Remote vs Hybrid vs On-Site - Where do you draw the line?

[IC3]

Here's my understanding of the three popular work arrangement terms:

Remote: There's no obligation to travel to an office, with potential optional get-togethers 1-3 times a year (not mandatory).

Hybrid: Maximum 50/50 split between office and remote work. If you need to attend the office 3-4 days a week, it's not really hybrid anymore. In my view, anything requiring over 50% attendance falls into the on-site category with remote work flexibility as a perk.

On-site: Requiring 3+ days per week in the office.

What does everyone else think?

 

[Lopéz]

For context, I'll be 45 this week.

I've worked remotely, to some degree, since 2015.

2015-2019 was an interesting mix, I was travelling across the world as part of a globally separated team, so I could be working in a branch office where I knew people one week, in a hotel room the next, and then in a branch office where I didn't know a soul the next. Friday was generally work from home. It was fine.

2019-Lockdown 1 was in an office Monday-Friday. That was fine

Lockdown 1-2023 I worked entirely from home as the only foreign based employee of a UK company. I flew back for the occasional company do, but we're talking 1 or 2 times a year. This was also fine, I'm quite disciplined about the work from home thing and though I missed seeing my colleagues in real life it wasn't a dealbreaker.

2023-Present I worked hybrid. The first of these jobs had no mandatory days in the office but I usually went 2-3 days a week. I found that okay as well. Just changed jobs and here we are 8 days a month mandatory in the office, though I tend to go to the office Mon-Thurs anyway as it's an easy commute, good working environment, plenty of space etc. This also feels fine.


So in terms of answering the question it sounds like I'm pretty flexible and I'm more interested in what the role is, how much autonomy I'll have etc then whether I can work remotely or not. For example if a well paid, interesting job came up but you had to be in the office every day, I wouldn't rule it out.

 

[throwaway4372]

I worked remotely since a few years before covid. I'm job hunting now and it's my preference to try to continue to work remote for the remainder of my career. When I'm satisfied that I can always find remote work then I will relocate to a cheaper part of the country.

I'm finding that job sites are inadequate when it comes to defining the location of the job. About 80% of jobs advertised as remote aren't actually remote imo because they require travel to an office a few times a month, often they don't even tell you where the office is or who the company is so you have to apply blind, usually it's about 2-3 hours travel each way from here, even seen "travel to Glasgow once a month for a few days at your own expense".

Often a job will be advertised as remote but contain a paragraph about how great their new office is and how you'll enjoy working there with your cycle to work benefit, seen that a lot and it's completely ridiculous.

I'd really like to see some improvement to job sites so I can search for 100% remote jobs and not have to filter through all the nonsense to figure out what the poster means by remote. There are terms like "remote first" and "fully remote" and "remote" and "home working" which all seem to mean different things to different people.

A consequence of having to apply blind is I've had some discussions with recruiters who get pretty angry when I say I don't want to travel hours to wherever. If they made it clear in their ads then I wouldn't have bothered applying.

This is how I think jobs should be listed:

• 100% Remote - no office ever, remote interviews, laptop shipped
• 90% Remote - office 1-2 times per month, remote interviews, laptop shipped
• Hybrid - work in an office 1-3 days per week
• On-site - work in an office 4-5 days per week

For everything which involves an office the office location should be specified and searchable so candidates can search for jobs within a reasonable travel distance of where they live.

All jobs may have the occasional team building or Christmas dinner nonsense, but it should always be optional and historically was anyway so no change there.

 

[jaybee]

If the ad mentions no proper salary range or where/how often I will be working, I scroll on by.
My current role is in the hybrid category. We are expected in office 2-3 days a week.
There is major push back on this for various reasons from employees. Mainly that it is not policed and some people in some departments are able to basically not come in ever, and get away with it. Being a London office, commutes are often long and expensive. 2-3 days hybrid is in the awkward position for train commute pricing as well, with many still having to buy annual seasons for thousands.

I would define onsite as 5 days a week personally.
Hybrid could mean anything which is why they need to say.
Remote should mean fully remote to me, with only occasional office requirement for something perhaps once a month absolute max.

