Why It’s Time To Make Hybrid Work - A Message From the CEO

In early 2020 everything changed. 

From one day to the next, the world as we know it transformed. 

Our daily routine was disrupted; we were segregated from our loved ones, friends and peers for too long. 

The very nature of our day to day lives changed practically overnight. 

Bo Burman’s ‘Comedy’ (from the “Inside” show) summarized it perfectly for me. 

The world is changing
The planet’s heating up
What the f***k is going on?
Rearranging
It’s like everything happened all at once
Um, what the f***k is going on?‍

Along with the fundamental changes to our personal lives, came the fundamental changes to our work lives. 

Working norms and assumptions shifted in a way that no one could imagine.

The classic 9-5 model. Full time at the office. The employer/employee relationship. The loss of the water cooler moment. The clean separation of work and life. 

Think of work in 2019. Remember the commute? The future of work is here and there is no going back.

Rewriting the Rulebook 

What started off as an interim work condition has become a permanent one. Over 80% of knowledge workers are working at least partially remote and plan to continue to do so. 

But here’s the problem. The majority of the industry is still treating the situation as interim, assuming we can go back to a pre-pandemic working world.

The truth is that we can’t. Our assumptions of how to motivate, engage and care for employees have been challenged. 

The rules of the game have changed and it’s time to rewrite the rulebook. 

It’s time we stop treating remote work as an interim. 

It’s time we start rethinking our definition of productivity and how we measure it. 

It’s time we value output and goals in place of number of hours worked, email response time and Zoom time clocked.

It’s time we give employees the right tools, work processes and environments so they feel empowered and productive when not working from the office. 

It’s time to stop thinking of remote work as second best rather than an optimal solution.

It’s time we focus on wellness, connection and balance in place of swag, parties and billboards.

It’s time we reimagine the workspace and evolve from the binary work/home status quo.

It’s time we empower our employees to work where, when, how and with whom they want.

It’s time to make hybrid work.

‍

The anywell story

When I decided to build anywell along with my co-founders Ori, Erez and Tomer, we set out on a mission to make hybrid work. The vision for anywell was simple; to transition individuals, teams, and companies to work well wherever they were.

Over the past year me and the awesome team at anywell rewrote the playbook of how organizations and their employees can work in our new reality. 

By partnering with local businesses in the hospitality industry we started to reimagine the concept of a workspace and how to make it optimal. 

It needed to be local. Hyper local. It needed to be inspiring, creative, dynamic. It needed to be productive. It needed to meet diverse work needs. Zoom. Team meetings. Face to face. It needed to work. Fast Wifi. Sockets. Desks. It needed food. And it definitely needed coffee. Lots of coffee.

We partnered with visionary customers who were at the forefront of embracing hybrid work, going the extra mile to care for their remote employees. We unlocked ‘the third space’ (think flower shops to art galleries, co-working spaces to bohemian cafes) and empowered employees to work well from novel and energizing anywell locations.

Employees started leaving their home ‘office’ (*read kitchen table) to break the monotony of the day, get inspired, meet a colleague and get treated with a perfect cappuccino. 

Productivity went up. Employees started collaborating in person on remote days. Hybrid started to really work. 

We built and tested. We wrote and rewrote. 

After tens of thousands of hours of anywell bookings, perfecting the anywell experience across our growing network of over 200 inspiring locations, today we’re excited to be launching anywell to the public. 

The opportunity to reimagine the way we work doesn’t come often. I invite you to join us on this journey. 

Because it’s time to make hybrid work. 

Gadi Royz, 

CEO and Co-Founder of anywell

www.anywell.com