Hybrid work is here to stay

Last week, the NSW government mandated return to the office 5 day a week. Our immediate response was… that’s not a very creative way to get people to the CBD to spend money on hospitality venues. That will not help the NSW government teams hire or retain the best talent, and it certainly won’t help those teams work better together.

Work has fundamentally changed, so we can't use what we used to improve collaboration.

96% of Australian knowledge workers currently work hybrid or remote, and that same number want hybrid or remote options in their work (PWC, 2024).

But, connected and engaged humans collaborate better. There’s an argument that mandating office days, helps people connect and therefore collaborate better. The thing is, hybrid work comes with so many other benefits like supporting customers in different timezones, improved cross-team collaboration across locations, improving outcomes for employees through flexibility, increasing diversity of employee opportunities and so much more.

So, we need to find other ways to connect to collaborate.

We know there are 3 ways to connect to other humans:

1. Shared trauma (no one is saying this is a good idea for team effectiveness. Let’s just cross that off the list right now❌)

2. Time spent together

3. Sharing stories

Hybrid policies aim to get us to spend more time together but without building story sharing into time together, we'll never reach the levels of connection we had when we all worked in the same offices at the same time.

Stories connect people to each other and to your company mission.

Stories inspire your team to inspire each other.

We've developed a story mining and sharing process that embeds into how your teams work that improves engagement and productivity. Find out how we help teams connect through stories, and reduce your need to mandate office days.