Hybrid may have been the corporate-speak word of the year for 2022. Hybrid working and hybrid workplaces were all the rage as the world settled on that word to describe the flexibility they were “granting” employees to not be in the office. There was no solid definition of the word other than everyone agreed it was anything less than a mandatory less than 5 days in the office.
Two years on, I think we can safely agree that a shared definition of hybrid is never going to happen. Flexibility is on a similar path. I have recently seen examples of companies touting the flexibility they were giving employees by letting them pick which three days a week they would be mandatorily in the office every week. It is not my definition of flexibility, but I can see how it would fit some technical definition.
The problem with a prolific word having no shared definition is that it now officially falls into the category of being a buzzword. Hybrid joins the excellent ranks of optimal, efficient, paradigm-shifting, omnichannel, hyperlocal, continuous improvement, gamification, and so many others to be used as an idea with no real form. Everyone has a rough mental picture of what these words mean, but they have the flexibility of committing a communicator to nothing solid.
What this means for us in corporate real estate is that we must reevaluate all of the workplaces we designed under a “hybrid” banner to better understand what we really did. It means finding new language to use again. It means building up new ideas to fill the gap that hybrid never successfully filled. If 2022-23 were the Hybrid years, 24 is likely the Flexibility year, then we have 15 months to figure out what comes after that because we have lost enough time already.