There is mounting evidence that the post-pandemic battle for talent will be won by companies that can best adapt to flexible work. Recent Future Forum research found that flexibility now ranks second only to compensation in determining job satisfaction. But getting flexible and hybrid work right is challenging. It represents a massive shift in the way a company operates, its culture, and its employee experience. Getting it right requires questioning decades of orthodoxy about office-based work and a willingness to experiment with new ways of doing just about everything. 

There's no one playbook that will work for everyone, but there are some starting points that can help all companies move in the right direction. 

In partnership with Boston Consulting Group, we at Slack have developed a framework of hybrid principles and guidelines. To put it simply: leaders need to establish organization-wide principles to focus on behavior change paired with guardrails to avoid creating inequitable experiences or opportunities. Some examples of principles include celebrating outcomes and results over activity and presentee-ism, ensuring equal access to opportunity for people from all backgrounds, and adopting a learning mindset given the amount of experimentation needed. Guidelines include ensuring executives lead by example, reskilling managers for inclusion over monitoring, and setting team-level agreements, and concepts like "one dials in, all dial in" — the idea that all meeting participants dial into virtual meetings if one person is working remote.

But even with guidelines, we're seeing teams and our own employees grapple with how to make hybrid work — what's it mean to have team-level agreements, and how in the world will we make concepts that sound lovely, like "one dials in, all dial in," a reality?

Here are 10 hybrid hacks culled from our experiments over the past 16 months at Slack, and best practices from our work at Future Forum with dozens of companies:

1. Team-level agreements over company-wide rules. Every rule has an exception, and once your company has thousands of people, you'll end up with hundreds of exceptions. Team-level agreements are generally the way to go: aligning a sales team around schedules, meeting norms, and communication habits is different from aligning an engineering team, and also works for cross-functional teams working on projects. How deep do you go on a team level? Give people the flexibility to experiment with their norms, but ensure that they ladder back up to the company- and team-wide principles. 

2. Focused work hours over no-meeting days. Having flexible schedules requires that we don't have 9-to-5 days of meetings. No-meeting days are notoriously hard to protect. Team-level collaboration hours (for example, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.) can work, but may be hard to implement across entire companies. Start simpler: set blocks (ex., Tuesday-Friday, 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.) when you don't allow recurring or team meetings and when people are supposed to turn off notifications.  

3. Establish clear off-hours escalation rules. Flexibility can lead to burnout if people feel 24/7 pressure to respond to notifications from all kinds of software. Be clear at a team level by setting boundaries about how you'll reach someone when it's really urgent, and your team's hours. For example, after 5 p.m., you'll get a phone call or a text (or Pagerduty notice for engineering) for something that requires immediate attention. Otherwise, it should wait.

4. Move update meetings to asynchronous. Do an audit of recurring meetings, take the ones that include information sharing and move them to asynchronous mode. Have a schedule for when updates are due, someone in charge of collating and sharing, and give people a time frame to respond. For example, Sales team updates are due by end-of-day Friday, they're distributed in a Slack channel or email alias by noon Monday by the operations manager with a summary of what's changed and questions from exec reviewers are due by EOD Monday.

5. Brainwriting over brainstorming. Stop relying on brainstorms to unlock your best ideas. It's time to rethink the whole process. Don't kick off the ideation process with a brainstorming meeting, end with one. For example, in building our research reports, we'll share out the detailed findings a week in advance of a meeting, and ask people to take 2-3 hours with notifications off to write out their top 5 insights. At the start of the meeting, we have everyone paste their ideas into a digital whiteboard like Mural, take 10 minutes to read them all, and then start talking. The result: a wider range of ideas; a more level playing field for participation across levels, introverts and people who need time to collect their thoughts; and a reduction in groupthink.

6. Drive a level playing field with tools at hand. Start by placing laptop stands in conference rooms. Concepts like "one dials in, all dial in" require habituation for those back in offices. One way to make the practice easier is through simple signage that not only reminds people but gives them easy ways to do it. If you're in a conference room, have one person with an open mic and speaker, and have fixed laptop stands on the table — it helps prevent neck strain and is a convenient reminder to extend courtesy to remote participants. The in-room participants now have access to the chat stream, in-meeting polls and more that we've all grown to use while working remotely. More importantly, everyone has equal opportunity to participate.

7. Quiet floors and noisy floors. The rise of open floor plans actually led to less collaboration, not more, given people's need to focus. It's no wonder some of the same employees now want to work from home more often. But there are people who need the space for their jobs, or because home isn't conducive for them. Given the need to rethink offices as more focus on interaction, and flexible use of space, give people choice about the environment they want, try out a "noisy" floor, maybe with ambient music, as a way to set expectations. Experience-based tip: avoid music channels that play songs with explicit lyrics.

8. "Week of the month," not "day of the week." For many teams that are more geographically distributed, it's easier to plan for a 3-to-4-day block of time together once a month that involves both social and work engagement than to make sure Tuesday and Thursday are the days you're "in." Advance notice is also critical, especially for those in caregiving situations.

9. Build alignment through storytelling. Some employees will find it harder to make the shift to hybrid work. Those who were likely most comfortable in the office — more often White male managers in headquarters — need to understand why you're creating new ways of work. Be deliberate about showing the positive impact hybrid work has on those in caregiving situations, employees who've found higher engagement working from home, and people who worked in what used to be "remote" offices who felt second-class that now feel engaged. Telling stories that cut across a wide range of people, from working mothers to Black employees to "remote" office workers, builds a culture of empathy and encourages others to walk a mile in someone else's shoes.

10. Experimentation and feedback. When we first announced "one dials in, all dial in," plenty of people had what might be politely described as a moment of doubt. But we got a few folks into the office trying different things, sharing what was and wasn't working, and sharing in a public forum. Admit up front that you don't have all the answers, but want help figuring them out, and people will appreciate your transparency and rise to the occasion.

The last year of shifting work into remote settings was challenging, but figuring out the path forward will have comparable hurdles. Bring your decisions to a mindset of experimentation, ask for patience, but most importantly for participation and engagement. This moment is an amazing opportunity for companies; leaders who listen and respond to it will be magnets for talent. And your talented teams will be your competitive edge as you drive your business forward.