When the pandemic broke out, Madhurya Hariharan, head of HR for the Microsoft Business Unit at Tata Consultancy Services, realized she could finally design her own workspace at home. A yoga practitioner for the past decade, she started working while sitting on the floor, cross-legged, with a low table. It was great for her back. “I would love to work like that,” she said, “but nobody at work gave me the option!”

Even so, as much as Hariharan loves having created a space that meets her needs, as a self-proclaimed foodie, she misses business lunches and even her commute, she told Fast Company staff editor Lydia Dishman, the moderator at a From Day One webinar titled, “Building a Hybrid Culture: Work From Anywhere, But Align From Everywhere.”

Hariharan's mindset perfectly encapsulates the complicated sentiments about hybrid work culture. As employers contemplate their return-to-office plans, ManpowerGroup surveyed 45,000 employers across 43 countries and found that 69% of them expect workers to be back full-time in offices or other worksites in the next six to 12 months. The researchers headlined their report “The Great Hybrid Divide,” however, because only 5% of workers said they want to be back in the workplace full time.

Research by the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) suggests that executives and workers will probably need to meet in the middle. In a survey of 1,200 workers, 55% said they prefer working remotely three days per week, while poll of executives found that 68% of them say workers need to be in the office at least three days per week, citing concerns about maintaining corporate culture. How will this get sorted out? The expert panelists offered their insights:

You Can Turn a Workplace Into a Lab 

Doug Dennerline, CEO of Betterworks, a performance-management and employee-engagement platform, was not a fan of remote work before the pandemic hit. “I wanted my leadership team to be in the headquarters with me,” said. “I've completely changed that attitude and I've gone 180° away from that. We are a remote-first culture and my whole goal is to hire the best talent I can find, no matter where you live.”

Similarly, the engineering and construction company Black & Veatch shifted to flexible work arrangements and “didn't miss a beat in terms of productivity,” said Joy Johnson, the company’s chief operating officer for HR. This realization inspired Black & Veatch to avoid requiring employees to come back full time. Instead, the company provides options: a resident employee goes to the workplace four days a week; a flexible arrangement is two to three days; a mobile worker shows up one to two days; and a virtual employee is fully remote. “We've heard a lot of feedback, and this is what they want,” Johnson said.

Companies with large manufacturing workforces, as well as office workers, face the challenge of bringing equity to work arrangements. “We had to think of something that could work for everyone, and so our underpinning is flexibility for everyone,” said Sarah Waltman, VP of global talent enablement at Dentsply Sirona, which makes dental products and equipment. “We came up with flexible work guidelines. We try different ways through which different populations within our workforce can benefit from flexibility. What we are trying to do as part of our hybrid model is not be prescriptive.”

“An office is now a lab, testing out different scenarios,” said Nick Allen, regional HR partner and talent-development leader at the global design firm Gensler. “How does the office interact with the workplace that it generated?” he pondered.

A Virtual Workplace Can Be as Human as an In-person One

For the past 35 years, Dennerline estimates he travelled 200,000 miles per year. When 2020 rolled around, he resolved to use the time he had been traveling to reach out to people more consistently. Now he has about five to ten one-on-one conversations each week. “As a CEO, you can't fix what's broken if you don't know what's broken,” he said.

“We have not seen the level of turnover you keep hearing about,” said Black & Veatch’s Johnson, alluding to the Great Resignation. However, “we are experiencing the war for talent. It's very hard to find the additional talent we need. So I do believe in providing flexibility right away, embracing the new way of working,” she said, emphasizing “the ability to balance this whole situation.”

The speakers noted the rise of a new style of leadership, one suited to a distributed workforce. “Your typical, charismatic leader is no longer able to be charismatic, because they can no longer rely on body language,” observed Hariharan. “We are seeing that new leaders are emerging: those who are articulate, if not very extroverted, but able to use writing,” she said, pointing to the example of using tools like email in ways that weren’t fully leveraged in the past.

Learning and Development Goes On-demand

Flexibility can be applied across the board, including an area that’s crucial in today’s competitive labor market: talent development. At Black & Veatch, “we were just working so hard that the development side of things just kind of went to the side,” said Johnson. “And we're finally coming up for air and realizing we've got to continue that development, and we’re working on better ways to do that. But instead of having a lot of classes where people have to attend at a certain time, we've made it accessible, so they can consume it on their own time.”

The Gensler firm systematized learning and development with the publication of company goals each quarter. Every manager is asked what goals they want to commit to upon looking at the report. Choosing a couple of classes becomes part of their OKRs, or “Objectives and Key Results,” which are completed with CFRs, or "Conversations, Feedback, and Recognition." Said Gensler’s Allen: “We have a culture led by feedback. We really want people to be brave enough to give real feedback to real people.”

In Conferences, Virtual is No Less Experiential

This year, Gensler organized a 100%-virtual leadership conference consisting of three days’ worth of workshops. “It was just leveraging everything that we can virtually to really bring the conversation, to bring alignment, and to think about how we're building and recognizing the culture of who we are–and also providing some direction,” said Allen. All studio teams and departments created videos to present who they are, what they represent, and where their focus is.

Then things got even more creative as the company sought to express its corporate culture. “We brought in a local singing artist from our community,” Allen said. “She helped develop a song of what we were going through, and specifically how it applied to our firm, and she sang it for us.” To offer a sense of direction in uncertain times, the company also convened a panel of futurists. “One thing that we recognized is that it was hard, especially looking back six or eight months ago, to think ahead more than a month or two or three, because the future was so unknown,” said Allen. “And what was really interesting is that when you started looking through the lens of the future, where we're going to be ten or twenty years from now, we found that where we're at today is less of a setback.”

Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.