The topic of hybrid working isn’t going away. It feels like each week another company instructs its employees to ‘RTO’ (return to office), with culture and collaboration the most common justifications.

Barclays and JP Morgan are just two of the latest, asking employees to be in the office three and five days a week, respectively. And Lloyds Bank is taking office attendance into account when deciding senior executives’ bonuses.

Alan Sugar weighed in on the discussion last week, saying young people “just want to sit at home”. Earlier this month, former M&S and Asda boss Stuart Rose said working from home was "not proper work".

My guess is that most CEOs who reverse their hybrid working policies never really tried that hard to make them work.

Hybrid working doesn’t just mean letting your employees work from home two days a week.

For hybrid to work, you need to rethink everything about how and where you work. And it needs to be managed properly.

I love this example from REA Group in Australia. Their ‘The Way We Work’ guide was first written in 2021 and updated in 2023 and covers everything you need in a hybrid working policy.

I especially like how they’ve applied their six values to how they work and how they’ve identified ‘moments’ that help people decide where they should work.

For example, sales kick-offs, team building, welcomes and farewells should all be face to face. While onboarding, interviews and problem solving are ‘preferred face to face’. Team meetings, stand-ups and 1:1s can work well anywhere. And town halls work best virtually.

Another great example is GitLab’s ‘All remote’ policy. As the name suggests, all GitLab employees work remotely (they have a vested interest as they sell tech for remote working). Their hugely detailed remote handbook looks at the various ways of working, from fully remote to no-remote and everything in between.

So, how do you go about creating your own successful hybrid model? By asking the people who actually do the work. Here’s some of the ways you might go about it.

1. Start by getting a baseline

A simple survey to all your employees can tell you things like:

How people are working currently
Where people would ideally like to work
Which tasks people think need to be done together and when’s best to work from home
What else matters to people about flexible working eg climate change

You can then combine this with your employee data on role type, location, tenure, team size etc to get a baseline of how things are working today and what could work in the future.

2. Create a champs group

You’re bound to have people in your organisation who are particularly interested in hybrid working and want to be more involved.

Do a shout-out for volunteers and bring together people who represent the different parts of your business. Think representatives from different roles, teams, locations and levels of seniority.

This champs group can help drive the project and design your way of working. They can bring the opinions of their teams and be a reliable communication channel so that people can feel involved.

3. Ask your managers

As well as the people doing the work, managers have the best idea of what’s working and what’s not when it comes to teamwork, innovation, decision-making and employee wellbeing. So get their input too.

You can plan a structured session where you set managers the task of coming up with recommendations.

I remember when Microsoft Australia moved to a new way of working, we held sessions with managers who shared their ideas and concerns — and that pretty much wrote the policy.

4. Let teams decide

When it comes to your policy, you’ll have decisions made at the exec level that affect the whole company. But there’s also a lot you can leave to the team level, for example:

When / if the team comes together in person

Ways you’ll welcome new members to the team and help them settle in

How to make sure no one is disadvantaged if they work more remotely than other members of the team

How they’ll spend time together socially.

5. Redesign your communication channels

If you rely on email as your main communication channel, that’s not going to support hybrid working.

It needs to be easy for teams to communicate and collaborate from different locations. Tools like Slack or Teams are essential, as is a system that sorts and stores teams’ info (Monday, for example). Again, the best people to design and shape how they work are your employees.

You also need to think about how you come together as a company to keep everyone clear on your strategy and the progress you're making. That could be an in-person or virtual kick-off or all-hands.

6. Keep up-to-date

There’s lots you can do to tap into the collective knowledge and experience of your employees — to stay abreast of any issues with how hybrid or remote working is going.

You can add questions to your engagement survey, run polls and competitions, meet regularly with your champs and showcase stories from teams and individuals where hybrid is working well.

Contact us if you’d like to consult your employees on how best to arrange how you work together.

Do you trust your employees to design their work?