You can lose your people in the hybrid workplace

We’d only just got used to working from home, with video meetings, webinars and a flood of emails. And because most of us have come to like it, many companies are keeping the option for part of the week.

Many people still spend two or three days a week in their home office, and the other days in the office. Some companies go even further and leave it entirely up to each employee to decide where they work. That creates new challenges for collaboration and for leading people.

Part-time in the office

Meetings are now a mix of video and in-person, which makes it even harder to engage everyone and keep them focused on the agenda. Day-to-day collaboration, where many decisions can be made quickly in short, informal chats in the corridor, gets harder, because it’s easy to forget that the colleague it affects wasn’t there.

Another obvious place where you risk losing people is onboarding new employees. That was already a problem when we were all working from home. But even now that we’re partly back in the office, there’s a risk the new hire gets “forgotten” in the daily routine. “Because when ‘someone’ is in the office, surely they’ve brought the new colleague up to speed.” It’s also easy for employees to cling to the habits they formed while they were working 100 percent from home. And individual teams may need to discuss whether everyone should be in the office more when new people join.

There are big advantages in keeping the option to work from home. More flexibility in everyday life for each person, and the chance to focus deeply when there’s a report to write or statistics to go through. So credit to the companies that aren’t simply forcing everyone back into the full-time office grind.

A risk of stress

Unfortunately, the new way of working can also be a source of stress. As hybrid meetings multiply, the time that used to go on travel and breaks now goes on more meetings. Meetings are often booked back to back, so preparation time and breaks disappear. Emails and agendas get read during the meeting, because there’s no time to prepare between meetings.

That means people are unprepared and unfocused, which in turn creates stress and dissatisfaction. In the end it hurts the individual employee, who at worst burns out or leaves, and it also hurts overall efficiency and productivity.

Set the ground rules together with your employees

Working at different times and in different places takes clear agreements and structure. That way, you can counter uncertainty and stress among employees. That goes for day-to-day collaboration, for leadership and for meetings.

Make sure you agree what gets done when. Which tasks suit working from home, and when is it better to be in the office? When do we work, when are we off, and how do we communicate with each other? To avoid uncertainty and stress, you’ll need to draw up shared principles that everyone can get behind and work by.

Involve leaders and employees in drawing up the agreements, and communicate them to everyone, so nobody is in any doubt about how you work in a hybrid set-up.

You could start with a survey to take the temperature of how employees feel about hybrid work. Follow up with a workshop, and use the results as the starting point when you shape the agreements and the communication about hybrid work. That’s how you get the best result.

Good advice

Part of your communication should be very concrete advice on how employees and leaders should approach the hybrid working day, and what they should look out for.

Here are a few suggestions:

• Remember your employees and colleagues when you hold informal meetings: not everyone is there
• Remember to be engaged and well prepared for hybrid meetings. It asks more of you when some people are around the table and others are on screen at home.
• Remember to get new employees involved, whether they or you are working from home
• Remember to talk to your colleagues rather than sending an email. Both the ones in the office and the ones at home.
• Put much more of your communication in writing, and make it precise

Get help to move forward

The hybrid model makes it possible to reap entirely new benefits in the workplace of the future. But it also takes deliberate planning and focused execution to come out of the change stronger. Even when the will to change is there, it can be easy to fall back into old habits. Perhaps you need advice and inspiration from outside. We give talks and workshops and advise on hybrid leadership, communication strategies and effective hybrid collaboration.

Hear more about what we offer

If you’d like to hear more about how we’ve helped other clients with hybrid work, get in touch here.