Let's say you're on a hybrid schedule and you need to be in the office three days per week. You walk into the office on your designated anchor day when the whole team is supposed to be there, and you're excited to see the team, except very few people from your team are actually there and the ones who are scattered all over the building because all the good desks were taken. You spend the day on teams calls with people who are in the office just not sitting anywhere near you. Well, this is hybrid work in 2025. Somehow both everywhere and nowhere, all at once. If hybrid work arrangements were a product, they would have a plethora of one star reviews. The onboarding experience is confusing, the navigation is inconsistent, and the user feedback brutal. The good news, like any flawed product, hybrid work can be redesigned.

So today we're talking about why hybrid work isn't working and how we can redesign it to actually deliver on the promise of flexibility, connection, and even productivity. Now, hybrid can mean lots of things. Hybrid sometimes means that you're in the office a certain number of days or hours per week and working from home a certain number of days or hours per week. Hybrid also could mean that some people are on site permanently and others are working from home permanently, but come to the office maybe on a quarterly basis or maybe just one or two times per year. Now, there's all kinds of other variations as well, but I just want to acknowledge that hybrid means a lot of different things. Now let's look at what's going on with the return to office hybrid work movement. So leadership wants people back in the office. Across almost every industry sector, even the ones who were told they were going to be permanently remote have been called back to the office.

Now leadership is saying and citing lots of different studies on productivity. Now here I just want to acknowledge that the results are really mixed. When you get down into the nitty gritty of these studies, there are some people who are absolutely more productive when working from their home office, and there are others who are absolutely more productive or I'm working from the main office, the headquarters, if you will. So I'm going to acknowledge those results are mixed and they are highly individual. Now, people want flexibility, and the results there are very clear. Study after study have shown that employees want the flexibility of work arrangements where they can work from home some of the time or all of the time. And what the results also show in those studies is that employees are happier when they get that flexibility and when they get that opportunity to work from home. Now, I do have to point out that a company's foremost job is not to make its employees happy.

Companies are either trying to give a return to their shareholders for those that are, you know, are either publicly traded or have owner investment that are looking to see a return on that investment. And they, their foremost other job is to deliver products and services to their customers that are going to then create that value for the customer. That, and even if it's a nonprofit, but to create the value for the customer that is going to then sort of prove why they're in existence. So the company's job is not to make employees happy. Now, it doesn't hurt when employees are happy, because when employees are happy and more engaged, they're going to be more productive, they're going to contribute more, they're going to feel like they've got some skin in the game. So we do want employees to be happy, but we also have to just keep that in check that is not an organization's foremost job. All right, now let's just get back to the whole idea of hybrid is not working and what can we do about it? So I want to go through the three main reasons based on my research and my conversations with folks like you about what's not working.

And then I'm going to give you some ideas for each of those three things that aren't working for you to work on fixing it. Because we want this to work. We really do. I mean, if we go back to those happiness studies that people are happier when they have the flexibility of working from home some days and working on site other days. And again, whatever hybrid means for your organization, we want that because it's going to create a more engaged workforce. It's going to create a more satisfied worker base. And there's all kinds of upside for that, both for the individual and for the organization. All right, so let's dive into what are the three top things that aren't working, and then, of course, what to do about it.

First is that personal relationships are largely missing in the hybrid workplace. Now, I want to tie each of these ideas to a usability or user experience heuristic as well. So here it's a match between the system and the real world is the usability heuristic we want to talk about. So that is that things should be familiar to the user. It should land at not only the workplace, but also your coworkers should land as something that feels familiar. Because when things feel familiar, then you can ask for help, you can joke around, you can, you know, have that sense of support in the workplace from those relationships. Now, I think there is a mismatch between the system and the real world because workplace relationships don't feel like work friendships, like real friendships in the way that they used to.

