The social psychological implications of our hybrid future

Were you working from home during the Covid lockdown(s)? Difficult for many at first, that has become such an ordinary part of working life that many organisations have kept up flexible working practices. Employers like it: there are a lot of benefits, like savings on office space through desk-sharing for smaller employers, or less everyday pressure on employee facilities in the larger firms. Many people like it too: job applicants are asking for it increasingly often, and established employees don't want to give up the relative freedom it gives them. But as many people discovered during the lockdowns, homeworking has some downsides.

The biggest of all was the sense of isolation. The social isolation and 'work-loneliness' generated by months of only seeing colleagues through remote work-focused technology was widespread, and the most frequent comment people made on returning to the office was how much they had missed the social side: the everyday contact with their colleagues. Inducting new employees also posed a problem, as any sense of welcome or joining a community was difficult to achieve. This was then reflected in job turnover: during that time, a significant number of office workers left their jobs having worked for months without ever going into the office.

Organisational psychologists have known for almost a century how important social contacts are at work. People need that day-to-day interaction for many reasons: to feel valid, to feel competent, and above all to feel a sense of belonging to that organisation. If your actual work is relatively routine or boring – as many people's is – then the interactions are what motivates you to go to work. Organisational psychology has shown over and over again that money in itself isn't a sufficient motivator: social factors matter too. And it was the social side of work that was lost in the lockdowns.

It wasn't just lost from office work, either. I spoke to many teachers who bewailed the fact that working remotely meant that they were unable to give the personal touch that so many pupils depended on. Teaching isn't a robotic practice, but a personal, and social one. But even if they could see that a pupil was struggling, teachers couldn't give a helping hand without exposing it to the rest of the class.

Craftspeople too, suffered from the social isolation, being deprived of the regular markets which not only gave them sales, but also added a social dimension to their otherwise isolated lives. And small businesses suffered, not only economically (many are still recovering), but socially, as frightened customers avoided personal shopping even when the lockdowns were over. Old people were locked up and unable to visit their families, or be visited by them, and the prevalence of mask-wearing meant that some went for over a year without seeing a single smile.

That may sound trivial, but it isn't. Human beings are social animals, and we need social contacts in order to function effectively. Our brains are hard-wired towards social interaction: at a neurological level, we respond differently to people we know than to strangers, and we have areas of the brain that respond explicitly to the social signals conveyed by facial expressions. The explosion in mental health problems and the emphasis on day-to-day social support shows how important these things are. And many of us are experiencing the relief of returning to the occasional face-to-face meeting, where so much more is discussed than just the items on the agenda.

So let's return to the world of work. Many firms are asking employees to combine coming into work with homeworking – for example, asking them to come into the office two days a week, and to work from home for the remaining three. On the surface, hybrid working gives us the best of both worlds. We have contact with our colleagues, and we also have the opportunity to organise our personal lives a bit more effectively, on our 'home-working' days. We can deal with the demands of school-age children, pets or other commitments, and ideally develop a more positive work-life balance.

Before the covid pandemic, many employers expressed fears that allowing people to work from home would mean they wouldn't do their fair share of work. But recent studies show the opposite: people put in just as many working hours, and sometimes even more. They just don't always do it at the same time. But work is a social environment, not just a task-based one, and the social aspect of working matters. Small greetings and trivial chats act as a kind of 'social glue', helping people to feel part of their department or company. And being in the office helps new people to integrate into the organisation, offering scope for the small tips and minor queries which can be crucial in clarifying working practice, but don't seem worth a whole Zoom call.

On the face of it, then, hybrid working is an ideal solution. But coming into the office just a couple of days a week can exacerbate a problem which applies in full-time offices too. Proximity bias is the natural human tendency to prefer interacting with the people we feel are closest to us. It manifests itself at work in all sorts of ways, from sharing ideas with the person we think is most on our wavelength, to chatting mainly with those who sit closest to us. Which is fine, as far as it goes. But it gives us a problem of inclusivity, since people who we think would have different opinions, or whose desks are more distant, or who just aren't like ourselves, get left out.

And that, in office life, can produce a distinct bias, favouring some individuals and not others. For example, those who sit closest to the supervisor may be more likely to be invited to take part in major projects, not through deliberate bias, but because they are the most available choice. It may not be conscious, but it is still bias, and means that those who are systematically left out feel excluded and disadvantaged. Inevitably, it is those who belong to minority groups or are 'different' in some way who are most likely to suffer from this.

Inclusivity is essential for making sure that all employees feel valued and able to contribute fully to work. Proximity bias is a real threat to that, and with hybrid working, it has become even more likely. Who else is working in the office during your two days in? Is it the same people every time, and are there people you just don't ever see? Does the office manager really see (and interact with) everyone who comes in, or do they too have their own regular days, so people with different days are just less visible?  Feeling excluded makes people unhappy and disengaged – and also, more likely to resign.

So, proximity bias has become a real issue in people management, and challenging it – for example, by making sure the whole team participates in decisions, not just those who were working in the office on that day – has become an explicit and essential part of the manager's job that wasn't really there before.

Leaders and managers, in fact, need to develop a whole new set of competencies if they are to manage hybrid working successfully. Stewart Wright described it as being like a super-systems engineer, making sure that teams can interact successfully with their own members and with the rest of the organisation – for example, by resolving and clarifying the inevitable misunderstandings and misinterpretations which happen, and would usually be sorted out invisibly by casual encounters or face to face meetings. Building trust and breaking down walls has become a much more important aspect of a manager's job than it was before, as is making sure that scheduling allows a department's staff to make regular personal contact with one another and with their management.

Next year marks the 100th anniversary of the famous Hawthorne studies, which showed organisational psychologists just how important the social side of work is. Social psychology itself has developed a lot since then. We understand how the mechanisms of social identification help to create and sustain effective groups and teams at work, we understand the subtlety of the messages conveyed by social interactions and how they can, consciously or unconsciously, generate social inclusion or exclusion. And we understand the underlying processes of communication, how meanings are constructed, and how those meanings can convey unspoken messages of trust or mistrust in management or in their innovations. Social psychology, in other words, plays an important part in an organisation's culture; and if we are to deal effectively with our hybrid future, we need to take the trouble to learn its lessons.

Nicky Hayes is a social and organisational psychologist who also happens to be the current President of the British Psychological Society