06/17/2021

Designing for Hybrid Work

The Silverchair story

Editor’s note: Today’s post is by Lily Garcia Walton. Lily is Chief People Officer at Silverchair in Charlottesville, Virginia.

At Silverchair, we have been pursuing our transformation to a hybrid work model through an inclusive design process, drawing heavily from end-user (i.e., employee) feedback. Pre-pandemic, all but a handful of our ~120 employees worked together full-time at Silverchair headquarters — an historic downtown Charlottesville office building known as the Hardware Store (after its original retail purpose many years ago). We had some reason to believe that our collocation at the Hardware Store was one of the secret ingredients that produced the vibrant, cohesive culture we all enjoyed.

Like so many organizations, the advent of the pandemic meant that we became fully remote nearly overnight. We instructed our people to take home their personal belongings and whatever office equipment they needed. We remained open for business during the pandemic in the sense that we allowed people to work at the Hardware Store if they followed strict safety protocols. Over time, however, nearly everyone gave up on this and Silverchair was, thus, unceremoniously transformed into a remote-first organization.

In January 2021, with the exciting prospect of vaccination on the horizon, we started to plan for what re-engagement with headquarters might look like on an expanding scale. It became clear to us, through survey feedback we gathered in January, that the vast majority of our employees had derived significant personal and professional benefit from remote work and, although we very much wanted to return to the office, almost nobody saw a need to return full-time. Based upon the impressive productivity our teams had been able to maintain throughout the pandemic, our leaders agreed.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.