In terms of what works... Depends on the role. For most IT roles I would say hybrid. We seem to be increasingly coming into the office to sit on teams calls to our colleagues that are at home that day anyway. Seems pointless. We need Collab days where really most of the key teams that work together all come in on the same day.

 

[Felon]

My current role (I'm on notice) has been full remote, and I've been a full remote worker for a while now, I'm totally done with it - I can't stand working from home anymore.

My new role has 'no mandate' for being in the office, however I'll be going 3-4 days a week - as being around colleagues in the flesh is just better than trying to do everything via video calls, in my opinion.

I think if it states in a contract that it's more than 3 days a week in the office, it's basically an 'on-site' role.

 

[jaybee]

My current role (I'm on notice) has been full remote, and I've been a full remote worker for a while now, I'm totally done with it - I can't stand working from home anymore.

My new role has 'no mandate' for being in the office, however I'll be going 3-4 days a week - as being around colleagues in the flesh is just better than trying to do everything via video calls, in my opinion.

I think if it states in a contract that it's more than 3 days a week in the office, it's basically an 'on-site' role.

What's your home setup like? Do you have an actual quiet place/office at home?
I think a lot of younger people prefer coming into office for the vibe/social side and going out after work and for lunch, not to mention that their home space might be a house share/flat where they do not have facilities to work comfortably at home.

 

[Liquid_Entity]

I work 2 days in office and 3 at home. My train commute is 1h15m and it's usually always late coming home not the other way around. Costs me £30 per day to travel on train using Trainpal and split tickets as it's cheaper than buying a weekly or monthly season ticket.

I prefer to be at home because I get a lot more done, nobody to collar you while making a tea, or popping to the loo. People can message you on teams asking for help and you can choose when to reply. Don't get that luxury in the office. I can generally get stuff done in reasonable day/time like washing or hoovering that I wouldn't get if I was away from home from 8am to 6pm.

 

[Martynt74]

What's your home setup like? Do you have an actual quiet place/office at home?
I think a lot of younger people prefer coming into office for the vibe/social side and going out after work and for lunch, not to mention that their home space might be a house share/flat where they do not have facilities to work comfortably at home.

Yeah, whilst i love working from home, i'm not sure how it'd be without a dedicated office

 

[Jim99]

I am getting very fed up of jobs ads stating "hybrid" and then offering 1-2 days a week at home. As you say, that's just working predominantly in the office with the odd opportunity to WFH.

At various point I did 3 days per week in the office before COVID, and it was always considered a full-time in office role - the point was that it wasn't benefiting anyone to spend all 5 days in the office.

I think a lot of companies are doing 3/4 days in office just so that they can continue to claim hybrid, not because they actually want to or support the concept.

 

[Feek]

Been fully working from home since mid 2017, last year I went into the office half a dozen times, this year, I've been in twice.

I've got a proper little office set up, it's great.

 

[Semple]

What's your home setup like? Do you have an actual quiet place/office at home?
I think a lot of younger people prefer coming into office for the vibe/social side and going out after work and for lunch, not to mention that their home space might be a house share/flat where they do not have facilities to work comfortably at home.

I had a chat with one of our interns this week and they basically said something along those lines, they go in the office 4/5 days a week for the social element, but also because being in a house share means the only private space they have to work from is their bedrooms - which I can imagine are fairly small rooms anyway. So hardly appealing to wfh from.

In my eyes hybrid working should be a max of 2 days a week in the office. When you consider pre-pandemic most people always WFH on Fridays (our office was always dead on a Friday), or used some sort of flexitime to take Friday off or half day Fridays. That makes the core working week 4 days long, if you're expected to be in 3 days a week then that's 1 day less than being on site full time.

We're classed as hybrid at work, expectation is for people to be in at least 1 day a week. But some have been ignoring that for some time and barely come in 1 day a month.

 

[dowie]

Remote: There's no obligation to travel to an office, with potential optional get-togethers 1-3 times a year (not mandatory).