Because remember again, and I've talked about this many times before on the podcast where you had your coworker who became your work friend, who became your real friend. Now in the hybrid work arrangement that is so much more challenging to have happen organically. I mean, it just used to happen organically because you'd have little snippets of conversation about your personal life or you'd overhear somebody on a personal phone call at work or whatever. I mean, just all these different ways that we would connect with one another. Now some of you might say, oh, but Janel, I do have work friends who are my real friends. Now here I want to dive into that a little bit more. Now if you were working in the organization pre pandemic and were going in face to face and you knew people face to face and had those personal relationships, and then due to the pandemic, you started working from home and those hybrid relationships now are a follow on result of that, I don't doubt that those relationships absolutely have persisted and persevered through the various things we've been through in the last five years. I don't doubt that at all.

Where the real challenge though comes is for folks who were working in the organization pre pandemic and then the new folks who came on since then, those folks establishing strong working relationships that become friendships that become like real relationships and the people who were hired post pandemic along with other people who were hired post pandemic, it's just much harder when you've got one or both parties who weren't there when the organic relationship building happened, say up to early 2020. So again, if you were there before the pandemic and you've got coworkers who were there before the pandemic and you're all in the same department, that's going to work just fine. You probably have very deep and lasting relationships. But when teams change and so it could be lateral moves within the organization, that sort of reshuffling happens. And you just don't know those people that well, or new teammates come into the organization or even new managers come into the organization, all of those things jeopardize those deep held relationships that we had. Now let's just take a look at what happens when you have those strong relationships. Well, you can ask for help.

People who don't have strong close ties at work are much less likely to ask for help. They're also much less likely to give help even if they knew how to give it, because nobody's asking them. What the research is also showing is that people are very much more heads down on their individual productivity metrics, especially because productivity has been called into question during the return to office. And so people are trying really hard to prove that they're being productive when working from home. And that often means working on their focus work. So putting themselves read on teams as unavailable so that they can get their own work done to high degree of reliability and a high degree of quality. And what that means then is that they're not available for those quick questions. You know, the quick questions that you used to like, swing by somebody's office and say, hey Janel, you got a minute? And then you'd ask me your quick question.

And then we'd end up shooting the breeze about something else and just having that familial conversation that made us feel close and connected. So the next time we, one of us needed something from each other, we had that foundation of a relationship there. So it's all of those little things that lead up to those stronger relationships that are missing in the hybrid work world. Now that's the first thing. Let's move on to the second thing. So the, and this is entirely related, but the workspace doesn't support collaboration. So and here we can tie this, send this idea to flexibility and efficiency of use to map it back to user experience criteria. And so flexibility and efficiency of use says that the way things are arranged speeds up the interaction.

Okay, so here, let's just dive into the workspace. So what many places and what many workplaces have done is shrunken their commercial real estate footprint in this post pandemic world. And when they shrink their post, when they shrink their commercial footprint, there's just not as much space. And so that leads to you not necessarily having your own dedicated cubicle or office anymore. You maybe did pre pandemic, but now you're sharing that space with somebody else who's working alternate days, or more likely you've got hoteling or what some organizations are calling hot desks going on where you just come in each day or each day that you're in the office and you find a place to plunk down and you can plug in your laptop to a docking station. Perhaps there's a second monitor that's if you're lucky, some places don't have that. But then also just these wide open spaces so that you can see who's around, but it leaves absolutely no privacy for, let's say you're discussing caseload or you're on a call with a client that you just don't want to be overheard by the other people sitting around you. So then you'd have to have that private conversation.

You have to get up and go move to a workspace that has a door that closes. And those office spaces are at a premium. Even if you're just going to drop in and use it for a 15 minute phone call, it's really hard to find those spaces in many of your organizations. And you know, I've been on a lot of different calls and presentations from different commercial real estate companies and they make the space look so state of the art. And it absolutely may, may well be absolutely state of the art, but people do need to sit near each other if they're going to collaborate and also, you know, to learn informally from one another, to ask those quick questions and so on. And so if you've got this amazing state of the art space, but sit near your colleagues, really, I mean, what is the point? So you may have heard of anchor days and your organization may have anchor days, and that is the idea that your entire intact team, whether that's a project team or whether that is just in the reporting structure on the organizational chart, on the anchor day, your entire team comes in together so that you're really maximizing the point of being on site together so that you can have that collaboration and that, you know, casual learning from one another and so on. But if you can't sit together, like literally, what is the point? So that is the second thing that is wrong with the hybrid workplace today.

