Faced with the need to improve organisational performance, tensions are rising between employees that want to continue working from home and employers looking to bring them back to the office. A handful of employers are issuing blanket orders to return-to-office, but the majority are working out how to balance staff desire for flexibility with the needs of the business.
From an employer’s perspective, hybrid presents three significant challenges. First, how to build an inclusive culture and a sense of belonging when some team members are on-site, and others are virtual. There’s an ever-present risk that remote workers will miss out on important spur-of-the-moment interactions and decisions and don’t feel included or valued as a result.
Second, high-quality collaboration, the hallmark of high-performing and innovative teams, is harder to achieve in distributed teams when team members may be working different hours and from different locations.
Third, hybrid working makes it essential for employees to have access to the same platforms and data, but even when staff are trained to use the technology effectively, the absence of in-person cues increases the risk of mistakes occurring from miscommunication that can easily happen over email or chat.
Equally, employees are finding that as much as they want to work flexibly, some aspects of hybrid are stressful. Those with care responsibilities, say that it’s almost impossible to organise care provision without a predictable work schedule or knowing where they will be expected to work from on a given day.
Reflecting on these challenges it’s easy to see why many employers have focused on technology-led solutions. While technology has a critical role to play, it’s not enough in itself to drive organisational performance. All the issues outlined above, inclusion, collaboration and reducing error risk highlight the need for employers to prioritise people-focused challenges. Based on our own experience and conversations with clients here’s our take on what employers can do to nurture high performing hybrid teams.
Focus on culture
On the inclusion challenge, mangers need to be intentional about advocating for remote team members to ensure they receive equal visibility and opportunities via hybrid arrangements. Continuous recalibration has become a key competence for managers of hybrid teams. Managers need to continuously check in with staff to ascertain what’s is and isn’t working and adjustment policy, practice, and ways of working in response.
Related to this point, the most finely tuned working practices will fall flat in an organisation that doesn’t nurture a sense of psychological safety among dispersed teams. Nothing kills this faster than an organisation monitoring employee’s every movement. Managers need to be supported to pivot from assessing performance based on traditional criteria such as physical presence or hours worked to output-focused deliverables. Not only does this approach build trust and personal autonomy, critical factors for job satisfaction but enables employees to manage personal needs alongside work expectations.
It's worth noting that no matter how hard managers attempt to create an inclusive culture, employees working from home will quickly become disaffected unless they see they have the same opportunities to progress pay and career, and access to high-profile assignments as on-site peers.
Celebrate collaboration
Collaboration is more than scheduling time to work together, it’s a mindset. Establish a culture that rewards collaboration. Start by defining the values and behaviours that underpin successful working together in your organisation. Then recognise and reward employees when they demonstrate these to encourage repeat behaviour. Even better, encourage peer to peer recognition to embed the mindset into everyday interactions.
While remote work enables focus, shared workspaces are important for relationship building, spontaneous connectivity and knowledge sharing. Managers need to balance virtual with in-person collaboration but need to be more purposeful in when, where and how they bring distributed team members together to feed innovation.
Learn from mistakes
Most jobs that can be done from home typically involve a higher level of personal discretion. Employees need to feel psychologically safe to take decisions by themselves, and trust that when mistakes occur, these will be treated by management as a learning opportunity and not punished.
Structure flex
A flexible free for all, where employees decide what days, hours, location they work can be as stressful as being ordered back into the office. If your organisation hasn’t already had an explicit conversation with employees about service delivery requirements do so before you attempt to address the other points. Employees understand the need to balance their desire for flexibility with the needs of the business, and have higher levels of satisfaction with working arrangements when they understand the rationale behind them.
Technology is vital for hybrid working but creating a high performing team requires managers and leaders to nurture the right culture and reward behaviour that drives successful business outcomes.
