Even before the Covid pandemic necessitated working remotely, technologies to enable remote work had been growing at a steady rate. Employees wanted more flexible working opportunities to improve their work-life balance, while businesses were looking for ways to employ skilled workers that may not live within commuting distance.
Then, in 2020, the global pandemic made remote work a necessity. Businesses had to quickly switch to work-from-home environments and began adopting tools to make it easy to collaborate and work from anywhere.
As employees started returning to the office, a middle ground between in-office and remote work emerged: hybrid work. With hybrid work, employees who prefer the structure of the workplace can work from an office, while those who prefer remote work can continue working from anywhere. Employees who prefer to find a balance between the two can also work from either location—perhaps two days from home and two days from the office.
The Hybrid Work Model
According to recent surveys, around 84% of businesses now take a hybrid approach to the workplace—a significant jump from 54% in 2022. A hybrid workplace, simply put, is any business environment that combines remote work with traditional in-office or onsite work.
Typically, this includes a group of team members who primarily work from the office, while others are free to work from anywhere, although the specifics can and will vary across businesses. Some businesses that are adopting a hybrid model set mandatory days for employees to work from the office while allowing them to work remotely during the rest of the week. Others allow employees to choose the balance that works best for them.
A hybrid environment supports employees who:
- Work in the office full-time
- Work remotely full-time
- Alternate between working remotely and in-office (regardless of which they favor)
Hybrid workplaces need to balance the needs of each of these types of workers, alongside the need for productivity and collaboration. And hybrid work is in demand: a Zippia survey determined that approximately 44% of employees prefer a hybrid model over working fully remotely or fully on-site, with around 55% preferring to work remotely at least three days a week.
A Gallup poll also found that a majority of hybrid workers (60%) do not want their employers to set a universal scheduling policy, and would prefer to choose the days they work. In fact, employee engagement tends to be higher when companies don’t require a set number of on-site days.
According to the poll, only 12% of hybrid employees want to spend four or five days working on-site, compared to 29% who prefer two on-site days (with Monday and Friday being unsurprisingly the most popular days for remote work).
Why Hybrid?
Before the days of hybrid work, employees typically followed the same work schedule in the same work environment. While this was expected and considered the normal way to work, it wasn’t the most effective.
Gartner found that, for organizations where employees work exclusively in the office, only 36% of staff were considered “high performers.” But for companies that use hybrid models, that increases to 55% of employees.
When companies had to switch to remote work during the Covid pandemic, they were able to experiment with new working styles and utilize cloud and digital tools for communication and collaboration. As it turned out, employees could be just as productive (if not more) when working remotely.