I'd have some disagreement here with the not-mandatory bit. You're a remote worker if you're typically working all 5 working days per week from home IMO.

Consider this, if you typically work on-site in London but have to attend an annual meeting at the NYC office, that once-a-year obligation doesn't negate that you work in the London office.

Hybrid: Maximum 50/50 split between office and remote work. If you need to attend the office 3-4 days a week, it's not really hybrid anymore. In my view, anything requiring over 50% attendance falls into the on-site category with remote work flexibility as a perk.

No, hybrid simply means you're splitting the time between home and office, if your working week is typically split between working in the office and working from home then you're a hybrid.

That can be 2:3 or 1:4, in either direction, it's not the case that it's Hybrid only if the split is in favour of home, applying a maximum only to one side of that seems flawed and more just reflective of a personal preference for home working.

On-site: Requiring 3+ days per week in the office.

No, on-site requires 5 days a week in the office (typically). Though you could have ad-hoc working from home days.

If you have a regular weekly scheduled day or two working from home then by definition you're no longer full time on site, you're hybrid.

 

[IC3]

...

So in terms of answering the question it sounds like I'm pretty flexible and I'm more interested in what the role is, how much autonomy I'll have etc then whether I can work remotely or not. For example if a well paid, interesting job came up but you had to be in the office every day, I wouldn't rule it out.

I would, in fact I did once already.

If I remember correctly, you're in the same line of work as me, there's no need for us to be physically in an office.

I worked remotely since a few years before covid. I'm job hunting now and it's my preference to try to continue to work remote for the remainder of my career. When I'm satisfied that I can always find remote work then I will relocate to a cheaper part of the country.

I'm finding that job sites are inadequate when it comes to defining the location of the job. About 80% of jobs advertised as remote aren't actually remote imo because they require travel to an office a few times a month, often they don't even tell you where the office is or who the company is so you have to apply blind, usually it's about 2-3 hours travel each way from here, even seen "travel to Glasgow once a month for a few days at your own expense".

Often a job will be advertised as remote but contain a paragraph about how great their new office is and how you'll enjoy working there with your cycle to work benefit, seen that a lot and it's completely ridiculous.

I'd really like to see some improvement to job sites so I can search for 100% remote jobs and not have to filter through all the nonsense to figure out what the poster means by remote. There are terms like "remote first" and "fully remote" and "remote" and "home working" which all seem to mean different things to different people.

A consequence of having to apply blind is I've had some discussions with recruiters who get pretty angry when I say I don't want to travel hours to wherever. If they made it clear in their ads then I wouldn't have bothered applying.

This is how I think jobs should be listed:

• 100% Remote - no office ever, remote interviews, laptop shipped
• 90% Remote - office 1-2 times per month, remote interviews, laptop shipped
• Hybrid - work in an office 1-3 days per week
• On-site - work in an office 4-5 days per week

For everything which involves an office the office location should be specified and searchable so candidates can search for jobs within a reasonable travel distance of where they live.

All jobs may have the occasional team building or Christmas dinner nonsense, but it should always be optional and historically was anyway so no change there.

I think it's either Remote or Not, there's no in-between as that falls under Hybrid.

I'm job hunting too currently and the amount of BS in the AD's means it takes twice as long, to get any meaningful information from it.

If the ad mentions no proper salary range or where/how often I will be working, I scroll on by.
My current role is in the hybrid category. We are expected in office 2-3 days a week.
There is major push back on this for various reasons from employees. Mainly that it is not policed and some people in some departments are able to basically not come in ever, and get away with it. Being a London office, commutes are often long and expensive. 2-3 days hybrid is in the awkward position for train commute pricing as well, with many still having to buy annual seasons for thousands.

I would define onsite as 5 days a week personally.
Hybrid could mean anything which is why they need to say.
Remote should mean fully remote to me, with only occasional office requirement for something perhaps once a month absolute max.

In terms of what works... Depends on the role. For most IT roles I would say hybrid. We seem to be increasingly coming into the office to sit on teams calls to our colleagues that are at home that day anyway. Seems pointless. We need Collab days where really most of the key teams that work together all come in on the same day.

