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Hybrid work, but with harmony

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Hybrid work, but with harmony

Over the years I have experienced the dawn and maturation of an intangible world, capable of radically transforming our material world. The promise to connect, to connect beyond barriers and distances. The promise to bring closer, in the dematerialization of space and in the possible cancellation of waiting, and the promise to contaminate, in the sharing of knowledge and in the immediate transmission of information. And the promise, in terms of value and impact in everyone’s life superior to any other, at least according to my experience, to free up and give back time.
Technology could have allowed us to protect and promote the value of our time, to clear it of background noise. The problem of time, after all, is all that humanity has always fought against and fought for, day after day.
For me, the promise of digital was above all in this: less time for repetitive and low-value tasks, more time for what is most dear to us.
As we find ourselves today, perpetually connected, perpetually available, digital seems to have kept many promises, but perhaps it has betrayed, in fact, the most important promise. He didn’t pay us back time. Or, if he gave it back to us, he immediately got it back. Perhaps, more likely, it was we who betrayed digital, not understanding it, wanting to abuse it.

A new and dangerous concept of time

The figure of everything is a new concept of time. If for years we have become accustomed to living as in an eternal black friday, in which everything is just a click away, the situation is now more serious: we are running the same risk also in terms of work. The most important news of these years is precisely the way we think about time. We are shrinking the physical space, we are minimizing displacements; we stay at home in front of the pc / smartphone, to then enlarge and crowd the virtual space of events.
We no longer live in a space that gave man a time, although not anthropocentric, certainly natural. We live more and more in an apparently anthropocentric space, but whose pace is actually dictated by technology and by the related needs and requests ever faster.
Translated into the concrete of our lives and in more familiar terms, we can speak, for example, of an expectation of availability and a perennial reactivity to every stimulus.
The digital has created an unnatural space of accelerated technological time, no longer sustainable for humans. Although, paradoxically, it was created by man himself to make him free and autonomous from nature.

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The hybrid invasion

The first time I heard about hybrid work, I felt uneasy.
Hybrid always makes me think of something artifact; the choice of empowering something but weakening something else. Although there are obviously cases of natural hybridization, for me the word evokes an artificial, intrusive activity, which makes little sense, and certainly little kindness, when we talk about men, women, work. And of course of life. It makes me think of imbalances and imbalances, of compromises.
Hybridization does not seem to be the richness that is generated by the encounter between differences, but rather the compromise that is formed by the union of heterogeneous elements that do not bind to each other and that, when mixed forcibly, find their own balance of survival by weakening their respective characteristics. Losing something on both sides.
I can’t help but wonder what we needed for a new word.
We have pursued and promoted smart working in the literal sense. For decades. Intelligent or flexible work, translating in a freer but, I would say, more sensible way. A job that knew how to adapt to needs. Of people and companies. A new work culture based on results rather than on time, rules and rituals; on trust instead of control; on the availability of different, adaptable workplaces, and not on an “office-centric” rigidity.
The pandemic, with the distancing and the difficulties of working in-house, seemed the ideal opportunity to fuel this evolution.
The final destination of this process seemed to be smart working and the possibility of respecting a new priority system in people’s lives. During the lockdown we were forced, from one day to the next, to “remotely” work at home, and we called it, in a reassuring but improper way, smart working. When everything seemed to have to go in this direction, the same dimension that had fueled the euphoric vertigo of change found itself labeled as obsolete, to be abandoned immediately after being discovered.
Once the era of smart work is over, the time for hybrid work begins. The world of hi-tech companies, strategic consulting firms, the media, all united in a unanimous chorus, without even trying to differentiate a little or to question the very meaning of the word, its implications. They presented us, in unison, a compact, convinced, one-dimensional vision of the future, which to my ears could only sound immediately like a sentence: “The future of work is hybrid”.
For some, hybrid work simply means distributing the weekly attendance between home and office, for others, however, it consists of combining the analog and digital world, physical and virtual experience. If, however, it is simply this, the possibility of living and working in a mixed space between home and office and between analog and digital, then I really struggle to understand the emphasis and the novelty.
I don’t think I have a decisive interpretation, and I certainly have more questions than answers, but personally I believe that it is not just a question of buzzword bulimia, nor that it is just a question of vocabulary. I believe that it is above all a question of semantics, with all the consequences that derive from it: if you change the word then, obviously, you also change its meaning.
The idea I have made is that what we are going towards is not so much the hybridization of analog and virtual, which has already largely occurred and is now irreversible, but the hybridization of life and work. Something that risks upsetting almost everything we know: our homes, our offices, the concept of time and that (now put in the attic) of work-life balance.
Smart working, as mentioned, would have allowed people to manage themselves independently, but without totally depriving themselves of company support. It did not cancel the office, just as it did not claim to transform the houses into permanent offices. Obviously the house was part of the work spaces but in an adaptable way, depending on the need. Technology was the enabler of this change, but all in all it remained a marginal element.
Hybrid work focuses on technology, whose development is increasingly directed by the desire to make the virtual experience as realistic as possible, close to, if not even superimposable, to the real one, pushing us clearly towards the remotization of everything it does. part of the human experience.

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Total but not fair hybridization

What we are laying the foundations for is therefore a condition of total hybridization of our lives.
The houses will sooner or later assume the features of a permanent office. What we risk running into is an unsustainable mix of spaces and levels, increasingly in favor of work and increasingly at the expense of our own lives.
Another consequence of the loss of spaces and borders caused by this vision of work is more dependent on problems of social fragility. If in the company everyone, regardless of origin or social level, can enjoy the same advantages, in terms of soundproofing, devices, connectivity, availability of spaces, what happens when everyone receives the same workload but everyone has to face it in different conditions ? Working from the desk in an office room, or working from the kitchen table while the children are doing their homework are two very different things. Being able to use a connection with one’s own line, or having to share the bandwidth with other family members, who in the same way work or follow the teaching at a distance, generates two very distant work possibilities. What impact does this involuntary but undeniable discrimination have both on productivity and – consequently – on people’s career opportunities? What impact does this forced domiciliation have on the much vaunted “work-life balance”?
The process of hybridization of our lives has already taken place, and perhaps we have not yet fully realized how much this affects our experience of existing.
I believe that, in some way, today we should find the ability to do what we normally do, when digital enters business processes: that is to decompose and reassemble, according to new architectures and new paradigms, creating a new order that allows us to separate the most possible levels and spaces.
According to my sensitivity, the real issue today is the need to re-dimension the relationship between human beings and technology, so that the former does not become, in the hybrid dimension, a functional means for the development, experimentation and improvement of the latter. Aware that it may seem like a dystopian vision, I believe that we must have the courage and foresight to actually understand how much, as humans, we can be means or we can be ends, and where is the limit between these two existential dimensions. This, today, is one of the issues we should reflect on when we talk about the future of work.
Personally, I don’t think the future of work should be hybrid. On the contrary, I believe that we have to work so that it can be harmonious.
A future with rhythm.

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