By Dr Harriet Shortt, Dr Stuart McClean, Dr Charlotte von Bulow, Gemma Pike, University of the West of England

What is the lived experience of hybrid working? How do knowledge workers really define hybrid working? And how have our home and office working practices changed since the start of the pandemic? These are just some of the questions we are asking as part of a new research project that intends to explore the lived experiences of hybrid-working in the knowledge workforce, and the potential role inclusive and resilient workspaces have in helping individuals and teams thrive in the future.

We know that the pandemic has brought uncertainty and challenges to how knowledge workforces engage with and experience forms of hybrid working in the Covid-emergent era. Hybrid workplaces will play an important role in workforce recuperation, decompression, mental health, and wellbeing. We want to understand more about people’s everyday hybrid working experiences, and we are using visual research methods to help us do this.

We are halfway through the data collection phase of our research and over the past few weeks we have asked our participants to take 3 photographs that capture their experiences of hybrid working. We have conducted in-depth photo-elicitation interviews to understand more about their images, why they took them, and what the images represent. So far, our participants have shared detailed stories about being in the office and out the office, how much they enjoy home working but why it is challenging. They have reflected on the blurry boundaries between work and home life and how they negotiate this daily. Some have shared personal stories of going into “unloved offices” and “sad spaces” in their organisations, reflecting on how empty and different these environments can be.

These stories and the images that go with them have so far revealed some interesting interpretations for us as a group of researchers:

a) We have seen how working at home has moved from a temporary, liminal space during the pandemic, to one that is more fraught with identity work as the workspace increasingly imposes itself in the private home. As such, working 'at home' becomes more like 'home working’ – the nomadic workers we often see in the de-personalised, open-plan, hot-desking office, are being mirrored at home as staff become nomads in their own personalised spaces at home. Talking to our participants has highlighted lots of interesting ideas about the strategies and approaches they use to manage their spaces, productivity, identities, and emotions – this is often through the personalisation and curation of their space (some of our participants have made their own desks from bits of wood and old furniture), territoriality and claiming ownership over spaces (especially when sharing home workspaces with family and partners), and their use of technology (deciding what to display when on a Teams call and what to hide)

When Work Wise UK asked me to write a blog for this year’s Work Wise Week, it got me thinking about what the word ‘wise’ might mean in the context of work in the current climate – what does it mean to be ‘wise’ about work as we in the UK emerge from the pandemic? Broadly, we know the word wise suggests some level of knowledge, understanding, and to be wise is to have the ability to analyse your experiences and gain insight. So, to be ‘work wise’ right now could not be more important. But what work-based insights have we gained over the course of the last 12 months?

Despite the blur of the last year and all the challenges so many of us have had to juggle – turning our dining rooms into offices, home schooling, and the ongoing concerns for friends and family – we have certainly gained great insight into home-based working. This has, of course, not been a ‘normal’ period of time to be working at home – it’s been a sort of forced social experiment. But it has encouraged all sorts of organisations and knowledge workers to see and understand how working from home works, and for many leadership teams to see that office based work is not always necessary, or indeed, productive.

However, as we move out of the crisis, have we really thought about what positive changes we can make in the workplace (wherever that workplace might be!), and have we really stopped to think about the lessons we have learned that might make life better for our employees? If organisations have spent time meaningfully reflecting on what a better workplace looks like post-Covid, and they’ve consulted their staff on how working practices have changed whilst working at home, then great! And I hope these stories of change and re-organising are shared far and wide. If organisations have not yet pressed paused to think about these things, then now is the time.

One of my concerns about ‘what next’/ ‘post-pandemic’ is that organisations are blindly moving towards hybrid ways of working without thinking about the lived experiences of their workers. In much of my research and consultancy work I focus on helping organisations understand their employee’s lived experiences of space and place at work. I’m a sociologist, and business and management workspace specialist and I help companies think differently and creatively about their spatial change projects. So often I see top-down decisions getting made that lack the authentic staff engagement needed to make long-lasting, impactful change.

It seems to me that what matters now is the power of reflection – organisations and leadership teams, and employees themselves, taking some time out to celebrate achievements over the past year, as well as asking themselves – how has the pandemic changed the way we work? What positives can we take from these new ways of working? What have the challenges been? What have we learned about others and ourselves? Taking the time to re-evaluate and re-frame our thinking about the spaces and places of work, and how these impact working practices and working life will be a valuable part of how we effectively move forward.

Back in 2017 I wrote a piece for Work Wise UK about how the commute – be it on a train, a bus or in a car – offers an important space for reflection and escape (https://www.workwiseuk.org/blog/2017/11/18/guest-blog-in-the-car-on-the-m4-my-transitory-dwelling-place-my-space-in-between-by-dr-harriet-shortt-associate-professor-in-organisational-studies-university-of-the-west-of-england-bristol). I talked about how the commute can be a space ‘in-between’ in which we can momentarily break away from the multitude of identities we seek to maintain in contemporary society, and temporarily find a sense of sanctuary in a working world characterized by change and fluidity. The commute, therefore, offers a ‘liminal space’ in which to momentarily dwell – a liminal space being one that is on the ‘border’, a transitory space somewhere ‘in-between’ where we can suspend social expectations - and just press pause. I also reflected on the liminal spaces of the workplace – like corridors, stairwells, corridors and toilets. Places in which, as my research shows, are usually used to escape the visibility of the office or shared workspace and become important territories for private conversations, quiet reflection, and inspiration and creativity (Shortt, 2015).

But since the Covid-19 crisis and the lockdown, for many workers these spaces have vanished. We aren’t commuting, which is great for the environment and for a whole host of other reasons, but I wonder if there are some of you who are missing the space the commute created between work and home – that liminal space for reflection, decompression or planning. And, of course, many of us are not in the office, so those corridor conversations, those watercooler moments, those snatched minutes in a toilet catching up with a colleague are gone. All these informal micro-interactions at work that are so vital in the everyday life of workers have, for the time being, disappeared.

Instead, many of us are working from home. We have set up workspaces almost overnight and our homes have become workplaces and meeting rooms, classrooms and gyms, places of worship and places to rest. These changes in our domestic environment have taken some adjusting. We have had to negotiate with partners and children about how our home spaces are used, for what purpose and when, we’ve had to compromise our sense of privacy and open up our homes as personal backdrops on Zoom calls, and as the earlier blog from Stefanie Reissner and Michal Izak shows, we have had to think carefully about how we establish, manage, and re-adjust our work/ home boundaries.

All this transposing of work life into the home and sudden, rather dramatic mass shift to working from home has made me think more about the organisation of space at home, and in particular, the liminal spaces of the home. In all my research projects in both public and private sector organisations over the past 15 years, the significance of liminal space has always emerged - whether it be the cupboards in which hairdressers find respite from the visible work they do, the toilets where open-plan office workers go to have private conversations or the stairwells that nurses use to catch up with each other away from the wards. But what are the liminal spaces in our homes, how are they being used in the current crisis, and do they have any value? As a researcher of organisational life, I’ve seen and heard various stories over the past 8 weeks from UK workers adjusting to working at home, and I’ve had my own experiences as a mother and knowledge worker juggling full time work and home schooling a 5-year-old, and the corners of our homes do seem to be significant in a number of ways…