Hybrid leadership skills: nine questions for your workplace

The way we’ll work in future is hybrid, and it puts new demands on both leaders and organisations. Here are the nine questions you need to be able to answer, and two concrete checklists for hybrid meetings.

Working from home became a permanent part of working life long ago. Most knowledge workplaces have found that productivity can be the same or higher when people work from home: many employees value the chance to focus without interruption, flexible hours, less time commuting and more room for family and free time. Work no longer fundamentally has to happen at the office.

But the downsides are real

Working at a distance has shown its downsides too. Creativity has poorer conditions when people can’t meet and develop ideas together. Wellbeing and people’s attachment to the workplace come under strain when colleagues don’t run into each other informally at the office. Studies show marked increases in loneliness and stress symptoms linked to working from home and social distance. We’re social beings who need to meet regularly and feel part of a community.

Neither fully at home nor simply back

A few companies choose to go fully virtual and give up the office. Others pull the opposite way and call everyone back full time. Given both the benefits and the downsides, neither extreme seems wise: the question isn’t whether working from home and virtual collaboration should be part of how we work, but how we get the most out of being able to combine office work and working from home. Hybrid is where this lands, and it’s management’s job to decide how it will work. (New to the concepts? Start with the guide What is hybrid leadership?)

The challenges of hybrid work

Microsoft’s large “2021 Work Trend Index” study, based on input from more than 30,000 people in 31 countries and data from Microsoft 365, put early figures on the challenges of hybrid work, and the patterns still hold today:

• 73% of respondents want to keep the option of working flexibly from home. The wish for flexibility is overwhelming, and Danish surveys show the same trend.
• At the same time, more than 65% of the workforce long to spend time with their team. Single people, new starters and the youngest generations in particular are hit hard by loneliness when they work from home a lot. The workplace has to actively rebuild the basis for a community among colleagues.
• Data analysis shows that communication with colleagues outside your own team drops sharply when we work from home. If innovation and collaboration across the organisation matter, and they do almost everywhere, this is a serious pitfall that the organisation has to handle deliberately.

Nine important questions

Here are nine questions it’s important to consider when you set the framework for hybrid work, along with a few thoughts to help you reflect:

1. Purpose

What’s your purpose with hybrid work? Is the goal to be an attractive workplace with a lot of flexibility? To get access to a larger talent pool living far from head office? To cut CO2 emissions, save desk space or make sure people have the best conditions for working efficiently? The answer gives you a reference point for all the other questions: if the purpose is efficiency, working from home should perhaps be limited to tasks that need deep focus. If it’s attracting talent globally, it should perhaps be possible to work entirely at a distance.

2. Terms

What should the terms for working from home be? How much freedom will you give each person? Should the number of days at home be agreed with the line manager, or does each person decide from day to day? Does it help the organisation to set an upper limit, such as two days a week, or should the level be agreed locally? Is attendance required for certain meetings, or is joining online always an option?

3. Technology

What technology do you provide? Hybrid meetings, where some people join virtually while others sit together in a meeting room, only work if the technology makes it easy to see and hear everyone. Until it’s in place, you may have to insist that meetings are either fully virtual or fully in person. The technology question is also about which platforms support virtual collaboration, and whether the company pays for internet and for setting up a workspace at home.

4. The best conditions for the work

How do you create the best conditions for innovation and collaboration across the organisation when many people work from home? In principle it’s simple: working from home works best for well-defined tasks that are easy to split up, and where knowledge is easy to share at a distance. When the tasks are complex, when there are many dependencies, when you need to be creative together, or when things have to be negotiated and argued out, it’s more effective to meet in person.

An honest conversation about the kind of work your employees do gives you a better starting point for agreeing how you work best together. There will be situations where working from home is best for the individual, but being together is best for the team as a whole. The company needs a position on dilemmas like that. Hybrid work doesn’t work if everything is left to individual choice: the company has to set the terms.

