The Quest for “How to do Hybrid right”: Moving Beyond Compensating Asymmetries to Experience-Driven Cooperation

Hybrid work has become increasingly popular in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite its popularity, many organisations still strive to find an answer to “how to do hybrid cooperation right”. Enabling collaboration across digital and physical workspaces, participants, and practices is a great challenge, as it inevitably introduces asymmetric relations, incongruences in frames of reference, and misaligned ecosystems and technical infrastructures. The paper investigates approaches used to manage asymmetries in hybrid work settings and their impact on cooperation. Through a multi-sited ethnographic study, we reveal a prevalent reliance on mimicking tools and practices native to fully physical or fully digital settings in the hybrid space. These mimicking practices often arise because the hybrid work setting is viewed through a deficit lens, whereby it is perceived as lacking certain elements (e.g., body, voice, mobility) and access to modalities from especially the physical setting, thereby necessitating the need for compensation work. To provide vocabulary to conceptualize and articulate this type of practice, we introduce the concept compensation work, referring to work that is carried out to offset a deficiency or absence that has been identified, aiming to restore and re-establish a familiar state that has vanished. While compensating through mimicking is intuitive, such approaches assume that our known practices and interactions from the physical workspace can indeed be translated to another context, neglecting the fact that changing the medium inevitably impacts the message. Thus, cooperative practices and interactions taking place in the physical workspace do not remain the same when unfolding in the hybrid space. Finally, we suggest that in order to design technologies and practices that support hybrid cooperation we first need to acknowledge the hybrid workspace as a distinct “third space” next to the fully remote and fully physical workspace. This includes following an experience-driven approach to hybrid cooperation, encouraging the design of innovative interactions that extend beyond merely compensating for asymmetries and leveraging the unique capabilities and affordances of these settings.