Hybrid work is the new normal, and the rapid pace of change at work hasn’t slowed with the end of the pandemic. WFH Research, a group of researchers who study the effect Covid has had on working arrangements, have found that the pandemic permanently increased work from home at an accelerated pace equal to almost 40 years of pre-pandemic growth—41% of workers are now in either fully-remote or hybrid work situations.
Even people who have returned to the office full-time are experiencing a shift. That’s because hybrid work doesn’t just mean working partially in-office and partially from home. It can also mean being in the office five days a week but video-conferencing colleagues on another continent. It can mean being part of a team that is fully distributed, or learning to reach clients without traveling to see them as often as you did before.
And while we’ve had more than three years to adjust to this shift since the start of the pandemic, many teams still struggle. There’s no rulebook for managing and building a successful hybrid team. As companies plead for, then mandate a return to office at least part-time, workers sometimes deal with the worst of both worlds—commuting to an empty office for video calls or working from home under the paranoid eyes of micromanagers.
But the key to productivity and success with hybrid work may not have anything to do with employee location. Workers are less concerned with where they are working than they are with the impact of their work. Gallup’s The State of the Global Workplace 2023 Report finds that engagement at work has almost 4x as much of an effect on employee stress as where they work.
To keep people engaged and informed at work, we need to forge new ways of communicating and collaborating. With the prevalence of global teams and hybrid work situations where colleagues don’t always overlap in the office, it’s important to be ready to do both live and recorded communication, much of it over video.
The problem is that too many teams aren’t yet equipped for this new hybrid world. Think of conference tables, speaker phones, video conference apps—the meeting tools that existed prior to this moment are biased toward either totally remote or totally in-person experiences rather than addressing the needs of the hybrid experience.
That’s why we’ve created the mmhmm guide to hybrid video. This is a resource for companies that want to make hybrid work work. Getting things done with a hybrid team is not about whether or not we’re in the office or remote—it’s about improving communication so that everyone can be noticed and understood, regardless of how they work.
mmhmm solves the four most common problems faced by people who aren’t understood at work:
- when you’re not clear
- when your colleagues aren’t there
- when your colleagues are distracted
- when there’s too much information
As a hybrid video native and a fully distributed company, the mmhmm team has studied and modeled best practices for improving clarity when your work happens on video. Over the course of this guide, we’ll share ideas and expert advice on how to improve not just productivity, but also culture, collaboration, and comprehension. Whether you’re spending more time in the office, logging hours while traveling, or building relationships from your home desk, we want to make this new world of hybrid work more sustainable and enjoyable for everyone.
Make your videos more engaging with less effort: Our free mmhmm-ready PowerPoint and Keynote templates help put you and your content on the same screen, elegantly. Download the free mmhmm-ready presentation templates.