5. The physical setting

How do you design the offices so they support hybrid ways of working? You need facilities and equipment that make for good online meetings and support creativity and closeness when people meet in person. Perhaps the office should make it easier to meet across teams, and perhaps there should also be better spaces for deep work: there’s solid evidence that the open-plan office is an inefficient place for concentrated work, for introverts and extroverts alike (see, for example, the Danish book Kontorkoma by Pia Hauge, 2020).

6. A strong community

How do you build a strong community and a culture people actually feel part of when many people work from home? Which meetings and events should bring people together, and what’s expected of local leaders? Experience shows that regular full-day team meetings in person are crucial for community and engagement. Consider whether the planned status meetings could just as well be held online, and prioritise workshops and social activities instead when you’re finally together.

7. Wellbeing

How do you look after wellbeing, and make sure work doesn’t take over, when people work more from home? You’ll need active people management that keeps loneliness and overwork in check for those who are often at a distance. Perhaps line managers should ask more directly about these things than they did at the office. Pay particular attention to young people and new starters: how do you give them a real community to become part of?

8. Leadership skills

What new leadership skills do you need to develop? Leading a hybrid team is more complex than leading a fully virtual one: some employees are often in the office, others mostly at home. It takes deliberate focus to build strong team spirit in hybrid teams and to make sure people who are in the office less often are judged fairly. Leaders have to learn to move between the two worlds, including having lots of small, informal interactions online with those who are rarely in the office.

9. Virtual collaboration skills

How do you develop your organisation’s virtual collaboration skills? Management should be clear about what’s expected in meetings: is it fine, for example, not to turn your camera on, or is everyone expected to be camera-ready at home? Both leaders and employees need to learn to facilitate hybrid meetings. It’s only when five people are in the meeting room and two are joining online that collaboration is really put to the test.

Two checklists for hybrid meetings

If you want to get started straight away, start with your meetings. Here are two checklists from our work with hybrid meeting cultures:

In the meeting room

• Make sure the technology works: top-quality sound, and video that shows both the room as a whole and the person speaking.
• Place the screen so the people joining online feel like a natural part of the meeting table.
• In larger meetings: hand responsibility for the tech and the chat to someone other than the speaker.
• Repeat every question from the room, or give the audience a microphone.
• Pay attention to the sound. Microphones don’t filter out noise the way your ears do.
• Share everything digitally: use an online whiteboard rather than the physical one, so everyone sees the same thing.
• Plan group work in advance, so the people joining online can be fully included.
• Actively make room for the people joining online to contribute.

For people joining online

• Treat the meeting as if you were there in person. No emails or side projects during it.
• If you can’t be there the whole time, tell the facilitator in advance.
• Mute your microphone when you’re not speaking, and unmute before you do.
• Take an active part: it’s harder than being in the room, so do your bit to make sure your points get across.
• If you miss something, ask for it to be repeated.

Towards an effective hybrid workplace

Even with good answers to the nine questions, building good hybrid collaboration will be an ongoing learning process. It’s a good idea to agree from the start that the framework will be adjusted along the way. The most important thing is to start defining how you’ll work together and developing the leadership skills you need now. That gives the company, the leaders and the employees the best chance of moving forward stronger.

Want to strengthen hybrid leadership skills in your organisation? See our hybrid leadership programme or the talk Hybrid Leadership 2.0.

Sources

• Makarius, E.; Larson, B.; Vroman, S. (2021): What Is Your Organization’s Long-Term Remote Work Strategy? hbr.org
• Hauge, Pia (2020): Kontorkoma. Fra støj til fordybelse i dit arbejde. Akademisk Forlag.
• The Next Great Disruption Is Hybrid Work: Are We Ready? 2021 Work Trend Index. microsoft.com/worklab
• Fayard, A.; Weeks, J.; Khan, M. (2021): Designing the Hybrid Office: From workplace to “culture space”. Harvard Business Review, March–April 2021.