My previous work experience was similar, those with more time under the belt rarely ever came in and some relocated to other countries.

My current role (I'm on notice) has been full remote, and I've been a full remote worker for a while now, I'm totally done with it - I can't stand working from home anymore.

My new role has 'no mandate' for being in the office, however I'll be going 3-4 days a week - as being around colleagues in the flesh is just better than trying to do everything via video calls, in my opinion.

I think if it states in a contract that it's more than 3 days a week in the office, it's basically an 'on-site' role.

It's not for everyone, I'm an introvert so it works beautifully for me.

What's your home setup like? Do you have an actual quiet place/office at home?
I think a lot of younger people prefer coming into office for the vibe/social side and going out after work and for lunch, not to mention that their home space might be a house share/flat where they do not have facilities to work comfortably at home.

I'm in my late 20's (closer to 30), not sure if I still fall into the "younger people" category, but me and people I know my age who work remotely would prefer to take a pay cut rather than return to a miserable one way 1-2h commute, public transport/car traffic and not to mention the additional time it takes you to get ready and prep meals unless you enjoy eating the processed crap available in the supermarkets. There's no time to actually live and enjoy life... lol

I work 2 days in office and 3 at home. My train commute is 1h15m and it's usually always late coming home not the other way around. Costs me £30 per day to travel on train using Trainpal and split tickets as it's cheaper than buying a weekly or monthly season ticket.

I prefer to be at home because I get a lot more done, nobody to collar you while making a tea, or popping to the loo. People can message you on teams asking for help and you can choose when to reply. Don't get that luxury in the office. I can generally get stuff done in reasonable day/time like washing or hoovering that I wouldn't get if I was away from home from 8am to 6pm.

My 1 day a month commute was costing me just under £50, that was train tickets, underground, bus and car parking for my car (could reduce this cost, if I took the bus but it adds even more time to the commute...)

Yeah, whilst i love working from home, i'm not sure how it'd be without a dedicated office

I don't have a dedicated office, I just switch between bedroom, living room and kitchen when prepping dinner whilst looking if my deployment push was successful.

I am getting very fed up of jobs ads stating "hybrid" and then offering 1-2 days a week at home. As you say, that's just working predominantly in the office with the odd opportunity to WFH.

At various point I did 3 days per week in the office before COVID, and it was always considered a full-time in office role - the point was that it wasn't benefiting anyone to spend all 5 days in the office.

I think a lot of companies are doing 3/4 days in office just so that they can continue to claim hybrid, not because they actually want to or support the concept.

Yeah, I knew loads of people that had that arrangement, Monday's and Friday's WFH and this use to be called on-site.

Been fully working from home since mid 2017, last year I went into the office half a dozen times, this year, I've been in twice.

I've got a proper little office set up, it's great.

Dedicated workspace in the house sounds like a healthy work life balance. I've a bad habit of working past working hours, when I was on-site I was ready to leave by 5:30pm and the amount of coffee breaks I use to take.

I had a chat with one of our interns this week and they basically said something along those lines, they go in the office 4/5 days a week for the social element, but also because being in a house share means the only private space they have to work from is their bedrooms - which I can imagine are fairly small rooms anyway. So hardly appealing to wfh from.

In my eyes hybrid working should be a max of 2 days a week in the office. When you consider pre-pandemic most people always WFH on Fridays (our office was always dead on a Friday), or used some sort of flexitime to take Friday off or half day Fridays. That makes the core working week 4 days long, if you're expected to be in 3 days a week then that's 1 day less than being on site full time.

We're classed as hybrid at work, expectation is for people to be in at least 1 day a week. But some have been ignoring that for some time and barely come in 1 day a month.

Sounds like prison, small room with 4 walls.

 

[Lopéz]

I would, in fact I did once already.

If I remember correctly, you're in the same line of work as me, there's no need for us to be physically in an office.

I work in a nice office, with good facilities, it's a 20 minute commute which the company pays for... just because I don't need to physically be in an office doesn't mean I don't want to be.

