For hybrid work to succeed, four steps are necessary, but too many organizations stop after the ... [+]
When it comes to the future of hybrid work, it’s hard to know what to believe: the headlines or our eyes. That’s because the changes are happening fast and moving in all directions.
Those who said “return to the office, full time, now” are backing off—yes, even Elon Musk. Those who told employees they could work however they want, such as Snap, also are backing off—now telling people they need to return to the office. It’s like watching a competitive ping-pong match.
There appears to be no rhyme or reason to what’s going on. But there is. People staked out their positions too early. They made sweeping pronouncements without fully considering the consequences and without the necessary follow-through. The resulting confusion—and backsliding—was predictable.
For hybrid work to succeed, four steps are necessary, but too many organizations stopped after the first.
Step 1: Align the leadership team on the policy. Listen to employees, set aside your biases about the good old days, discuss the options with your senior colleagues and align. Your answer probably will be some version of hybrid, at least for employees who normally work in an office. But it will have some nuances. You may identify certain roles that can be fully remote. You’ll have to pin down certain details, such as approval processes, travel and reimbursement policies for remote workers, which days or weeks everybody’s presence will be required for culture- and team-building purposes (hopefully allowing teams to decide). Align, get things down in writing, and spread the word.
Step 2: Let your teams determine their hybrid norms—then support them. Hybrid work can’t be left to individual choice, or it will lead to chaos. Remember when people tried to work flexibly before Covid-19 struck? They were marginalized: unable to get recognized during meetings where they were the only ones who dialed in, missing important conversations during meeting breaks, viewed as uncommitted by their full-time, on-site peers. In many cases, their careers took a hit.
Remote work worked during the height (or should I more properly say, depths) of the pandemic because everyone was remote. Everyone interacted the same way, on a level playing field; during Zoom meetings, people took turns, raised hands, submitted comments in “chat,” privately sent each other words of encouragement, helpful tips or even jokes. Yes, they built connection and rapport despite being remote.
But when some people returned to the office, while others continued working remotely, it started falling apart. An example: Just before I started writing this, I was “in” a meeting with some European colleagues who wanted help with a client. They sat together in a room with a camera showing the room view and a couple of us were dialed in full screen. They looked like ants and we looked like giants. We had our names under our faces and they were identified only as Conference Room 1. It was a terrible dynamic. So, I paused the meeting and asked everyone to open their laptops and introduce themselves so we weren’t “a room of strangers.” It helped. But guess what, the two senior partners didn’t open their laptops. They said they didn’t bring them. They assumed I knew who was who, though it was virtually impossible to tell who was saying what among the tiny ants on the screen.
The point is: Hybrid protocols and norms need to be worked out in advance and no one is in a better position to work them out than the team members themselves. There are lots of questions to be answered: When will we be together in person? When will we be together on screen? When we have to be hybrid what rules will we follow? [I love one company’s “don’t share a square” rule. That would’ve fixed my bad hybrid meeting the other day.] Companies should expect the norms to vary by team. And they’ll probably change over time; that’s okay. Tech teams may get together in person once a month for a week at a time; finance teams may spend several weeks together toward the end of the financial quarter—and when the auditors are in town.
Step 3: Invest in building capability and making it work. This is still new for everyone. It will take serious commitment and effort to get it right. Company leaders wouldn’t enter a new market or launch a new product without first putting all the pieces in place to give it a solid chance of achieving success. Likewise, hybrid work: It won’t happen magically. Organizations need to teach managers how to build connection and culture across distributed teams. Everyone, including the “suits” on the top floor, will need working knowledge of some new (and perhaps frustrating) technologies that will allow them to collaborate asynchronously without all the meetings we hate. You can’t rewire how people work by issuing memos. But that’s what some have tried, without the necessary planning, capability building, discipline and investment.
Step 4: Transition to an operating model more compatible with hybrid work. It’s hard to make hybrid work schedules truly work when teams operate in silos. Hybrid work can work, however, if you switch over to an operating model using dedicated, cross-functional—or “agile”— teams: people with different skills who collaborate on specific projects and then move on to work with new teams on other projects requiring their expertise. Hybrid and agile were made for each other.
The greatest obstacles to the new ways of working typically are leadership and culture. Leaders want to see their followers. So, they cling to frequent meetings, hallway interactions, management-by-walking-around, and other beliefs and practices incompatible with hybrid work. If one assumes that presence equals productivity, as many do, hybrid is a non-starter.
Leaders need to work with their managers and employees to articulate the aspirational new culture needed to make flexible work truly work. Most importantly, they have to change where, when and how they personally work to “role model” it all from the top. If they do, they will find that the rewards of making it work—in terms of engagement, productivity and retention—were well worth it.
