Which hybrid policy fits us?
A hybrid policy is a question about culture first
How many days in the office is a strategic choice about the culture you want to be and how work gets done in it. Space, cost and commute follow from that choice. A rule announced without knowing where it clashes with a team's culture is the kind that gets walked back.
Why policies get reversed
A reversed policy is expensive twice: once in the change effort, and once in the trust it spends.
A common pattern behind reversals: the policy was set on a single factor, often office cost or a leadership preference, and the other factors arrived later as complaints.
The second pattern is applying one rule to a whole organisation. A laboratory, a contact centre and a legal team have genuinely different distributions of work. A single number will be too strict for one, too loose for another, and roughly right for nobody.
The evidence to have on six factors before you announce
- Cultural fit
- Whether a team's day-to-day culture matches the culture the organisation wants and the new way of working. Based on the Competing Values Framework and measured by Dynamics. A mismatch is an indication of retention risk at group level, not a mood and not a forecast for any person.
- Office space
- How many desks and rooms the policy actually requires at the peak, not the average.
- Satisfaction
- Measured against how the workplace supports the work, rather than as a general mood score.
- Commute & emissions
- Travel time and distance, which distribute very unevenly across a workforce and drive attendance more than policy does. The commute CO₂ per employee that follows directly from them is reportable, and increasingly required to be.
- Recruitment appeal
- What the policy signals to the market you hire from.
- Workspace impact on productivity
- How much the workplace helps or hinders the work: measurable, unlike productivity itself.
Get the six-factor score sheet
Three policy options scored on all six factors that move together, with two common patterns behind reversals and five checks before you announce. Blank, so you can fill it in with your own numbers.
PDF, in English.
Questions we get asked
Can you measure hybrid and remote work?
The workplace side we measure directly; the rest we find out by asking. Occupancy describes how the building is used. Dynamics establishes patterns, preferences and where people work when they are not in the office.
Judge an operating model on building data alone and you are looking at half the picture.
What do employees have to do?
It depends on the product. Dynamics asks them to complete a workplace profile once. Occupancy does not involve them, though they should be told it is happening. Passport gives them a personal workplace guide in return.
Taking part should be worth their time, and they should know what is collected, what it is used for and what comes back to them.
Do you collect personal data?
It depends on the product, and each one says what it stores and what it shows.
Occupancy observation studies record spaces and activities, not people, so no individual record exists. Dynamics stores each participant's answers, because Passport gives that person their own profile back. The organisation sees those answers only in aggregate, at team, department or location level, and every report, filter or cross-cut must contain at least five employees or it is withheld. Administrators see who has completed the profile, not what they answered. Passport is visible to the employee alone unless they choose to share it. Booking shows colleagues where someone has booked a desk, because that is what a reservation is for.
What is processed, on what basis, who may see it and how long it is kept is settled per project before implementation, and written down.
What happens after the analysis?
The analysis is not the deliverable; the decision is. Depending on scope, what follows is scenarios, a hybrid policy, a space programme, support through design and fit-out, help for employees in the new workplace, and then measuring again on the same method.
That last step turns two snapshots into a trend, and a trend into the next business case.
What answers this
- Balance
Configure: culture first, then scenarios with space and cost as the consequence.
- Dynamics
Analyze: the work patterns, culture and needs the model runs on.
- Hybrid work policy maker
A first, indicative split of time from your own assumptions. Balance is the full model, on workplace profiles, personas or assumptions.
- People are different, so is hybrid work
Why one rule lands differently on a lab and a legal team.
- Hybrid needs alignment
Why coordination may work better than compulsion, and how to test it.