Workspace is not supporting that collaboration. Which leadership is saying so is so important for coming back on site. The third thing, and you've probably heard me talk about this before, I mean, I talk about. I've got a couple podcast episodes on hybrid meetings and virtual meetings. And I teach this on almost a weekly basis to one or more of my clients, how to have more effective meetings in the virtual and hybrid environment. What the research shows and what my experience in talking with folks just like you is, is that meetings aren't working. And so here we can go to a usability heuristic of minimalist design. And the idea behind minimalist design is that the relevant information is the most important and any irrelevant information is competing with the relevant information for our attention.

And so right here, you know where I'm going with this folks? I'm going right to multitasking. So now let me, before I dig into multitasking, let me just say there are a couple of types of meetings that are absolutely working in the hybrid environment. So I don't want to let those go unnoticed. One on one meetings are absolutely working. And in fact, if you've heard me talk about this recently, you've probably heard me say if your organization is using teams, this is one of the things that Microsoft absolutely got right. When you log into a teams meeting, say with one other person, the other person is big on the screen and you are small down in the corner if you have not turned your own own self view off. And that is a wonderful design for you to be focused on the other person. What the research shows in online, when we're on video online meetings is that we over index on looking at ourselves.

And so when Microsoft makes the other person really big, you're less likely to watch yourself in a performative fashion in that meeting. And then that makes you just like self conscious and all the rest. So one on one meetings are working well and small intact team meetings are working well as well as small project meetings. Now when I say small, I'm talking like three, four, five people, maybe six tops. When we get larger numbers than that, hybrid and virtual complicates things because two things happen. One is the energy in the room takes over. When you've got, let's say six people on site in a conference room and then another six people who are working from home or regional offices other places that day, what happens? And again, this is reminiscent of pre pandemic when we had virtual meetings and we had that black Polycom conference call phone in the middle of the table, the energy in the room took over and everybody forgot that those other people were logged in on that Polycom phone. Now if you've got a good conference room, and increasingly I'm seeing my clients do this right where there's a big screen on one end of the conference room and anybody who's logged in is on teams or whatever platform you're using and is big up on that screen so we see those people as well as the mic drops in the room and the camera, multiple camera angles in the room are picking everybody up.

So increasingly the technology is accommodating for that. But still I'm going to say up to let's say half a dozen people logged in. Because otherwise, even if you've got a really big screen, if everybody's up there in a tiny Brady Bunch box, it's not necessarily going to create the feel of them being in the room. And so again, the energy in the room is going to take over and those remote attendees are going to left feeling alienated and disengaged. Which brings me to part two. Anyone who's disengaged is going to multitask. Even if it's a team ground rule that you're not supposed to multitask during meetings, you're going to not be a useful contributor if you're disengaged. And we need to do one thing in the meeting, and that is be in the meeting at all times and do just that one thing.

And again, that goes back to that idea of minimalist design. We really want to focus on being in the moment in the meeting and contributing in the meeting. Okay, so those are our top three things that are wrong with the hybrid work environment. Number one, personal relationships are missing or just not as strong as they need to be. Number two, the workspace does not support collaboration. And number three, are remote and hybrid meetings just are not working. All right, so let's dive into the fixes because I promised fixes and I'm going to give you a handful of ideas, like three ideas for each of these problems. And my wish for you, my call to action for you is to take, take one of them on this week, experiment with it, try, try it out. Drop me a DM on social media or hit me up on email and let me know if you tried it and what's working.

Okay, so let's go to the personal relationship fixes first. The first is flip those collaboration days to connection days. So again you have that anchor day when everybody comes into the office in the intact team or the project team that day. But instead of using those in office days for back to back meetings and, and like solid collaboration, at least half of one each anchor day per like half a day per month purely for relationship building. So no agenda, no project work, think office hours, think show and tell or reverse mentorship where the junior staff are going to teach the senior staff something new. It could be a tech hack, it could be a Gen Z trend, you could watch a TED talk together and, and then have some discussion around it. You could invite someone like me in to do some workshop where you're doing relationship building and some team building that maybe ties in some of your work product but is really more about strengthening the relationship.

