Citi Ventures Hosts Hybrid Work Event for Portfolio Company Leaders

On October 21, Citi Ventures hosted an event on The Future of Work: Thriving in a Hybrid World to offer guidance to our portfolio companies as they navigate the changing world of work.

In the one-hour session, Vanessa Colella—Citi’s Chief Innovation Officer, Head of Citi Ventures & Citi Productivity—spoke to Dr. Nicholas Bloom, William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University and a leading expert in the field, about the findings from his decades of research into remote work. They explored how new working models can impact management style, corporate culture, and talent retention, and how executives can thrive through empathetic leadership.

Vanessa kicked off the event by addressing the challenges and opportunities Citi teams have faced while working remotely during the pandemic. “Hybrid work is something we all have to grapple with,” she said, pointing out that there is no one-size-fits-all model when it comes to helping teams adapt to a new normal. “It’s different for all of us, so figuring out how to lead through this time with empathy and flexibility—and ensuring that we foster an equitable return to work—is important.”

Forging a Flexible Future

Professor Bloom then walked through some of the findings of his research, which is based on data models and surveys that have enabled him to track trends in remote work since 2004. In 2020, COVID-19 caused a massive shift in remote working across every industry, skyrocketing the average number of days employees spent working from home from 5% to 50%. Now, as Professor Bloom noted, “The big question is: what’s going to happen post-pandemic?”

To answer this, Bloom and his research associates have been surveying 5,000 workers and 1,000 companies every month for the last year and a half, analyzing what the results reveal about employees’ needs, employers’ expectations, and the best practices that organizations are using to meet both. “Hybrid [work] is really the best of both worlds,” said Professor Bloom, noting that large firms such as Apple and Citi have already begun to put these kinds of working arrangements into place. “You get the advantage of working in the office—face-to-face events, client events, training sessions, etc.—and that’s better for creativity and preserving company culture.” Meanwhile, employees enjoy a quieter environment on remote days, which results in markedly higher productivity. Bloom’s research has also found that companies benefit from reduced commuting time: “We know from our data that if you save your employee that one hour commute, roughly half that same time is now spent on work,” he said.

Given these benefits, it’s no wonder, as Bloom noted, that “there’s been a tsunami of companies coming out and saying they’re going to do hybrid...pretty much all major companies.” Nevertheless, Bloom’s research shows that there are still important challenges to fully supporting a hybrid workforce, especially at the level of the individual employee.

Hybrid’s Hurdles

A major finding of the survey data is that not everyone is equally keen to return to the office. “There’s a DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] issue,” Professor Bloom said, echoing Vanessa. “When people are in the minority—whether by age, gender, politics, race, or religion—they feel less comfortable about coming back to the workplace.” For some, that discomfort is due to microaggressions they encounter in the office and/or the macro stressors they deal with on their commutes. This puts the onus on corporate leaders to be more mindful of their diverse workforce’s needs, or risk resignations as employees move to firms that are more supportive of remote work.

On the other end of the spectrum, employees who feel most comfortable back in the office present another challenge for corporate leaders in the form of “presenteeism bias.” Professor Bloom’s research has shown that, in cases where some workers are clocking full workweeks on-site while others are working mostly from home, the latter group “had an almost 50% lower promotion rate.” In a hybrid model, difficulties can also arise if some employees choose to come into the office on their designated WFH days—leading others to feel obliged to follow suit out of fear of being left behind professionally.

Without clear guidelines, employees can also encounter logistical snafus in hybrid offices. For example, conversations that begin in hybrid meetings will often continue afterwards amongst on-site colleagues, to the exclusion of colleagues joining remotely. Furthermore, in-person meetings and interactions that were previously spread over five days on-site are now being compressed into two or “three very, very crushingly social days,” said Professor Bloom. Thus, he stressed the need for evolving guardrails that can adapt to unpredictable effects as they emerge.