Mayday, mayday! The return-to-office debate shows no sign of slowing any time soon, as some companies stick to remote work and others mandate an in-person five-day workweek.
But, the companies with hybrid work arrangements might be poised for a smoother landing. Software development company MongoDB’s 5,600-person workforce has followed a hybrid work setup across its 30 global offices in the US, Europe, and Asia since 2021, its chief people officer Harsha Jalihal told HR Brew.
“We had made peace with the fact that the five-day [in-person] workweek was over, and we wanted to find a happy medium, and that’s how our hybrid working model came to be,” Jalihal said, adding what makes MongoDB’s approach work is giving teams the choice to pick between multiple hybrid options.
Why hybrid works. Jalihal started as the chief people officer in August 2020 when the pandemic was in full swing, and even though more employees went into the office prior to the pandemic, she said flexibility has always been a company priority due to the nature of working with global teams.
“The chances of you being co-located with everybody you work with are low,” she said. “All my direct reports are not based in New York, so I do need to be able to work with people that I don’t share an office with, whether or not Covid happened.”
As companies slowly welcomed employees back into the office in late 2020, Jalihal said she wanted to craft a plan that gave flexibility while offering the benefits that being in the office provides. Where she landed was giving senior leaders the ability to choose between four options.
“When you give employees optionality to opt into something, it drives greater engagement and buy in,” she said. “When you force people to do something, it actually creates more discontent, so we were also trying to balance those two things.”
The four hybrid choices. Since 2021, Jalihal said senior leaders have the option to choose between four categories that define their team’s working style:
- In-office model: Three or more days in the office
- Flexible working model: One to two days in the office
- Customer-facing remote model: Work from home, but go into customer offices
- Fully remote working model: Work from home 100% of the time
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“We had business leaders decide what kind of working model made the most sense for them,” Jalihal said. “A majority of them went with the flexible working model, or remote if [their employees were] nowhere near a MongoDB office, but we did have a small group of teams that opted into an in-office model.”
There was some initial “change management” that senior leaders needed to work through, Jalihal said, so her team provided guidelines on how to choose a workflow based on team makeup and business needs. Many sales leaders chose the in-office models based on their need for collaboration. Teams with interns and early-career employees also chose to follow a flexible or in-office model for more leadership visibility and mentorship.
Jalihal said she set the expectation that senior leaders themselves had to follow the plan they chose, because it would be “futile” and “disingenuous,” she said, to force employees to be in the office if their senior leader wasn’t there too.
The hybrid expectation is also established in the recruiting process, she added. Her recruitment team asks hiring managers which workflow is preferred for the role they’re hiring for, so applicants know the expectation early on, and there are no surprises.
Flexibility is a leadership priority. Unlike companies that have vague RTO policies, Jalihal said her hybrid approach has worked because it’s clear, and her executive team also believes flexibility is key to helping employees do their best work. Jalihal added that she follows this approach in both her personal and professional life.
“I have a family that I have to think about as well, and for me, personally, as a leader, [flexibility] has been a bit of a non-negotiable for the latter part of my career,” she said. “I remember telling [our CEO] that if I’m traveling [to the office] three days a week, you’re going to get a very ineffective CPO, and I’m going to be a very ineffective mother and wife as well, so net-net, no one wins here.”