Now, this might sound counterintuitive, and you're like, Janel, we don't have budget or time or anything to just do team building. That sounds like, you know, circa 1990s. I know it might be a little counterintuitive, but less structured work time in person is going to build those strong relationships, which is going to lead to more collaboration and easier collaboration later. So it's kind of like you need to slow down at first to build those strong relationships, and then you can just naturally speed up. All right, so that's idea number one.

Idea number two, pair people for relationship building. So this is aimed at the new employee, but initially I would love it if you rolled this out across the entire team just for practice and to create this as part of the culture. Now, again, let's hearken back to pre pandemic days. It was common practice to pair a new employee with a different partner for various periods of time. So I remember when I was in corporate. Now again, this goes way, way back because it's been, gosh, 15 plus years since I was in corporate. But when a new employee started, I would assign that new employee with a different person to go to lunch with every single day. Some of them were intact team members, some of them were project team members, and some of them were just interdisciplinary folks so that people could get to know people who maybe sat nearby us but weren't in the same disciplinary because, you know, it's just fun to meet people and get to know the people that you work with. So I recommend doing this absolutely. With your new folks.

Again, these could be virtual lunches, virtual meetings, virtual coffees, that sort of thing. Or for the hybrid schedule, make sure that those two folks are in on the same day in one of those first couple of work weeks, and ideally have a bunch of those folks for. For the brand new people. Now, to really enculturate the organization in this, I recommend rolling it out carte blanche across the organization or at least across your team or your division, just so people get in the habit of it. And it creates that orchestrated connection that we very purposefully used to cultivate previously. I think a lot of that has dropped off with how we onboard folks in this post pandemic era.

Okay, and then the third idea here is pair people for micro connections. I've talked about this before on the pandemic or on the pandemic. I have talked about this before on the podcast. Um, but it's been a minute. So this would be pairing people intentionally for coffee talks, like once a month even it doesn't have to be once a week. And the idea here is it's a 15 minute connection with one person and that rotates and every single month you're given another person. Um, you could use random pairing, pairing through AI that could do some auto generation for you. There's also apps that do that, but the idea is just to simply connect pairs of employees and their assignment is to have a 15 minute hybrid coffee chat once, twice a month, and then next month you're going to pair them up with somebody else.

And to make it stick, you could give some creative prompts like show me something on your desk that has a story to it. Or, you know, sometimes people are like unwilling to talk about their personal lives and various types of things like that. So, you know, tell me about the piece of clothing you're wearing. Now, maybe there's no fun story to it, but at least it will invite a conversation about how they shop or hate to shop or whatever. Okay, and this is going to create a little bit of serendipity that the hybrid work environment tends to kill.

All right, so let me just give you those three relationship fixes, quickly summarized. Number one, one, flip those collaboration days to connection days and use a lot of unstructured time so people can build relationships. Number two, pair people for relationship building. And again, this would be going forward for new employees only, but initially start it with everyone and then pair people for micro connections. So this is just assigning somebody a coffee buddy for a period of time, a couple weeks or a month.

All right, let's move on to the second one. Workspaces do not support collaboration. And let's look at some fixes there. Number one, create micro neighborhoods, not open offices. So instead of everyone fighting for hot desks in that hoteling style thing, reserve entire areas or pods that are the size of actual teams so that people aren't fighting for various spots. You know in advance that your team is on the third floor in section A, where there's a variety of different workspaces. Maybe there's some conference tables, maybe there's some high tops, maybe there's cubic close, maybe there's some doors with close, but your group is assigned to that whole area. So all 15 of you or whatever are gonna sit in that area.

Now, when you can reserve space like that on anchor days, it's like reserving a block of hotel rooms instead of reserving a single hotel room. Okay? So over time, people will know where to find each other and if you can always fall into the habit of reserving the that same block. And of course, this is going to involve facility. For those of you in larger organizations, this is going to involve some facilities management and some restructuring of how spaces and offices are reserved, but it is absolutely worthwhile. Now, it may seem a little bit counterintuitive in that it's making the office less flexible, but it's going to make it more functional because you'll actually get to spend time with your team on those anchor days instead of being all scattered around the building.

