The National Association of State Chief Administrators  has issued a new report,  titled “How states are future-fitting their real estate portfolios,” in partnership with JLL, a global real estate and property management firm.

Despite the appearance of a shift away from hybrid work in the public sector, the report found that, in fact, hybrid work is now the standard in the majority of states which have settled into 2-3-day hybrid schedules. As the report says “findings demonstrate that state governments have not simply returned to pre-pandemic operations or remained in the pandemic crisis response mode. Instead, they have embraced what we term ‘moving to the middle’, adopting sophisticated hybrid work arrangements that intersect between mandatory full-time office presence and completely remote operations.”

The report goes on to say that “This evolution represents one of the most significant transformations in state workplace strategy, with implications extending beyond real estate to encompass workforce development, technology investment, and citizen service delivery.”

To make the new reality functional, states are actively redesigning their offices, according to the report. “These renovations typically involve reducing the number and size of dedicated individual workstations and reallocating that space to create a wider variety of collaborative environments, such as technology enabled conference rooms, informal huddle spaces, and open-plan project zones.”

While individual work can happen successfully at home, the office offers opportunities to congregate for teamwork. To that end, the development of space designed for a hybrid environment can help to emphasize collaboration, providing demonstration spaces that engage state employees about the effectiveness of the approach.

The redesign offers a destination for collaborative activities and the kinds of work that can best occur in a shared office environment and not a remote setting. 

Of course, even though many states seem to be settled on hybrid at least for now a number of challenges still exist. Among those listed in the report are:

• “The decentralized nature of most state governments also creates unique challenges in implementing consistent hybrid policies across diverse agencies with varying missions, cultures, and leadership preferences.”

• “The success of hybrid policies often depends on individual agency leadership commitment, which creates a spectrum of implementation enthusiasm across agencies within the same state.”

• “The transition to hybrid work has exposed fundamental gaps in management capabilities across state government. Traditional supervision models built around physical presence have proven inadequate for hybrid environments, creating an urgent need for comprehensive management training.” 

• “Hybrid work demands that managers focus on results rather than activities, requiring new skills in goal setting, KPI’s, progress tracking, and virtual team leadership.”

  
  

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