In the post-pandemic reality, organisations are rethinking work and hybrid working arrangements. Some leaders consider an adaptive bottom-up approach, letting individual teams figure out their own hybrid working policy.
Others are implementing ironclad rules which ask at least some staff members to be in office so many days a week – Meta and Zoom want their employees to be in two days a week.
Focus on Coordination
However, in order to make this organisation effective, there needs to be open communication between team members by sending emails, chat through apps on instant messengers and videoconferencing softwares and virtual meetings. Further, a system should be put in place to keep track of each team member’s working hours, different tasks milestones and their progress.
While some should work together, others will want to work together less often. Leaders should also decide on how the teams will work together, based on individual preferences, and provide support for these arrangements. A process for feedback could be created and implemented so that decisions could be made about how we should optimise a hybrid working model.
Ensuring that your hybrid work model works is a challenge, but those who get it right can reap the rewards: outputs could grow, costs could be cut, and people could become more deeply engaged. In a fast-changing environment, we need to be supple enough to respond however and whenever we need to, in order to create a world where two cultures – of working – can both thrive.
Communicate Effectively
In contrast, good middle managers will be in a better position to lead the department through hybrid work by designing policies that encourage the development of flexibility and inclusiveness, such as setting proactive policies for work hours, responsiveness and asynchronous coordination.
Minimise ambiguity so that remote working becomes more productive, and that every person working, wherever in the world, can access them.
Physical distance should not result in an ‘us and them’ culture between the teams; so both at-office and remote employees should proactively cultivate working relationships between them (through team meetings, virtual drinks or lunch, discussion groups, etc) to collaborate with employees working both in-office and remotely. Collecting regular employee feedback and adapting your hybrid policy if and when necessary Organisations must take appropriate and careful measures to make sure that the hybrid policy is delivering on its promise as part of their new hybrid workplace model. Read more about what should be included in your hybrid workplace policy in our recent blogpost.
Develop Shared Goals
Employee engagement – whether we’re talking about an office space or remote settings (including video meetings and collaborative workspaces like a Weekdone dashboard) – is vital, and one crucial way to enhance it is to have constant and clear communication norms. This way, you make sure that all staff members don’t feel as lonely and their emails/Teams chats are promptly replied to within an acceptable time frame.
How to balance flexibility and oversight is a key question in maintaining a healthy company culture. For some, a core day model balanced the role of the office; others allow their employees to determine how these flexible work policies should be arranged to suit their individual needs and preferences.
Leaders need to create clarity for their teams about what they are expected to do – for instance, the key performance indicators, the accountabilities around project milestones and workflows, providing feedback through surveys or focus groups, etc.
Provide Value in Coming to the Office
Regardless of whether the team works remotely or in-office, if you oversee it, make sure everyone has the time to pick up their kids from daycare during working hours, or to go for a run outside those hours.
It can also be more challenging to support relational development in hybrid work environments where managers, cross-functional networks and coworkers who don’t spend every day together still see each other less frequently. Managers will have to get better at building connections with their peers as well as creating the space for social connections at work to boost productivity – virtual drinks/lunches or internal panels should truly be designed as opportunities to do so.
Second, I think managers need to stop correlating facetime with accountability, and start measuring outputs (impacts that actually move the needle with respect to business objectives) for everyone on their team – that might mean reconsidering goals and performance management processes for all individuals, as well as changing the style of leadership of many managers; and it might also mean, for some of them at least – reconsidering what it means to ‘work from home’. Some academics are suggesting that, to reweave these links, junior staff should have mentors who aren’t necessarily their senior managers.
