NEW YORK–As with so many other organizations, credit unions have been caught up in the challenges of returning remote workers to their offices, which means they may also be facing another related trend: the so-called “hushed hybrid” schedule.
But unlike other forms of “sneakily evading a return to the office,” this practice requires a boss to know about it in order to make it work, according to Business Insider.
According to the report, “hushed hybrid” refers to employees working from home more often than companywide policies would otherwise permit them to, thanks to the flexibility of their managers.
As Shelly Majors, a strategic HR advisor with Boardwalk HR told Business Insider, it could entail bosses "enforcing a return to office selectively among employees, allowing flexibility on certain days, mandating on days only when someone's presence is absolutely necessary, or even misreporting attendance in some cases.”
The Manager’s View
As Business Insider noted, managers may feel that cutting employees some slack can help with employee satisfaction and worker retention — even if doing so is officially against company policy.
"From an organization's standpoint, they may have an overall policy, but some managers may not enforce it as strictly as long as the results are being produced," Hatim Rahman, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, told Business Insider.
But as the report notes, “hushed hybrid” can be a risk for managers who may find themselves caught “between a rock and a hard place as they try to juggle employees' desires to work remotely with firms' mandates to haul them back to the office.”
An Additional Risk
And there is another risk as well, the Business Insider report observed, pointing out that while some workers could benefit from working "hushed hybrid," uneven enforcement of work policies could raise questions of favoritism, and that “could also crush morale for workers who see their peers getting exemptions but don't reap any benefits themselves.”