 

[Liquid_Entity]

I'm sure if they paid my travel I'd go in more haha

 

[Jim99]

If my office was walkable and a nice place, I'd happily go there a few days per week. My job involves a lot of meeting people and talking to them, and I do enjoy it more when I'm physically in the room.

But with the reality that it costs over £30 and takes more than an hour to get there, it really doesn't matter how nice a place it is, or how much I'd like to take part in an event of some kind - I'm not doing it if I can possibly avoid it.

It does feel like the only carrot they have to offer is "we've got a lovely office" and it counts for a bit, but not that much. So now the sticks are coming out.

 

[Stu999]

But with the reality that it costs over £30 and takes more than an hour to get there, it really doesn't matter how nice a place it is

Yeah, my current office is mostly great (stupid hot-desking aside*) but it still costs £11 a day to park to get there, not including petrol, so would avoid that if I can.

*the issue is more a people thing (can’t be bothered to look up allocated desks), rather than an issue with hot-desking itself, although on the busiest days there aren’t enough desks.

 

[D.P.]

I'm sure if they paid my travel I'd go in more haha

Not really aimed at you in particular, but it see this line , or similar arguments about commute time counted as working time.


It is not your employers responsibility to provide you housing close to the office. I assume you knew the office location when applying for the job so it is up to you to choose jobs with a commute you can manage,.or simply move and live closer to work.

While short commutes are unavoidable,. people travelling 2 hours at great expense is almost always entirely their own fault. Sure rent might be higher closer, but that is why the salary is likely higher. People trying to get tye higher salary and cheaper rent shouldn't complain at the commute and shouldn't push the commute angle on why remote work it better.

 

[HangTime]

I largely agree with your definition although I think there's an argument that 3 days a week in office is still hybrid as 40% of the work is remote. Realistically not many would do a true 50/50 split (2.5 days in office) so 60/40 or 40/60 still seem hybrid to me.
IMO it would be a bit a bit hypocritical to say that going in an office e.g. once a week (20%) is enough to make it hybrid, but being at home twice a week (40%) isn't hybrid.

What I would say however is there's a general problem with "Hybrid working" just considered to be purely about time spent at office vs remote. I've written about this in the past but you need to do a lot more than just say "two days a week in the office, job done" to make hybrid effective. If you don't nurture it properly, hybrid working can be worse than both fully office based or fully remote.

I'm sure if they paid my travel I'd go in more haha

My travel is 'paid' but it's taxable, I'd still prefer to travel less anyway.

Not really aimed at you in particular, but it see this line , or similar arguments about commute time counted as working time.


It is not your employers responsibility to provide you housing close to the office. I assume you knew the office location when applying for the job so it is up to you to choose jobs with a commute you can manage,.or simply move and live closer to work.

While short commutes are unavoidable,. people travelling 2 hours at great expense is almost always entirely their own fault. Sure rent might be higher closer, but that is why the salary is likely higher. People trying to get tye higher salary and cheaper rent shouldn't complain at the commute and shouldn't push the commute angle on why remote work it better.

As someone that lives over 2hrs from the office I agree in general, that's my decision. However what's more tricky is the people who were sold jobs on the basis of x about of time in the office, and then there's an RTO mandate. I was told it was 2 days a week in the office during the hiring process so I'm fine with that, but if this was changed to 3+ days a week it would be frustrating (not least because the travel budget isn't high enough).

 

[Freefaller]

I personally like being in the office but it depends on the company, the culture and the commute. If those are all good I'd happily go in daily.

For me I feel 2-3 days a week in the office is absolutely what I'd call hybrid.

Whilst it's been proven that we don't need to go in daily people overlook the importance of developing working relationships with your peers and colleagues. This is a human element that needs human contact , those spontaneous conversations are often vital for solving problems, creativity but also understanding deeper elements of work.

Again this is all role and industry dependent, however what isn't role or industry dependent is being a human being. Irrespective if you're an introvert or not spending time with people is a really important thing not just for mental health (although hugely important) but it's a critical human and element.