Making Work Worth Doing Series
Action Research Case Study: Thriving Hybrid Offices
Session Date: April 24th, 10:30-10:30 Pacific Time
How is work evolving — and are we truly putting humans at the center?
On 24 April 2025, Carly Riehle and Bert Painter led a thought-provoking session on “Designing Hybrid Work.”
Since the post-peak stages of the covid-19 pandemic, the emergence of “hybrid” office work arrangements, namely some combination of people working remotely and in-office, has been a highly controversial and diverse phenomenon within both public and private sectors of the economy. The approach by both employers and unions has often been quite arbitrary or bureaucratic, such as with an across-the-board minimum requirement of a standardized 2- or 3-day in-office work schedule. In other cases, the approach has been similarly standardized but very contrary, based on a belief that “hybrid” is the worst of all options, and thus, organizations have opted for either fully remote or fully in-office operations. Although some employers and workforces have successfully implemented more flexible forms of office work, imposed solutions have generally not been popular, and have likely contributed to phenomena of “quiet quitting”, high labour turnover, and beyond normal labour shortages.
What has most often been missing is a “human-centered, whole-systems” approach to designing flexible work organization. “Human-centered” means the work designing is driven by the aspirations of the salaried or hourly-paid workforce for flexibility in how they optimize quality and effectiveness in their work and lives. Equally important is a focus on the nature of the specific work and the concept of work organization as a “whole-system”, with many different social and technical elements that need to be continuously align given constantly changing internal employee and external client/customer needs.
This assertion is based upon 2 years of action research in development of thriving hybrid office work environments (for engineers, accountants, IT professionals, etc.) within a small sample of manufacturing operations. The design outcome has been a form of hybrid work that is an optimal combination of the best of the in-office environment with the best of flexible remote work. Furthermore, within the larger objective of “Making Work Worth Doing”, these cases appear to illustrate many of the contextual factors and elements of what has been described as a new model of “Humancentric” work that combines “people + digital” to create resilience and sustainability.
Recording:
https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/UKrysuMxm6_YZagDok4U9khAURGUFTTWwIRqf6e902GsOtQCN8MacOoZUsdk1AP0.oHfieVLVK_YGb56o?startTime=1745514271000
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