By Sonia Jaffe (opens in new tab) and Jenna Butler (opens in new tab)
What does hybrid mean?
Generally, ‘hybrid’ refers to a mix of co-located (in office or facility) and non-co-located work or workers. That mix can be within a single person or job, or it can be across individuals in a team, workforce, or group of people meeting.
- A hybrid worker: a person who spends some of their regular working hours in an office or other location shared with colleagues and some of their regular working hours working from their home or other location that is not shared with their work colleagues
- A hybrid team or workforce: a group where some people spend some of their time working from the same location. A team of hybrid workers is a hybrid team, but a team can also be hybrid without any hybrid workers if some of the workers are in-office and some are all-remote, or if everyone works in an office, but the team is split across multiple geographies.
- A hybrid meeting: a meeting where some attendees are co-located in one place and others somewhere else (either at home or another office)
For individuals, it is not obvious what cutoff to choose – someone who goes into the office twice a week is hybrid and someone who goes in twice a year is work-from-home, what about someone who goes in twice a month? The right threshold may depend on the context, but a useful starting point is to think of someone who works an average of at least one day a week in the office and at least one day a week at home as ‘hybrid.’ If someone works from home less than once a week, they are ‘mostly in-office’ and if someone goes into the office less than once a week, they are ‘mostly work-from-home.’
Microsoft’s Hybrid Workplace Flexibility Guide (opens in new tab) refers to a mix of workstyles across work site, work location (geography), and work hours. Microsoft’s policy uses a 50% threshold for needing manager approval and not having assigned on-campus office space, but that is a cutoff between ‘more-in-office hybrid’ and ‘more-at-home hybrid,’ not between hybrid and other modes.
The simple definitions and terminology can help us talk about hybrid work but should not mask the diverse implications and impacts it will have: on the timing of our workdays, formats of our meetings, the mix of tools we use, boundaries between our home and work lives and the nature of our relationships, teams, and social networks.
Other useful terms related to ‘hybrid’
Pre-Covid, work was often defined as working in a shared, consistent, company-owned space for a set number of hours. Earlier papers on ‘telecommuting’ (or hybrid work) such as that by Allen et al. (opens in new tab) were specifically looking at deviations from that pattern. The Covid pandemic caused work to shift drastically, and the new world of work is often referred to as ‘hybrid.’ However, the new world of work involves many facets such as: flexibility, non-standard employee/employer relationships, working-from-home, etc. Discussions will be clearer if we use different terms for the different aspects of work rather than lump them all under a ‘hybrid’ umbrella.
All-remote/remote
‘Remote’ is often used as the opposite of ‘co-located,’ but it is not a useful term unless it is clear what the person is remote from. Employees that never go into the office are remote from their co-workers, but an employee may also be remote from their collaborators if they work in a satellite office (either type of employee may be part of a hybrid team). ‘All-remote’ refers to companies that do not have office space, so all employees are remote from each other (at least most of the time, they may get together in-person yearly or quarterly).
Flexibility
For some people, hybrid work comes with flexibility – employee choice in location or hours or maybe other things like how work is done, whether to wear pajamas, etc. For instance, some people may now have the flexibility to go for a walk while listening to a meeting or do a yoga class between meetings and show up sweaty, or put in some hours on Saturday in order to go to the grocery store at 9am on Tuesday. Hybrid work does not have to be flexible and flexible work does not have to be hybrid (but flexibility is core to Microsoft’s own Hybrid Workplace Flexibility Guidelines (opens in new tab)).
Non-standard employee types (e.g. ‘gig work’)
The future of work may involve more people working for multiple employers, either through traditional contract work, gig work, or other evolutions of worker-employee relationships.
Geographic and time-zone dispersion
Hybrid or all-remote workforces allow for more dispersion in the geographic location of employees. If they do not have to go into the same office, employees may live in different cities, states or even countries. This can be particularly relevant for collaboration when people live in very different time zones and synchronous collaboration becomes challenging or impossible within a standard 9-5 day.
Working from home
Hybrid tends to involve some amount of working from home, but not everyone who works from home is hybrid: in addition to all-remote jobs that we discussed earlier, someone who goes to the office five days a week and then does more work in the evenings or weekends from home should not be considered hybrid.