Many companies are still trying to balance remote, in-person and hybrid work. Here are some tips.
Until very recently, remote work was always a novelty. Maybe you were part of a small team of remote workers, or a rare individual who worked remotely and needed to educate colleagues and peers on how best to communicate and collaborate with you. Or perhaps you worked for one of the few large organizations with widespread remote work policies, many of which reverted to internal policies in highly publicized U-turns before COVID suddenly made remote work the norm.
When office work was the default, it was relatively easy to treat remote workers as “second-class citizens,” intentionally or not. Technophobes could safely ignore tools like Teams and Slack while dropping not-so-subtle hints that remote workers could always come into the office if they wanted a better experience.
With most knowledge workers forced to quickly adapt to remote work, it was no longer possible to feign ignorance about how to find the right document in Slack or how to connect to a Zoom meeting. In a complete role reversal, the few workers who go to physical offices find themselves chained to their laptops, webcams and headsets, participating in video conferences with remote workers instead of face-to-face meetings with the entire team. Essentially, they are working remotely from company properties.
Hybrid becomes normal
Too many companies have struggled with the rather myopic debate about what constitutes a “hybrid model”, producing presentations, policies and procedures for what most workers have developed intuitively. We have given our workers the freedom to figure out how to stay productive in the face of uncertainty, and trying to impose restrictions on what has been largely successful is an exercise in futility.
Likewise, one can try to apply strict definitions of hybrid work models. Requiring a certain number of days in the office is a recipe for damaging trust unless there is a compelling reason why such a policy would make work easier or more efficient for a remote worker. As leaders, we essentially asked a large portion of our workforce to transform their homes into a place of business. Expecting that we can impose arbitrary dictates will, at best, generate distrust and, at worst, drive out employees.
Instead of rigid policies and procedures, ask yourself what you as a leader can do to help advance the efforts of teams and individuals. Are there additional tools or capabilities that would make your job easier? Are they crying out for some personal interactions that you can help facilitate? Can you offer guidance or lessons from other groups that might be helpful?
Just as your teams were willing to improvise to make your organization successful during a challenging time, strive to return the favor rather than forcing them to abandon what worked. Hybrid work does not need to be a special condition. Instead, it has been proven to be an effective and desirable way of working for many people. Allowing and facilitating individual choice about how to work will be more effective than short-term, short-term mandates.
Always be learning
In most organizations, there have been dozens of innovations in how, where and when work is delivered, most of them developed by individuals or small groups. Try to capture what worked and use it to share “winning practices”, rather than trying to create a monolithic policy based on what worked for some teams but may be ineffective for others.
This can be as simple as creating “photo albums” of interesting home office or desk setups, or as complex as extending a workflow a team has built using spreadsheets and emails into an automated tool.
The sad thing about most innovations that are developed informally close to where they make an impact is that they often go unnoticed. Your company paid for these innovations in the form of “sweat capital” invested in their development, so why not maximize the return on that investment by seeking to learn and share rather than impose and prohibit?
Integrate your partners
Anecdotes aside, these partners can have access to custom or out-of-the-box tools for everything from managing physical office space to creating ad hoc collaborations across departments or teams.
Noncompeting organizations, suppliers, and customers are also potential sources of hard-earned lessons about what works and what doesn't in the new work model. They may have already instituted policies that you are considering, allowing you to learn from others' efforts. They may have had great success (or spectacular failure) with everything from mandatory days at the office to that fancy new collaboration software.
Start with the employee and the work will follow
Perhaps one of the biggest innovations in the way products and services are delivered in recent decades has been the focus on customer experience. Developing a detailed understanding of a customer's needs and wants and identifying where and how your organization can meet those wants has revolutionized most products and services. Likewise, thinking about how your company works from your employees' perspective will provide the same benefit.
Simple tests, like asking employees whether free lunch and in-office yoga classes are more valuable than avoiding 90 minutes of commuting, can prevent investments in initiatives that could backfire. Anticipating employee needs and meeting them will likely yield better results than process maps and new policy manuals.
We've asked a lot of our employees in recent years. A little investment in understanding what innovations they created and sharing them is a start. Following this investment with a greater reimagining of where, when and how we work through the eyes of employees will create more productive, happier and more effective workers than another debate over how your company defines hybrid work versus remote work.
