What the Hushed Hybrid Trend Might Mean for Your Company
Managers and workers could be staging their own return-to-office rebellion. But here's what that might indicate about your company culture.
By Sarah Lynch, Staff reporter
Move over, coffee badging and quiet quitting. There's a new buzzy workplace term in town: hushed hybrid. And it could be a problem for your workforce.
The term hushed hybrid -- the subject of numerous recent articles and LinkedIn posts -- describes employees working from home more than their company's return-to-office mandate allows, with the approval of their manager.
It's a developing behavior specific to hybrid work cultures, which makes it notable, says Joe Galvin, chief research officer at executive coaching organization Vistage--but he adds that it's actually not too common.
Indeed, according to the latest data from Gallup, 84 percent of hybrid workers say they adhere to their company's hybrid policy "most weeks or always," says Ben Wigert, director of workplace research at Gallup.
And yet, in cases where this arrangement does occur, the results can be somewhat of a mixed bag, says Hatim Rahman, assistant professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.
For some teams, more flexible hybrid work can be beneficial, Rahman says--and Gallup data shows that hybrid workers reported the highest levels of engagement when their team decided on their hybrid work policy rather than their leader, manager, or even themselves.
But it can also indicate some problems within the company culture, Rahman adds, and "create issues of, or perceptions of, inequity." Why might one team be allowed to come into the office just once a week while another team is in four or five days?
"Hushed hybrid" arrangements can also create longer term cultural issues, Galvin argues, as employees won't know whose instruction to listen to: "When you get that disconnect, it just reverberates through your management structure and your ability to cohesively lead an organization with consistency and fairness and integrity."
The effects can vary based on the size of the organization, though, says Rubab Jafry O'Connor, a professor of management at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. In larger organizations, overarching policies can be more "generic," she says, and having more team-specific policies might be less taboo. But in smaller companies, where managers and employees work more directly with CEOs, it can be a bigger issue.
"That becomes more about breaching the trust, because you are damaging that personal connection," Jafry O'Connor says.
But that doesn't mean that leaders shouldn't still allow for flexibility, Jafry O'Connor argues, so people can feel comfortable at work while still achieving their goals: "They want people to be productive, and they want people to be engaged, and that should be the goal."
If there is a need for in-person work, Rahman says, leaders need to be "clear about the rationale" for the decisions that they've made. "The most frustrating thing for workers is when there's this return to office mandate [and] there isn't necessarily an explanation given," he adds, "or the explanation given doesn't match what ... their lived experience is."
Photo: Getty Images.