All right, so number two, designate collaboration studios for hybrid work. So convert one or two meeting rooms into those hybrid optimized spaces. Again, think multiple camera angles share digital whiteboards so the remote people can actually participate. And again, I was mentioning before, we're getting better at this. And in increasingly, as I go into organizations to do consulting work and to do meeting facilitation, I'm finding that the technology is getting so it's there. But just make sure, especially in the hybrid workspace, that you've got rooms like that that you can sign out and that your whole team can be in there, along with the people who are working remote on those days to really make the most of collaboration and have better meetings. So the point is to make remote employees feel like full participants, not spectators, not the ones who are getting forgotten, not the ones who are going to get disengaged and start multitasking.

And if you want to frame this in UX terms, friction cost between digital participation and physical participation is going to get reduced. So we're going to take that friction out of it. So everybody's going to feel much more like they're participating in the same meeting. All right?

And then the third idea for workspaces is to put in some physical breadcrumbs. So breadcrumbs are a UX concept that shows the user how they got to where they are. So the path is clear and there's some sort of physical evidence. Like if you've ever done a Google search and you found yourself like deep into the antioxidant properties of a blueberry, and you're like, how did I get here? Well, you can look back up at the top of your Google page and see what your search terms were, so you can look at those search terms at the top of the page, that is leaving some physical evidence or some breadcrumbs. Now, we can do that in the workspace as well.

So we can have rolling whiteboards that don't get erased, or we can have digital whiteboards that can get pulled back up. So when we're not in that space, we can pull that same digital whiteboard up from our meeting last week or two days ago. Maybe somebody else was using the space in between. So it can be digital and it can also be physical. Now when it is physical, another idea that I've seen, it doesn't have to necessarily just be related to the work. So another physical idea of this that I've seen. And this goes, man, way back pre pandemic, I was working with an organization that was starting to roll out remote work just because they were short on space. And so in that specific organization, a third of employees were working from home for one week and then another third home from the next week and another third home the next week.

And these were people who had a long history of working very closely with one another. They had been co workers, become work friends, become real friends. And what they did is they put up a really big whiteboard where people could write notes to each other on. And so people were writing notes to the people who weren't there on the same week that they were. And those notes would be waiting for them on Monday morning when they came in, when it was their week to work in the office. And they could then literally have a conversation with their co worker and, you know, draw cute little pictures and stuff like that. So it could be project based. You might, as you think about project based, again, it could be that physical whiteboard on wheels that you roll off into a closet when you're there.

Or it could be a digital whiteboard. You can almost think of that as like a murder board. If you're a, if you're a fan of only murders in the building like I am, there's always a murder board that's showing like the dotted lines connecting various things. So it would be that sort of physical board that connects people, or it could be that, you know, much more social board that I was talking about. But this is going to keep collaboration alive across time and space so that when people are in the office, there is some, you know, is some actual breadcrumb that they can follow. So again, the quick review of how workspaces don't support collaboration and some fixes, first of all, create those micro neighborhoods so you're reserving a whole geographic area on a floor, not just a desk or two. Designate collaboration studios. So really well outfitted meeting rooms so that people feel like they're part of the action.

And number three, create those physical breadcrumbs so that there is some sense of connection across space and time. All right, now let's go into meetings and talk about some meeting fixes. And I mean, I could do a whole episode on this. It's been a minute since I've done an episode on hybrid meetings, so maybe I do need a whole episode on hybrid meetings. We'll put that in the queue soon. But right now I just want to give you three ideas for some quick fixes. The first one is what I call meeting zero. So before scheduling any meeting, the team must answer the question, can this be solved with a three minute loom video or a shared doc or sending an email instead? So make that a cultural rule that every meeting has to start with that check.

So you do that when you're scheduling the meeting. But then once the meeting begins, as it's being called to order, the question gets raised. Why did we need to be in person for this? Why couldn't this be? And if you're not familiar with Loom, Loom is a screen recording software. So you could do like picture and picture of yourself talking through an issue where you're showing, showing the spreadsheet or showing the slide deck or showing a webpage or whatever it is. Um, you don't have to use Loom by any means. You just hop into a teams meeting all by yourself and hit record and record that and send the teams meeting to other people. But once you get in the meeting, the first point of order should be the justification for why this needs to be a real meeting. Okay, so that is what I call meeting zero. So we are going to make sure this meeting needs to exist. And it's a little bit counterintuitive, but honest to goodness, the best meetings are the ones that you cancel because people get that discretionary time back on their calendar.

