so the technical discussions I find so difficult to have online can be had in person.

Hybrid primarily works because of optionality (a rather underappreciated concept). In my line of business, things can get so technical that there is a limit on the complexity of discussions that can be had online. Similarly, things can get so technical that we need undisturbed alone time to think through some of the solutions.

Hybrid works because it allows for both – it allows you to have your me time for your deep thinking, and the optionality of summoning a teammate to office “tomorrow” for some deep collaboration. The former is unavailable in an all-in office; the latter is not possible if you’re fully remote (I’ve experienced this during the pandemic years).

Yes, hybrid means you need to live within commuting distance of office (sometimes during interviews, I see candidates furiously googling for “richmond circle” or “residency road” when I tell them our office is there. It’s a strong signal that they’re not going to join 😛 ). However, that you only need to commute twice a week (rather than 5 times a week) means you can choose to live a little bit farther.

Yes, it does make hiring harder (compared to all-remote), but once hired, people can be far more productive in a hybrid model. With the option of doing deep work without the danger / fear of someone poking you (this literally happened to me yesterday) when you’re in the middle of deep work!

So yes, put me down as someone who likes the hybrid model of work.

Formal interactions

Over the last couple of years, as the covid-19 pandemic has hit us and people have been asked to work from home, there has been a raging debate on the utility of office, especially for “knowledge work” (where the only “tool” you need is a computer).

Some companies such as Twitter have announced a “remote work in perpetuity”. Others such as Goldman Sachs have declared that remote work is inefficient and people need to return to offices asap. I probably was closer to the twitter position not so long ago, but now I think I’m firmly in the GS camp.

If you look at all the articles on remote work (I think Derek Thompson of The Atlantic has written some interesting pieces on this), one of the main arguments in favour of getting people to office is “informal interactions”, “bumping into colleagues”, “water cooler conversations”, etc. These kind of unstructured interactions can lead to new thoughts, which lead to innovation which lead to growth, goes the saying.

And in response to this, some companies have been trying to replicate these informal interactions in the zoom world. Instead of bumping into a colleague, you are forced to do a random “coffee chat” with a random colleague. There are online events. The hope here is that they will stand in for offline informal interactions.

Whether these events actually work or not, I don’t know. However, as I come close to a year in my job, it is not the informal interactions that I care about when I think of office vs remote. It’s “formal interactions”.

The lightbulb moment occurred earlier this week. I’m working on a fairly challenging problem with two others in my team. Two of the three of us were in office, and started talking about this problem. We drew some stuff on the whiteboard. Did some handwaving. And soon we had a new idea on how to approach this problem.

Now the task at hand was to explain this to the third guy, who is in another city. We opened Google Meet. We opened a “JamBoard” in that. I tried to replicate the whiteboard drawing, but he couldn’t see my handwaving (you realise that in video calls, video and screen share are two disjoint things!). It took a whole lot of effort to get the idea across.

This is not an isolated incident. In terms of collaborative work, I’ve found on multiple occasions that simply sitting together for a short duration of time can achieve so much more than what you can do in online meetings.

Another thing is that I’ve found myself to get exhausted faster in online meetings. Maybe I speak louder. Maybe having to look in one particular direction for the duration of the meeting is stressful. Offline meetings I can keep going and going and going (especially when on methylphenidate). Online, 2-3 meetings and I’m exhausted.

And then you have new colleagues and onboarding. Employees at an early stage require an extremely high degree of collaborative work. You need to “show stuff” to your new colleagues. Sometimes you might just take over their laptop. There are times when they need interventions that in the off-line world take 2 minutes, but online you need to schedule a meeting for.

Notice that none of the stuff I’ve mentioned so far is “informal”. Maybe it’s the nature of the work – involving deep thinking and complicated ideas. Remote work is absolutely brilliant in terms of the ability to shut yourself off without distractions and do deep work. The moment you need to collaborate, though, you need to be in the same physical space as your collaborators.

It’s unlikely I’ll ever want to go back to office full time (as I said, working from home is brilliant for deep work). However, I do look forward to a permanent hybrid model, meeting in office at least once a week. Hopefully the pandemic will allow us to get to this sooner rather than later.

Oh, and informal interactions are only a bonus.