Leaders’ love of offices is based on an outdated fantasy

The writer is a professor in the management of professional services and author of ‘Leading Professionals: Power, Politics, and Prima Donnas’

Depending on who you listen to, the pandemic-inspired shift to hybrid working is either a fundamental threat to how professional firms do business, or an exciting opportunity to address profound problems within the professional sector.

At one extreme is Goldman Sachs, insisting its staff return to the office full time. At the other extreme is Deloitte UK, which recently announced that employees are free to choose when, where and how they work. Many leading professional firms have adopted an intermediate position, with staff allowed to work from home two or three days per week. Whether hybrid working is viewed as helpful or harmful, the consensus is that it represents a once-in-a-generation reconfiguration of professional work.

It is time to cut through the hype. Professionals have been working hybrid for years. My research makes this clear, by analysing hybrid working on three dimensions: duration, location and communication. Each of these dimensions has a spectrum: from standard hours to fully variable, from office-based to completely remote, from face-to-face to fully digital.

Even before the pandemic, the model of working broadly standard hours, in your firm’s office, alongside colleagues, was no longer the norm for professionals. In terms of location, proportionately more and more work was being conducted at clients’ premises, on the move and at home.

In terms of duration, excessively long hours had become endemic among professionals and the tech-induced freedom to work anywhere, any time, had morphed into the requirement to work everywhere, all the time. And in terms of communication, in the largest professional firms, teams were increasingly working virtually and communicating digitally.

The tech-induced freedom to work anywhere, any time, had morphed into the requirement to work everywhere, all the time

So hybrid working was already the norm, but it was informal and ad hoc. It resulted from multiple compromises each professional was making to accommodate the competing demands of clients, colleagues and private lives. It was, in essence, an “undercover” hybrid, largely unacknowledged.

When the pandemic arrived, professionals adapted well. Now firms are surveying staff about returning to the office and discovering the majority want to spend most of their time working from home.

This is not simply about avoiding the commute or wanting to spend more time with families. It reflects the increasing impoverishment of professionals’ office-based lives.

In recent years, teams have become larger and more temporary, with individuals working asynchronously across multiple time zones, and across multiple teams. Meanwhile, working relationships for many professionals have become more transactional as partnership governance became more “corporatised”.

Leaders of professional firms worry that hybrid working will inhibit collaboration and collegiality, but this assumption is based on a nostalgic fantasy. Pre-pandemic, under pressure to maximise billable hours, most professionals did not spend happy days in the office enjoying ad hoc bonding sessions with colleagues around the water cooler.

Almost two decades ago I studied a firm where professionals had been banned from sending emails to colleagues on their own floor, to overcome their reluctance to leave their cubicles and speak to each other face-to-face.

Concerns that hybrid working will damage collaborative and collegial cultures are based on sloppy logic. Cultures vary enormously across professional firms. Some are highly collegial, but a great many are not. Yet until now, all professional firms were assumed to be office-based. So collegiality and collaboration are about a great deal more than co-location.

These false narratives obscure a fundamental truth. When leaders express concern about hybrid working they are really worried about losing control. Yet its formal adoption potentially gives leaders greater control.

They can encourage their professionals to move away from an informal, “undercover” approach to hybrid work, and develop a more deliberate, systematic and transparent model. This would recognise that different activities can be delivered in varying ways to reconcile the demands of professionals’ clients, colleagues and private lives.

The biggest risk to hybrid work comes from leaders clinging to old beliefs and cobbling together halfhearted policies to which they are not fully committed. Professional firms that get this right will have a competitive advantage over those which do not. As the hybrid deniers will eventually discover.

Andrew Hill returns next week