All right, number two, ban multitasking. And I have a fun twist on this one for you. Ban multitasking by embracing it. All right, now, once you've done your meeting 0, check to make sure that we need to have this meeting. Then the next thing you're going to say is, is, hey, if you're doing other work during this meeting, tell us what it is in the chat. Now, this sounds a little cheeky, but it forces people to confront the absurdity of trying to do two things at once.

And it often curbs the behavior naturally, because nobody wants to put in the chat that they're just answering a bunch of emails. Okay, so this is a little bit of humor being used as behavioral design because we're laughing at ourselves. Because usually our, our laughter on at this one is going to first of all be self directed because we're going to be like, okay, I can't believe I was actually going to try to proofread this report while I was in this meeting. Something's going to give and it's probably either going to be a very poorly proofread report or a very, very poorly executed meeting participation on my part, and quite likely both. So humor will act as your behavioral design.

All right, and then number three, this is a meeting review cycle. So once a month hold a short meeting review cycle meeting. Now that sounds a little counterintuitive, but here's what you're going to do. And I'm saying like have more meetings when I'm saying have fewer meetings. But here's what you're going to do. You're going to list out all the meetings that have occurred over the course of the month. And then you've got some added value of retrospect here because you're doing this at the end of the month. These meetings have already happened. You're going to evaluate which meetings were valuable and which ones should have been canceled or redesigned. And again, here's also where that retrospective comes in kind of handy. But it's a little bit of a double edged sword.

Sometimes you don't know that a meeting was going to be a waste of time at the time you're having it. It's only after other circumstances reveal themselves that you then realize, oh, making that we didn't have all the information to make that decision. But even having a conversation where you're debriefing that a little bit can help you learn why you should have waited to have that meeting until you had more information. So the debrief on that can certainly serve a positive end point. Even if it feels like, oh well, you know, it's a bit like looking into a crystal ball because we already know that something happened that made that decision irrelevant. Okay, then once you've done your meeting review cycle, see if you can either eliminate some meetings or maybe there are some that need to be redesigned. Maybe they need to be shorter, maybe they need to have fewer people. Maybe you need to take a meeting that has a whole project team on it and break it down into smaller, multiple meetings that are 15 or 20 minutes each.

And then the one meeting that has the whole project team at it is, you know, 30 minutes once every two weeks instead of an hour every week. Okay, so keep a visible list then of meetings that have been retired or redesigned because it's going to re reinforce this process of having the meeting review cycles, and it's going to remind people to be watching for information that's going to help them be more discerning when it comes to those meeting review cycles. Okay. And what this does is it creates a feedback loop for your meetings. And so, you know, feedback loops are huge in user experience because we learn so much from these feedback loops.

Okay, so quickly, let me again recap the three things to fix your meetings or at least improve them. I can't say these are going to carte blanche fix your meetings, but number one, meeting zero. So before scheduling any meeting, teams must answer that question. Why does this need to be a meeting instead of an email or a quick video? Number two, ban multitasking by embracing it. Everybody's going to type into the chat what they're multitasking on and then have that meeting review cycle at the end of each month where you're evaluating how the meetings went.

All right, my call to action for you, my friends, is to choose one of these. I gave you nine ideas across all three categories, three in each category. Choose one and put it to work for you this week because we want hybrid work to work. I know you do, because again, the research is overwhelming that people want to keep those flexible work arrangements. It makes people happier to be able to work from home or have some flexible work arrangements.

So we want to keep them, but we got to make work work. We got to make it work. So pick one thing that you can get started on today and get and try it out again. I love to hear your successes. I love to hear your struggles too, because then I can dive deeper into something if it didn't work for you. So call me out on social media. My social media is linked up on the show notes for this page.

And to find the show notes for this page, you're going to go to my website, janelanderson.com/239 for episode 239. All right, my friends, try one of these out. Be well and I will catch you next week.