Why hybrid teams demand a leadership upgrade
Hybrid working has changed the psychological contract between workers and employers. To retain, engage and recruit the people they need, organisations must adapt their leadership and management capability.
The arrival of hybrid working has fundamentally changed expectations around the way we should work.
Where job roles allow, prospective and existing employees now expect remote working as a default condition of employment having got used to the autonomy that goes with that.
Meanwhile, leaders and managers survey near-empty offices, blacked out screens on zoom calls and wonder how they can maintain healthy relationships in their teams and a positive organisational culture when their people rarely see each other in person.
As a result, the accommodation which worked for both employee and employer in the pandemic is now a source of conflict.
Leaders like Elon Musk demand that their staff come to the office or leave the business. Meanwhile one-in-five UK workers say they want to move jobs in order to get more flexibility, according to recent research by PwC.
Research by Edenred in 2021 showed that while many organisations were quick to give employees the tools to work remotely, only a minority had addressed the upskilling or reskilling required to manage effectively in a hybrid environment.
For organisations who want to make hybrid working a success, addressing this skills gap is critical to ensure managers and leaders are able to maintain the necessary alignment between the needs of employees and the organisations they work for.
Flexible gains
For organisations who can get new ways of working right, there are certainly significant gains on offer.
Bodies like the CIPD advocate flexible working as a way of attracting and retaining the right people in a white-hot recruitment market.
Remote roles also have a critical role to play in improving gender diversity, as they allow more people to balance work and caring responsibilities which would otherwise be impossible.
There is also plenty of evidence that a flexible approach can improve wellbeing.
Most crucially of all, a better balance between home and office might improve the poor productivity which dogs the UK where our output per worker is still 13% below the G7 countries’ average output (ONS).
While there is no blueprint or rule book for how they should manage employees and working patterns right now, it is clear from the experience of the last two years that certain things do need to happen if businesses want to reach an arrangement that is productive for all concerned.
Set the guardrails
By now, almost every leader and manager will have an idea of the flexible working practices that work for the organisation and colleagues and those that don’t.
Whether those practices have evolved organically or by design, the first action for leaders is to work out what boundaries still need to be there for every employee so they can continue to build a culture of teamwork and collaboration
This requires setting guardrails for how people behave, especially in terms of responsiveness, communication, the way work is briefed, appearance and ‘camera on’ presence on calls.
They also need to set rules for time in the office and the mandatory requirement for attendance at certain meetings or stand-ups. Autonomy is important for employees, but it can’t be unbounded.
Define and respect flexibility
As a next step, organisations should then define what flexibility means for employees. Creating clarity on this will ensure that when people can carve out time in the day to attend to personal needs – whether that is a parent doing the school run in the middle of the afternoon or a lunchtime exercise class – that time is respected.
As the line has blurred between work and home life, this kind of definition is critical if we want to ensure flexible working improves employee wellbeing rather than it being a source of additional stress.
Balancing rules with empathy
Flexible working arrangements also bring a further challenge in that any personal issue facing employees is more immediate – and harder to get away from - but completely invisible to managers or team members when they come onto a remote meeting.
While meetings and one-to-ones will always have a focus on tasks or targets, line managers need to appreciate the importance of asking about and listening to any of the background challenges and stresses their people face.
This will help employees work and flex in a way that delivers on the needs of the organisation and the individual.
Without empathetic management, performance is more likely to suffer as workloads ramp up for certain projects or to meet seasonal demand.
Employees must understand that their side of the bargain involves transparency about any challenges they face, identifying what they need to succeed and being open about them.
Psychological safety
One of the most important areas of current thinking around this issue is the concept of psychological safety: the creation of an environment where employees feel they can talk up and be themselves without fear of negative impact on their status or career – even when they have made a mistake.
Over the years this concept, first developed by Professor Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School, has been proven to encourage creativity and improve employee productivity and performance.
In a post-pandemic world, it will also be important to creating a climate of trust and transparency that will prove fruitful in the future.
Improving psychological safety in the workplace will also be of particular benefit as organisations strive to retain as many employees as possible amid the current skills shortage – not least because it is an inclusive approach that helps people to feel more like they are part of a culture that is empathetic.
Organisations also need to promote not just individual psychological safety but also team psychological safety. This kind of group resilience can help them to foster growth and move on positively from the last two years – helping them to get truly insightful answers to those critical questions like ‘what did we all learn?’, ‘how can we help each other get back on track?’ and ‘how can we grow together from this?’.
Upskilling for a remote world
Managers can’t be expected to have all the skills and knowledge to lead and manage differently on their own and any training needs to cover a range of areas aimed specifically at improving performance in a hybrid or flexible working environment.
One dimension of this is improving the way managers brief tasks and identify the support required to ensure that those tasks are completed. This will ensure that people don’t feel isolated by physical separation from their team or simply tasked with something they can’t do or need help with.
Another change required is a leadership style grounded in ‘positive psychology’ which focuses on strengths, capabilities and possibilities rather than problems, deficits and weaknesses often falsely associated with remote workers.
As well as understanding how to listen to employees in a hybrid environment, leaders also need guidance to help them think in practical terms about what they can do to identify and remove barriers that impact on flexibility, autonomy, and the ability to focus on work.
This will help to address the growing problem of work intensification whereby workers are being asked to do more tasks in less time. Many studies have suggested this trend is growing despite, or perhaps because of, the growth of new technology designed to promote better productivity and collaboration.
The key takeaway
Developing the right management and leadership capability will help organisations challenge and change areas which get in the way of peak performance.
This is likely to include how effective work is measured, by focussing on outputs and outcomes rather than inputs and time spent on a job. Different ways of target-setting and the qualitative evaluation of employees is key to making autonomy and flexibility work.
It will also extend to the tools and systems that underpin – and control – remote workers: is Slack really making people more productive? Does the constant stream of communication across channels really help people focus? And what response time do we really need from emails?
But organisations can only hope to make these gains if they grasp the critical fact that allowing new working practices and management styles to evolve on their own is what will undermine productivity and engagement, not the practice of flexible working itself.
Dr Gill Owens, Head of Department (Leadership, Management and HR) at Teesside University International Business School
