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Hybrid Workplace: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review
Reinvent your organization for the hybrid age. Hybrid work is here to stay—but what will it look like at your company? If your organization is holding on to inflexible, pre-pandemic policies about where—and when—your people work, it may be risking a mass exodus of talent. Designing a hybrid workplace that furthers your business goals while staying true to your culture requires balancing experimentation with rigorous planning. Hybrid The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review will help you adopt the best technological, cultural, and new management practices to seize the benefits and avoid the pitfalls of the hybrid age. Business is changing. Will you adapt or be left behind? Get up to speed and deepen your understanding of the topics that are shaping your company's future with the Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review series. Featuring HBR's smartest thinking on fast-moving issues—blockchain, cybersecurity, AI, and more—each book provides the foundational introduction and practical case studies your organization needs to compete today and collects the best research, interviews, and analysis to get it ready for tomorrow. You can't afford to ignore how these issues will transform the landscape of business and society. The Insights You Need series will help you grasp these critical ideas—and prepare you and your company for the future.
192 pages, Paperback
Published March 15, 2022
17 people are currently reading
91 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 19, 2022
Surprisingly good for a business book, or a collection of articles, tips, and perspectives. It deals a lot with how to balance the pros and cons of having a team where some are in an office and some are at home full or part time. It is especially good when talking about meeting dynamics and mitigating the proximity effects that give advantages to those in the main office. Short but really useful.
**Thanks to the editors, publisher, and NetGalley for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.
**Thanks to the editors, publisher, and NetGalley for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.
May 20, 2024
The book contains twelve articles divided in three sections that explore how to design a better workplace, management and culture and meeting and collaboration. Having a hybrid team myself I found some useful ideas. Nothing groundtaking but applicable to my daily job. I like that it demystifies the virtues that some insist in seeing only in in-person meetings (like innovating and team building) and challenges us to find a way to do that also in an hybrid format. I still find it challenging to smoothly integrate people who work remotely when most of the team is in the office (I think it happens to most of the companies but they don't care or don't know how to solve it) and the articles introduce some tips that may help.
This book is from 2022, when we were just getting out of the global pandemic. Many people still worked from home fully remote at that time. Now, 2024, most companies have requested their employees to return to the office at least 3 days a week and some others the whole week. The authors didn’t expect (and me neither) that everything would be so similar to before that fateful 2019. I think we got the chance to take advantage of technology and both employers and employees missed the opportunity to embrace it in a responsible and effective way (as the change was so abrupt it makes sense that many feel safer returning back to what they considered normal). Hybrid is like management 3.0 on steroids: people using their potential from everywhere, asynchronous work and empowering ownership and accountability of the team. Despite that many companies (including digital natives and big techs) are more comfortable using management 2.0 classic leadership style (watching over the shoulder, chasing effort and not result, not delegating, etc.). Maybe remote work will return to being a niche like it was when Jason Fried and DHH wrote their wonderful "Remote".
The main output I got from this book is to make a conscious effort to include remote people. Don’t just assume that because I shared a Teams link and booked a big room with a giant and flashy screen they are going to feel part of the team meeting. Being able to work with people from all around the country is a great way to get talent and it was inconceivable before Covid. Now it's time to really design working experiences that are both smooth and effective (I'm thinking of onboarding, regular meetings, quarterly feedback, etc.) to make them feel part of the team even if we meet in person just once or twice a year.
Most interesting suggestions for me:
“Allow them to choose to work in the ways that best play to their strengths.”
“Allow us to make our work lives more purposeful, productive, agile and flexible.”
“The typical experience of virtual connection is transactional, agenda-driven.”
“Build serendipitous interaction into the virtual world of hybrid work -time to wander and organically connect.”
“Two axes: place and time (...) from being time-constrained (working synchronously with others) to being time-unconstrained (working asynchronously whenever they choose).”
“Critical drivers of productivity -energy, focus, coordination, and cooperation.”
“The office we return to must offer people a better experience than what they have at home.”
“Shift from a fixed workplace to a fluid workplace.”
“Allow employees move between ‘we’ and ‘me’ time easily.”
“Learn your team members’ circumstances for flourishing: goal for near term and long term, what makes them feel valued at work, what do they wish they could spend less time doing.”
