By late February 2020, as the implications of Covid-19 were becoming clear, Hiroki Hiramatsu, the head of global HR at Fujitsu, realized that the company was in for a shock.

For years, flexible work arrangements had been on the agenda at Fujitsu, but little had actually changed. Most managers in the Japan offices still prized face-to-face interaction and long office hours—and according to an internal survey conducted not long before, more than 74% of all employees considered the office to be the best place to work. But the pandemic, Hiramatsu foresaw, was about to turn everything upside down.

By the middle of March, the majority of Fujitsu’s Japan-based employees—some 80,000—were working from home. And it didn’t take long for them to appreciate the advantages of their new flexibility. By May, according to a follow-up survey, only 15% of Fujitsu employees considered the office to be the best place to work. Some 30% said the best place was their homes, and the remaining 55% favored a mix of home and office—a hybrid model.

As employees settled into their new routines, Hiramatsu recognized that something profound was happening. “We are not going back,” he told me this past September. “The two hours many people spend commuting is wasted—we can use that time for education, training, time with our family. We need many ideas about how to make remote work effective. We are embarking on a work-life shift.”

For 10 years, I’ve led the Future of Work Consortium, which has brought together more than 100 companies from across the world to research future trends, identify current good practice, and learn from emerging experiments. Since the pandemic I’ve focused our research on the extraordinary impact that Covid-19 is having on working arrangements. As part of that effort, I’ve talked extensively to executives, many of whom, like Hiramatsu, report that they’ve detected a silver lining in our collective struggle to adapt to the pandemic. These executives told me that given the astonishing speed with which companies have adopted the technology of virtual work, and the extent to which most employees don’t want to revert to past ways of working, they’re seeing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reset work using a hybrid model—one that, if we can get it right, will allow us to make our work lives more purposeful, productive, agile, and flexible.

If leaders and managers want to make this transition successfully, however, they’ll need to do something they’re not accustomed to doing: design hybrid work arrangements with individual human concerns in mind, not just institutional ones.

The Elements of Hybrid

Figuring out how to do this is far from straightforward. That’s because to design hybrid work properly, you have to think about it along two axes: place and time.

Place is the axis that’s getting the most attention at the moment. Like Fujitsu’s employees, millions of workers around the world this year have made a sudden shift from being place-constrained (working in the office) to being place-unconstrained (working anywhere). Perhaps less noticed is the shift many have also made along the time axis, from being time-constrained (working synchronously with others) to being time-unconstrained (working asynchronously whenever they choose).

To help managers conceptualize the two-dimensional nature of this problem, I’ve long used a simple 2×2 matrix that’s organized along those axes. Before Covid-19, most companies offered minimal flexibility along both dimensions. This put them in the lower-left quadrant, with employees working in the office during prescribed hours. Some firms had begun to venture into the lower-right quadrant, by allowing more-flexible hours; others were experimenting in the upper-left quadrant, by offering employees more flexibility in where they work, most often from home. Very few firms, however, were moving directly into the upper-right quadrant, which represents an anywhere, anytime model of working—the hybrid mo

But that’s changing. As we emerge from the pandemic, many companies have firmly set their sights on flexible working arrangements that can significantly boost productivity and employee satisfaction. Making that happen, I’ve learned in my research, will require that managers consider the challenge from four distinct perspectives: (1) jobs and tasks, (2) employee preferences, (3) projects and workflows, and (4) inclusion and fairness. Let’s look at each in turn.