As an HR professional, it’s impossible to escape the words ‘hybrid working’ right now. Teams have spent months reviewing policies and discussing strategies for how – and, more importantly, where – the workforce might begin to return to some sort of post-pandemic normality. Every day seems to produce a new announcement from a major brand on its ‘future of work’ strategy, and experts appear to agree that hybrid is the way forward.
But there have been a few vocal dissenters. Last month JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said he expected the investment bank’s offices to return to how they looked pre-Covid by the autumn. “It doesn’t work for those who want to hustle. It doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation. It doesn’t work for culture,” he said. At Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, CEO David Solomon sent staff a missive demanding that they come back to the office from June, claiming a culture of “collaboration, innovation and apprenticeship” could not thrive without being together in an office. There are clear arguments in favour of a hybrid model where staff come together to collaborate but do the bulk of their everyday work at home, but could they be on to something, or is there a danger that hybrid is not as inclusive as it seems?
