Hey there, it’s Mia, on the Work Shift team for the summer. Welcome back to our weekly newsletter. We want to hear from you, so send your feedback and ideas to me here. And if you haven’t already done so, you can use this link to sign up to our newsletter.

Quick Hits

• Move the needle. Boil the ocean. Blue-sky thinking. If this business jargon has you rolling your eyes or scratching your head, a Los Angeles-based startup says it wants to help.
• Companies with flexible in-office policies are hiring at double the rate of those that have fully returned to pre-pandemic attendance rules.
• ‘Work from anywhere’ jobs are drawing record demand as summer travel heats up.
• An exodus of workers and a surge in new business from China have combined to spark a talent war among banks and insurers in Hong Kong.
• Austin, once a national leader in returning to the office, is quickly becoming a laggard.

  Empty Desks

  Austin's citywide office-vacancy rate has shot up in recent months

You’re Muted

We’re all too familiar with the phrase — guilty of either forgetting to unmute before speaking in a meeting or sitting in awkward silence as a colleague earnestly chimes in on mute. Three years of hybrid meetings later, the issue is more complicated than unchecking the button at the bottom of the screen.

Disparities between in-person and remote workers in meetings can “reinforce other fault lines that separate groups,” said Anita Woolley, a professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University, by feeding an “us vs. them” mentality that stratifies office groups depending on their work-from-home status.

“If it turns out that people in certain job functions or at certain levels of seniority are always in the office physically, then you might see not only more logistical difficulties, but also negative social dynamics,” she says.

It could be that a disproportionate number of senior executives are attending hybrid meetings in-person compared to rank-and-file employees, or vice versa. Regardless of how the disparity manifests, one group is bound to feel left out, Woolley says.

Hybrid meetings are still in a testing stage, according to Steven Rogelberg, professor of organizational science, management and psychology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and author of forthcoming book Glad We Met: The Art and Science of 1:1 Meetings.

One way to level the playing field, he says, is to opt for entirely remote or in-person meetings, which are “inherently more democratic.”

In the meantime, company leaders must instill a hybrid meeting etiquette in all of their employees, remote and in-person.

“You can't make remote participants a hundred percent equal to in-person ones until we have excellent virtual reality technology,” said Gleb Tsipursky, chief executive officer of future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. “But the right techniques and the right technology will get you about ninety-five percent of the way there.”

Here are other tips for holding hybrid meetings where everyone stays engaged.

Quotable

Read/Watch/Listen

• Read: In her latest Working Assumptions column, Julia Hobsbawm writes about Queenagers, women who began their careers in the 1980’s, and how they might change work culture today.
• Watch: Japanese tech giant Fujitsu is taking a unique approach at improving employee well-being with a new office populated by dogs rather than workers, according to a new episode of QuickTake’s Work Smarter series.
• Listen: On this episode of The Circuit, Bloomberg’s Emily Chang visits Mattel’s design center to learn about Barbie’s history as well as what lies ahead for the fashion-doll-turned-movie star.
  
  Sources: Bloomberg