Saying the quiet part out loud about hybrid work – Part 2

In Part 1, I shared my observations about the changing workplace landscape and the in office versus remote versus hybrid work debate. I explored:

• Why some nuancing is required

• Why we can’t have it all

• And that the experience of work isn’t working.

In Part 2, I continue the conversation, exploring two more considerations to enable thoughtful and intentional decision making about the future of how we work and, just as importantly, where to from here.

3. The unanswered capability question

For people entering the knowledge sector, as well as anyone seeking to develop in their career in 2025, there are legitimate questions to be answered about how we build capability without in-person guidance, mentoring and modelling of management, people and life skills.

For a concrete hypothetical, consider an 18-year-old with no prior work experience, entering the public service in Canberra immediately upon high school graduation. Their department and team have no coherent, articulated approach to hybrid work. This 18-year-old will often go into the office, only to be the sole representative of their team.

While this dynamic may be adequate for the execution of business-as-usual tasks, in the context of an intentional plan to build an individual’s capability, the cost of the team’s fragmentation is hard to ignore. Not only is our new starter not reliably exposed to the negotiation and relationship building skills necessary to develop in their career, they also don’t see much of the organic and spontaneous conversation that demonstrates problem solving, strategic thinking and collaboration.

They’re not building networks, they’re not gaining exposure to other capabilities, or the other ways of thinking that would inspire them to think about the skills they want to learn or the role they want to build toward. Plus, I’m just going to say it, their experience of work is inarguably diminished when they routinely find themselves spending all their time on Teams meetings, with limited opportunities to interact with the people around them.

What’s the cost of this in terms of current but also future workforce capability? How are we building and developing people to be strategic, proactive and chase impact—characteristics that companies across the country, and the public sector, need in spades right now, and will continue to need into the future?

4. There’s no quick, simple fix

The truth is, there are so many factors that impact an individual’s preference or practical capability to work from an office versus from home. I can’t even attempt to list each systemic factor that influences it here, but just to get us started:

We could consider childcare reform so that no one must ponder the riddle that is “school finishes at 3pm… work finishes at 5pm…how do I manage both effectively?”. Not to mention the mental arithmetic (that often falls to women) of working out the financial viability of full-time work when full-time daycare costs are only ever so slightly less. It’s doing something about this pesky patriarchy.

We could consider electoral reform to motivate politicians to look beyond their immediate 3 years to drive long-term, future-focused change.

We could detox ourselves from the immediacy of a news cycle that insists everything is urgent and it’s all our birthright, to have it all, all the time. From the existential to the concrete, it’s fixing the ‘must have a meeting’ culture that pervades so many workplaces so that people have time to a) do the work that comes out of the meetings and b) have time to realise the relational benefits that work offers, whether you’re working from home or in an office setting.

We could, and should, be looking at our society, our institutions, our work and our lives with a critical lens, and not shying away from having the hard conversations now, so it’s better in the future.

Where to from here?

As much as I’d like to tie this up neatly with a bow (believe me, I really tried), the reality is that we can’t offer a one-size fits all solution to work design in 2025. Hybrid work is here to stay, and any effective policy or approach will need to ultimately balance the factors of operational need, a capability lens, an understanding that what might be good for us isn’t always most convenient, but also that different people want and need different things from their workplace depending on their life stage.

We know that hybrid work benefits and carers—particularly women. But if we want more women to continue to participate full-time in the workforce, we cannot have a conversation about the future of work without a parallel conversation about childcare access and affordability. Our current moment, where hybrid work enables women to ‘do it all’ is not a feat of gender equality in action—it’s creating the conditions, and the expectation, that women can and should juggle full-time paid and unpaid work. 

Someone very wise recently said to me “you can’t fix it; you can only make it better.” To make work better, we need to be honest about what’s not working, and take a nuanced, systemic and intentional approach to designing the path forward.

At Ora Advisory, we love working to tackle and explore complex problems like this, explore human behaviour and develop creative and tailored solutions. If you’ve got a view on this topic or would love some help to manage the messiness of hybrid work realities and connection across teams, reach out—we’d love to grab a coffee and talk it through with you. 

Lydia Stevens | Senior Manager