Hybrid Working: A Process Rather Than A Destination

The pandemic continues to reshape how we work, where we work, and the technologies we use to stay connected to each other.  McKinsey predicts nine out of ten organizations will be combining remote and on-site working in the coming years. As hybrid working becomes the permanent way of working, we must ask whether companies are ready for the massive changes this will have on HR processes, leadership practices for engaging a global workforce and the design of the office of the future.

While many of us have been working in a hybrid model for the past few years, leaders are continuing to ask: 

1. How do we create choice with guardrails for hybrid working?
2. When does being face to face really matter?
3. What is the impact of hybrid working on career development?

One way to address these questions is to create a framework for communicating hybrid working in your company. My column on Forbes is here, Here I want to share an abbreviated version and start a conversation on what is working around designing a hybrid workplace and what do we need to continue to be aware of in this next normal of work.  

The model below details key areas to explore in your vision around designing a hybrid workplace.  

Let’s examine each of these areas and pose some questions for you and your team to address:

1. Propose Principles for Flexible Working: Provide Clarity and Autonomy

Hybrid working has gone from a temporary accommodation to a mainstream workplace practice. Pre-pandemic, 20% of U.S. adults whose jobs could mostly or entirely be performed outside of the office worked from home, and that number jumped to 71% during the pandemic, according to Pew Research. One of the first steps companies are taking is to create enterprise principles for flexible working. Royal Bank of Canada has done just this with its set of guidelines for workplace flexibility. These enterprise principles for flexible work provide guidance and autonomy, rather than a “top-down policy” and explain why hybrid working is a work in process rather than a destination.

 These principles are shown on Figure 2.  

2. Re-Invent Work: Where, When, Why and How We Work

While the pandemic may have eliminated our commute to work, many of us ended up working longer hours and less efficiently,  leading to excessive workloads. In fact, Microsoft Teams data shows between February 2020 and February 2021, time spent on Teams meetings more than doubled, and continues to climb, with workers reporting they respond to Teams chats every five minutes.

This hyper-responsiveness is exacerbating our ability to find work life balance, leading to greater stress and employee burnout. The American Institute of Stress reporting 83% of American workers suffer from workplace stress, and 52% of American workers surveyed by Indeed are feeling burned out.

It’s not just we are working more on Zoom, Teams, or Slack, but it’s really about the density of our workday. Many of us are asking, how can we re-design work so the flow and design of working is different than it is today. This is what Salesforce is doing with some parts of the organization experimenting with going meeting-free for one week. They are calling this, “working asynchronously” at Salesforce.  And it does not just happen, Salesforce created a preparation guide for working asynchronously  with tips for moving brainstorming meetings to digital channels like Miro, and best practices for focusing on heads-down work for long stretches. Then there is VTT Research Centre of Finland’s future of work experiment  creating an offline hour when all employees are unreachable via online channels so everyone can focus on individual work without interruptions. It’s these types of experiments, as Kirsi Nuotto the SVP of Human Resources at VTT says, that can help all of us clarify new ways of working. I believe what is important here is the recognition that we do not have the answers for working in a new way, but we need to ask a new set of questions and start experimenting to test new ways to work.

This brings us to the question of what’s the new role and purpose of the office? In a recent article by McKinsey The Office A Whole New Floor (Plan) Phil Kirschner,  Associate Partner, McKinsey, shared what one senior manager observed of office life post pandemic, which gets to the core of the change many of us have made transitioning from our “office,” to working in a hybrid fashion. The comment went along these lines:

“I feel like I have lost my office through this transition, but I’ve gained a floor. I have all this diversity and access not just to meet different people but to use different typologies of spaces and technologies and signals and feeling and design throughout my day to best serve my needs and the needs of my team.”

We need to look beyond the physical space of the office to what needs to be created so we work differently both when we are together in a common space and when we are apart. The office needs to be designed for both the people in the room and those not in the room and a new better way of working needs to be created in organizations!

3. Provide Equitable Career Development: Unlock Potential For All Employees

Hybrid working is bringing proximity bias into focus. This is the phenomenon of favoring in person workers for career development, stretch assignments and mentoring at the expense of those who work remotely or in a hybrid work model.

Earlier this year, Executive Networks in partnership with MeQuilibrium conducted research among nearly 1,000 HR leaders, business leaders and full-time workers uncovering the fear remote and hybrid workers have of proximity bias.  While 32% of employees prefer a hybrid work environment, 43% view in-person work as the best for career advancement. Perhaps most telling, when we asked business leaders their views on the connection of hybrid working and career advancement, 61% of business leaders say their organization places more value on in-person work than remote or hybrid work and 56% of employees agree with this.

For hybrid work to be successful, organizations must clearly define and communicate how career development can be equitable so those who work in a hybrid or remote model have access to similar career opportunities as those who work primarily in-person.

4. Model Empathic Leadership: Soft Skills Become The Hard Skills

Ten years ago, Google's Project Oxygen started with a fundamental question: do managers matter? The consensus was that not only do managers  matter,  but the best ones are good coaches. These managers inspire trust, provide regular feedback, and build equitable processes for growth and development. Taken together, these skills may typically be referred to as “soft skills,” but have become the “hard skills” of leadership.

 A recent Harvard Business Review article, The C-Suite Skills That Matter Most, the authors analyzed 5,000 job descriptions of C-suite executives and found that the skills that matter most are such soft skills as the ability to listen and communicate well, a facility for working with different types of people and groups, and the capacity to be empathic, trust building and the ability to infer how others are thinking and feeling. These skills are important not only for the CEO but also for the CIO, CHRO, CMO and CFO and their teams.

As work norms have been forever changed, developing these soft skills-what I called Power Skills for Jobs of the Future are essential to helping all employees feel equally supported in the hybrid workplace.

Conduct On-Going Check-Ins: And Team Level Agreements

HR processes at most organizations—such as recruiting on-boarding, performance management, and career development—are not designed for the hybrid workplace. So, each one of these processes needs to be re-examined for hybrid working. And managers need to reach consensus with team members on core working hours, as well as how all the moments in an employee’s journey that will change as they work in a new way.

It's so important to have these check-ins to understand your team member’s needs and aspirations and discuss the agreements that will guide and shape new ways of working. A conversation about hybrid working is really a conversation about equity in the workplace.

What types of conversations are you having with your teams about hybrid working? Are you thinking of hybrid working as a “work in process” and if so, what experiments are you running?

Jeanne Meister is Executive Vice President, Executive Networks. She is also a Contributor to Forbes and Harvard Business Review.

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