Is hybrid working all it’s cracked up to be?

New research has shown that simply offering hybrid work doesn’t immediately mean all benefits take effect.

While employers often turn to performance reviews, mandatory training, and regular check-ins to ensure strong management for hybrid working employees, one expert warns that these steps fail to address deficiencies stemming from reduced in-office time.

According to Professor Stefan Jooss, who teaches in the UQ Business School’s MBA program, employers have to make up for deep learning expertise time lost when employees work from home, making those in-office days all the more crucial, especially for junior workers.

His recent study, co-authored by Michelle Carr and Amalie Ringgaard, which looked at the controls accounting firms traditionally use to ensure learning and deep professional expertise and the impact of hybrid work, found that hybrid work increases employee responsibility for the development of professional expertise, but that employers can also harness work arrangements to produce beneficial outcomes.

Of the report’s key findings, the authors found that managers and early-career professionals see hybrid learning differently.

“Managers often worry about how juniors will build judgment and client skills with less day-to-day oversight. Juniors, on the other hand, tend to value the autonomy and feel they’re still developing, just in a different way,” Jooss said.

“For businesses, this means development has become a shared effort: the organisation provides some structure, but how well it works depends on how people engage with it.”

Jooss explained that deep learning expertise comes more naturally in in-person arrangements, where workers can watch experienced colleagues, ask quick questions, and be part of client conversations.

Further, arrangements can also see uneven development across the workforce, depending on colleagues’ efforts, personality, and opportunities.

AI has also increased the value of early-career development, Jooss said.

He explained that, as AI takes over admin and routine work once tasked to junior professionals to learn the ropes, deep subject matter expertise is now a defining trait of a valuable employee and a way to insulate oneself from replacement.

In the same way, Jooss reinforced the importance of human skills, such as judgement, critical thinking, curiosity, empathy and systems thinking, which “develop largely through experience and interaction with others, so employers that leave this to chance risk a capability gap in their future leaders”.

In this way, hybrid work demands deliberately designed measures that facilitate deep learning, meaning employers will also get the most value when they create “deliberate time for interaction and learning, not just space to do the same work in a different place”.

As such, Jooss urged employers to closely consider and communicate what hybrid arrangements mean for learning and career progression, so workers aren’t concerned about how their working arrangements affect development and opportunity. Similarly, he encouraged intentional office time coordination and building in shadowing, team reviews, and client exposure opportunities for these days.

“Make it easy and expected for early-career staff to seek feedback and mentoring, and equip managers to coach, not just monitor, so that quieter team members get the same development as their more visible colleagues,” he said.

“In a competitive talent market, a strong development experience is a real differentiator for attracting and keeping good people.”

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