In a conversational interview, Christopher Parsons and a researcher discuss early qualitative research led by Kevin Rockman at George Mason University on how hybrid work schedules reshape workplace relationships. The study introduces the concept of "social compression," where employees defer questions until shared in‑office days, leading to a chaotic surge of interactions that overload staff, deplete energy, and impede real work. This compression disrupts the natural flow of vicarious learning—learning from colleagues—because workers avoid bothering others on in‑office days and resort to solitary problem‑solving when remote. The researchers find that hybrid arrangements can be worse for relationship quality than fully remote or fully in‑person setups, contrary to common expectations. While no positive outliers have been identified yet, the interview speculates that staggering in‑office days (e.g., different teams on different days) might alleviate the compression effect by spreading interaction load more evenly. The discussion highlights the need for intentional hybrid policy design to preserve informal, serendipitous interactions that support learning and collaboration.
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I don't wanna lose though the point you brought up about hybrid.
Oh, sure.
Yeah. 'Cause I, I do think that's hybrid is gonna be a fascinating, um, not going to be, hybrid is a fascinating sort of moderator of all of this. I'm doing some work with colleagues led by Kevin Rockman at George Mason University that is looking at the impact of hybrid work arrangements on our relationships at work. And so learning vicariously is essentially a core part of our workplace relationships. But what we're finding is that hybrid has this really unique effect on the way that people intend to and then engage in interactions in the workplace that is different. It's both different from fully in-person, but also different from fully online. So it's not just, oh, the more online you go, the worst. Hybrid is actually the worst, full stop. And in-person and online are both the worst, significantly better.
From what measure?
Yeah, so good question. The worst in terms of disrupting the pattern of relationships and interactions that we see happening. We're calling this, this idea of sort of social compression, that essentially what everybody in a hybrid work schedule does is, oh, I need to ask Chris something. We'll both be in the office tomorrow. I'll wait and ask him then scaled to the entire organization so that when everybody's in on Tuesday and Thursday, it is this chaotic free-for-all of, hey, can I bug you for a second? That people all know they're going to do when they get there, but then hate doing while they're there because it's a big disruption. And meanwhile, their email inbox is piling up and they're not able to, quote, get any real work done. And so then they go back on Wednesday and they're totally depleted from the Tuesday interactions and they feel like they're just catching up and they get in this spiral where they feel like interacting with other people becomes this big burden in their role rather than part and parcel. And what was interesting is we did not see that reaction from either the people who are in the office full-time or from the ones who are fully remote, cuz they know they're fully remote. And if I have a question for Chris, I'll ask him right now cuz there's nothing to then wait for. But this idea that we compress all our interactions into these in-office days and then try to not interact with people on our at-home days because we need to get stuff done. One creates this weird, like, now interacting with people is not getting work done.
Yeah, that's what I was going to ask.
It used to be kind of part and part, like, that was part of the work was interacting with people. We've created this totally different orientation to how we interact with others. And I think a big risk is that we lose vicarious learning in the process because we don't wanna bother other people or we're already too overloaded with interactions on our in-office days. So when we're home, we think, uh, I could message Chris and ask him how he had done this, but it's probably just easier for me to Google it or figure it out myself. I'll just learn it on my own.
Or your mental model is Chris's head's down trying to get work done. I don't wanna bug him now. I'll just see him on Thursday or whatever it is.
Right. And by the time Thursday comes around, you've got a 20-person queue outside your office waiting to ask you for all these things. You're giving curt answers, trying to kick them all out of the door and address your inbox. So we, we've been looking at this. It's very early stage kind of qualitative work, just understanding the change here. But what we find is that ironically, hybrid policies are often marketed as restoring some of the relationships and interactions that were missing when everybody went fully remote. But we find that in some ways they do the exact opposite. They actually deteriorate them more quickly because of this compression effect.
Have you found outliers like positive deviants in this firms that are doing hybrid really well that you can learn from yet?
We haven't yet. So this is small scale. We've looked in a couple organizations, but it was surprisingly consistent. And then we did a broad panel look just from a representative sample of people working fully remote, hybrid, and fully in person. And we found similar sorts of patterns. I have no doubt there are places that are doing it very well. Again, back to your question of serendipitous versus intentional interactions. What we are observing is that the compression is worse when everybody shares the same in office days.
Mm-hmm.
Right. So we did not study this. I'm speculating, but one could imagine then that staggering the overlap where everybody does overlap with one another, but not everybody in on Tuesdays and everybody in on Thursdays where it is more balanced throughout the week. One might imagine then could attenuate some of these problems where it's not that everybody's trying to have their meetings on Tuesday because that's the day we're all in the office. Half of us are in on Tuesday then. Half on Wednesday, then the first in, or whatever, a different half are in on Thursday and a different half in on Friday would sort of spread the load a little bit perhaps. So again, we haven't studied that directly, but I would imagine there are organizations who are out there who have thought more intentionally about how they're doing their hybrid in ways that might be addressing some of these concerns.
