What is hybrid work? We’re missing half the picture
"When designing flexible work arrangements, focus on individual human concerns, not just institutional ones," is the opening line of Lynda Gratton's article titled How to Do Hybrid Right, which was just published in the Harvard Business Review. With the onset of the pandemic, the topic of hybrid work has never been more relevant. Yet, we're missing half the picture. The term hybrid work is being used inaccurately, failing to encompass the totality of what hybrid work really is.
If we're going to do hybrid work "right," shouldn't we fully examine what hybrid work really means?
While Gratton does a thorough job of detailing a number of important considerations for how to implement effective hybrid work operations and processes, her focus falls squarely on hybrid workplaces and work arrangements. She completely neglects two other intertwined forces: hybrid jobs and hybrid workers, which completes the picture.
Defining Hybrid Work
Hybrid work has become a catchall phrase and even a misnomer for the bigger shifts at play in the workforce. There are three key components underlying the concept of hybrid work. These include: hybrid workplaces, hybrid work (jobs/roles), and hybrid workers. I'll explain each.
Hybrid workplaces: where the work arrangement or work environment itself is hybrid, allowing flexibility in where and when people may work. (Gratton's article illustrates this extensively).
Hybrid work: the work itself becomes hybridized (meaning jobs, roles, and responsibilities). In 2019, Burning Glass wrote an entire report on hybrid jobs and noted that hybrid roles were projected to grow twice as fast as jobs overall. They even created a distinction of highly hybridized jobs, like bioinformatician and cybersecurity analyst, to identify jobs that are becoming more sophisticated and more specialized. The report stated that "the real drivers of hybridization are certain 'disruptive' skills that themselves can apply across multiple fields." Burning Glass defines hybrid jobs as "combining skill sets that never used to be found in the same job."
Hybrid workers: the people doing the work blend and combine multiple professional identities together to form new work identities. Instead of being experts (strong in one domain or skill) or generalists (having breadth in many areas), hybrid professionals possess intersectionality between their work identities. They tend to be the person on a team who's talented at being a connector between departments, has cross-functional or cross-disciplinary expertise, can translate concepts between domains, and has a strong capacity for systems thinking.
Instead of merely accumulating subject matter expertise, skills, identities, and job titles over a career, some workers hybridize, meaning they integrate their different identities together. They become the sum of their work identities, no longer siloing them. In doing this, hybrids defy conventional labels, and their superpower is formed at the intersection. That's also where their unique value lies and what sets them a part in the workforce.
It's Time to Add Hybrid Professionals Into the Hybrid Work Conversation
The third component, hybrid workers, is the one that gets the least amount of attention, although it has been hiding in plain sight for centuries. Workers have been trying to distinguish themselves as hybrids, oftentimes relying on awkward terms such as expert-generalists, specialized-generalists, multifaceted, multipotentialites, slashes, renaissance souls, and many others.
At one point, I tried calling myself a T-shaped person (a term coined by IDEO's Tim Brown) to convey my hybridity, but not only did I feel silly calling myself that, it wasn't a true reflection of who I was. I didn't just possess depth and breadth of knowledge (the vertical and horizontal lines of the letter T). Instead, my work identities were woven into an inseparable composite, and I didn't know what to call myself or how to label my multiple identities. Hybrid professionals try to fit themselves into binaries and boxes, but they can't, and they never will be able to because they're hybrids.
I've interviewed hundreds of professionals and career development advisors. The expression I hear most often when I ask people what they do is, "I wear a lot of hats." Workers across industries struggle to convey their hybridity because this term is under-recognized. Career advisors reference them as people who have portfolio careers. Josh Bersin refers to this as the pixelated workforce. We have yet to leverage the term hybrid worker, even though that's what's happening.
In the book Serial Innovators, Griffin, Price and Vojak call these types of workers serial innovators because they can straddle and span departments, build valuable relationships between teams, reframe problems, develop new approaches, and bring diverse perspectives. They're experts of their own hybridity. Gino made a similar argument in her book Rebel Talent and explained why employers need to hire people that don't fit neatly into boxes or straightforward job descriptions.
Even Gratton emphasized the need for adaptability, flexibility, and fluidity in the hybrid workplace to do hybrid work right. That call to action also transfers to how we create hybrid jobs as well as how we recruit and manage hybrid talent. Furthermore, we need to rethink how and where hybrid workers fit alongside traditional talent to build high performing teams.
The Three Types of Professional Identity in the Workforce
In order to have thriving, engaged, productive teams, in a hybrid or a traditional workplace, we must hire, manage, and retain three types of professionals because they work in tandem with each other. Especially in today's hybrid world, we can no longer neglect the existence of hybrid workers.
This framework of three types of professional identity shatters the binary of workers being either experts or generalists and welcomes a third option the "and." We no longer work in a binary world. Workers must have at least one professional identity, many professional identities, or a hybrid professional identity, a mixture of many.
From this diagram, it can be seen that singularity references experts or people with only one professional identity, multiplicity references generalists, and hybridity references people who work in the liminal spaces between identities. All three types of workers are part of the workforce and are necessary types of talent. Not everyone is a hybrid just like not everyone is an expert.
Employers and managers need to be aware of this framework so that they reshape their hiring and management processes to be sensitive and inclusive of hybrids just as they target experts and generalists for certain roles and adapt practices to meet their needs. In order to develop workplaces and organizations that are resilient and adaptable, hybrid workers are a key element because they frequently act as bridges, boundary crossers, translators, and connectors between products, services, and people.
As much as I commend Harvard Business Review for making the focus of their May-June 2021 issue about doing hybrid work right, and for Gratton's comprehensive article about how to do hybrid work, until we talk about the bigger picture of hybrid work--including hybrid workplaces, hybrid jobs, and hybrid workers--we're missing half the picture of what's happening in the workforce and ignoring major factors companies need to also focus on to thrive and be successful.
Hybrid work isn't going anywhere. We're still learning more about it and the best practices on how to do it. The existence of hybrid roles has been documented and studied, but we need to focus on individual humans in hybrid work too. According to McGowan, the pandemic has ushered in the human capital era and companies are only as good as the way they nurture their people. It's time to unlock the power of hybrid talent, hybrid professional identity, and hybrid careers.