“The war for talent is over, and the talent’s won”
“”Focus on outcomes, clarify what needs to be synchronous, make clear agreements and hold each other accountable.”
“Set the boundaries about what’s important to you as the leader, while leaving room for people to create personalized arrangements that work for them.”
“We want to ensure those joining remotely are always first-class participants: up your audio game, consider video from the remote participant perspective, test the technology in advance, design meetings for all attendees.”
Some questions to make to yourself and your team
- Are any team's tasks redundant?
- Can any tasks be automated or reassigned to people outside the team?
- Can we reimagine a new purpose for our place of work?”
- Should this be a meeting?
- Are my meeting goals relationship-based or task-based?
- Could my meeting take an entirely different shape or form?
This book is from 2022, when we were just getting out of the global pandemic. Many people still worked from home fully remote at that time. Now, 2024, most companies have requested their employees to return to the office at least 3 days a week and some others the whole week. The authors didn’t expect (and me neither) that everything would be so similar to before that fateful 2019. I think we got the chance to take advantage of technology and both employers and employees missed the opportunity to embrace it in a responsible and effective way (as the change was so abrupt it makes sense that many feel safer returning back to what they considered normal). Hybrid is like management 3.0 on steroids: people using their potential from everywhere, asynchronous work and empowering ownership and accountability of the team. Despite that many companies (including digital natives and big techs) are more comfortable using management 2.0 classic leadership style (watching over the shoulder, chasing effort and not result, not delegating, etc.). Maybe remote work will return to being a niche like it was when Jason Fried and DHH wrote their wonderful "Remote".
The main output I got from this book is to make a conscious effort to include remote people. Don’t just assume that because I shared a Teams link and booked a big room with a giant and flashy screen they are going to feel part of the team meeting. Being able to work with people from all around the country is a great way to get talent and it was inconceivable before Covid. Now it's time to really design working experiences that are both smooth and effective (I'm thinking of onboarding, regular meetings, quarterly feedback, etc.) to make them feel part of the team even if we meet in person just once or twice a year.
Most interesting suggestions for me:
“Allow them to choose to work in the ways that best play to their strengths.”
“Allow us to make our work lives more purposeful, productive, agile and flexible.”
“The typical experience of virtual connection is transactional, agenda-driven.”
“Build serendipitous interaction into the virtual world of hybrid work -time to wander and organically connect.”
“Two axes: place and time (...) from being time-constrained (working synchronously with others) to being time-unconstrained (working asynchronously whenever they choose).”
“Critical drivers of productivity -energy, focus, coordination, and cooperation.”
“The office we return to must offer people a better experience than what they have at home.”
“Shift from a fixed workplace to a fluid workplace.”
“Allow employees move between ‘we’ and ‘me’ time easily.”
“Learn your team members’ circumstances for flourishing: goal for near term and long term, what makes them feel valued at work, what do they wish they could spend less time doing.”
“The war for talent is over, and the talent’s won”
“”Focus on outcomes, clarify what needs to be synchronous, make clear agreements and hold each other accountable.”
“Set the boundaries about what’s important to you as the leader, while leaving room for people to create personalized arrangements that work for them.”
“We want to ensure those joining remotely are always first-class participants: up your audio game, consider video from the remote participant perspective, test the technology in advance, design meetings for all attendees.”
Some questions to make to yourself and your team
- Are any team's tasks redundant?
- Can any tasks be automated or reassigned to people outside the team?
- Can we reimagine a new purpose for our place of work?”
- Should this be a meeting?
- Are my meeting goals relationship-based or task-based?
- Could my meeting take an entirely different shape or form?
February 28, 2022
A very interesting and useful book, different point of views and hints on how to manage hybrid teams and people working from different places.
Informative, recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine
Informative, recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine
July 10, 2025
I really liked most of this book. There were a couple of ideas which I can't use for myself, but it never hurts hearing about how things should go in a perfect world 😁 Who knows, one day I'll be the CEO making decisions about the perfect virtual meeting room with augmented reality and holograms 😅
November 22, 2022
Insightful and especially useful for managers trying to establish the new normal with a diverse team
June 9, 2023
Very useful book for me
January 18, 2024
Had better.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews