Saying the quiet part out loud about hybrid work – Part 1

With the 2025 Australian federal election imminent, the debate over working from home versus return to office mandates for the Australian Public Service (APS) has become a political flashpoint. The Coalition is vowing to bring public servants back to the office full-time, while Labor promises to double down on their commitment to flexible work. The international spectre of Trump and Musk’s quest for government ‘efficiency’ also looms large. 

In our increasingly polarised political, social and media landscape, we’re encouraged to come down hard and in absolute, partisan terms, on either side of this debate. We hear much about the benefit that remote and hybrid working has brought to women in the workforce, seemingly enabling them to “do it all”. Similarly, we hear plenty from those longing for a return to the good old days—when you worked in the office five days a week and ‘productivity’ was managed and measured by time spent at a desk.

We’re being forced to be either pro hybrid work and a woke anarchist who doesn’t care one iota about the Australian virtue of hard work, or vehemently anti hybrid work and, by extension, anti-progress, anti-women, dictatorial and, respectfully, a philistine. 

So where does that leave us?

Some nuancing may be helpful in this debate. There is an opportunity to step out from the opposing corners of the proverbial boxing ring and take a beat to consider not necessarily what the solution should be, but more about how we design work.

If we’re ever going to solve the vexed issue of how we need and want to work in 2025 and beyond, we need to start having honest and intentional conversations about the trade-offs that remote versus in-office versus hybrid work requires people, and organisations, to make.

To enable thoughtful and intentional decision making about the future of how we work, we need to consider four things:

1. We can’t all have it all

We need to critically interrogate the premise that everyone can “have it all”—that it is anti-progress every time a workplace fails to provide the precise context for an individual to work the way they want to. For example, remotely and from the desert in a caravan, never miss a school assembly, secure a steady slew of promotions and be there for school drop off and pick up every day). 

We need to get better at saying the quiet part out loud and articulating the costs of our decisions. For example, that you can work remotely but that it may (not must) limit your opportunities to manage people, which is often (not always) a pre-requisite in securing promotions. These are tricky, sometimes disappointing complexities, but we cannot ignore them. To ignore them is to perpetuate the inertia we’re currently seeing on this issue, where it’s considered counter cultural to take a purposeful look at work design (i.e., question the work settings we adapted to amid a once-in-a-generation global pandemic). 

2. The experience of work isn’t working

Have you ever commuted into your physical workplace, only to sit in an open plan office amongst 20+ other people (not your direct colleagues—you’re hot desking), all yelling (the timeless problem of volume control exacerbated by the in-vogue call centre headsets) versions of “Tom, you’re on mute” or “my air pods aren’t working” for 8 hours straight?

Maybe you’ve participated in a “hybrid” workshop, with the facilitator forced to perform mental and social gymnastics to make sure that the vibe is “the same” for online and in-person participants, and the experience is palpably mediocre (at best)?

It is uniquely unfulfilling to go to a physical space, only to spend your 8 hours there staring at people in 2D, straining to interpret body language, tone and facial expressions through a screen, while necessarily having to ignore the very 3D human beings around you.

We know that the culture we (accidentally or intentionally) create, the relationships we build (or don’t), the sense of belonging (or lack thereof) we cultivate, shape how we experience work.

We know that how people feel about their work impacts how they perform—and so designing work to create a positive experience is not just good for people, it’s central to building and sustaining workforce capability.

Try as we might, we can’t ignore our reality as human beings, inherently social and evolved to thrive on connection, cooperation and shared experiences to find meaning in our lives. The interactions around the proverbial water cooler are how we connect and relate with each other, and we need to consider what we lose when we are passive to settings that overlook the historical role of the workplace in facilitating connection between people.

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Stay tuned for Part 2, where I’ll explore:

• The unanswered capability question

• Why there’s no simple, quick fix

• Where to from here?

Lydia Stevens | Senior Manager