Tagged: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky

How to Measure Success in Your Hybrid Work Model

26 May, 2023

With 74 percent of US companies transitioning to a permanent hybrid work model, leaders are turning their attention to measuring the success of their hybrid strategy. That’s because there’s a single traditional office-centric model of Monday through Friday, 9am – 5pm in the office, but many ways to do hybrid work. Moreover, what works well for one company’s culture and working style may not work well elsewhere, even within the same industry.

So how should a leader evaluate whether the model they adopted is optimal for their company’s needs—or whether it needs refinement—in a way that avoids bias?

Establish clear success metrics

The first step involves establishing clear success metrics. Unfortunately, relatively few companies measure essential aspects of the hybrid work transition. For example, a new report from Omdia shows that while 54 percent of organizations saw improved productivity from adopting a more hybrid working style, only 22 percent established metrics to quantify productivity improvements from hybrid work.

Involve the C-suite

From my experience helping 21 organizations transition to hybrid work, it’s crucial for the whole C-suite to be actively involved in formulating the metrics, and for the Board to approve them. Too often, busy executives feel the natural inclination to throw it in HR’s lap and have them figure it out.

That’s a mistake. A transition to a permanent hybrid work model requires attention and care at the highest levels of an organization. Otherwise, the C-suite will not be coordinated and fail to get on the same page about what counts as “success” in hybrid work, then find themselves in a mess six months after their hybrid work transition.

Identify quantitative and qualitative metrics

It’s a best practice for the C-suite to determine the metrics at an offsite where they can distance themselves from the day-to-day bustle and make long-term strategic choices. Prior to the offsite, it’s valuable to get initial internal metrics, including a baseline of quantitative and objective measures. While there are plenty of external metrics on hybrid work, each company has a unique culture, systems and processes, and talent.

Based on the experience of my clients, companies focus on a variety of success metrics, each of which may be more or less important. Retention offers a clear-to-measure hard success metric, one both quantitative and objective. A related metric, recruitment, is a softer metric: it’s harder to measure and more qualitative in nature. External benchmarks definitely indicate offering more remote work facilitates both retention and recruitment.

Measure or assess performance

A key metric, performance, may be harder or easier to measure depending on the nature of the work. For instance, a study published in the National Bureau of Economic Review reported on a randomized control trial comparing the performance of software engineers assigned to a hybrid schedule vs. an office-centric schedule. Engineers who worked in a hybrid model wrote 8 percent more code over a six-month period. If there is no option to have such clear performance measurement, use regular weekly assessments of performance from supervisors.

Collaboration and innovation are critical metrics for effective team performance, but measuring them isn’t easy. Evaluating them requires relying on more qualitative assessments from team leaders and team members. Moreover, by training teams in effective hybrid innovation and collaboration techniques, you can improve these metrics.

Use surveys to assess subjective metrics

Several hard-to-measure metrics are important for an organization’s culture and talent management: morale, engagement, well-being, happiness, burnout, intent to leave, and quiet quitting. Getting at these metrics requires the use of more qualitative and subjective approaches, such as customized surveys specifically adapted to hybrid and remote work policies. As part of such a survey, it’s helpful to ask respondents to opt into participating in focus groups around these issues. Then, in the focus groups, you can dig deeper into the survey questions and get at people’s underlying feelings and motivations.

Weigh metric importance

Once you have baseline data from these diverse metrics, at the offsite, the C-suite needs to determine which metrics matter most to your organization. Choose the top three to five metrics, and weigh their importance relative to each other. Using these metrics, the C-suite can then decide on a course of action on hybrid work that would best optimize for their desired outcomes.

Assess, revise and reassess

Next, determine a plan of action to implement this new policy, including using appropriate metrics to measure success. As you implement the policy, if you find the metrics aren’t as good as you’d like, revise the policy and see how that revision impacts your metrics.

Likewise, consider running experiments to compare alternative versions of hybrid policy. For instance, you can have one day a week in the office in one location and two days in another, and assess how that impacts your metrics. Reassess and revise your approach once a month for the first three months, and then once a quarter going forward. By adopting this approach, my clients found they could most effectively reach the metrics they set out for their permanent hybrid model.

Contributed by Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, who was lauded as “Office Whisperer” and “Hybrid Expert” by The New York Times for helping leaders use hybrid work to improve retention and productivity while cutting costs. He serves as CEO of the future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. He wrote the first book on returning to the office and leading hybrid teams after the pandemic, his best-seller Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams, as well as seven other books. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting for Fortune 500 companies from Aflac to Xerox and over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist at UNC-Chapel Hill and Ohio State. A proud Ukrainian American, Dr. Gleb lives in Columbus, Ohio.

For more insights and inspiration from today’s leading entrepreneurs, check out EO on Inc. and more articles from the EO blog.

Categories: Best Practices Company Culture OPERATIONS PEOPLE/STAFF

Tags: best practices Disaster Avoidance Experts Dr. Gleb Tsipursky entrepreneurs' organization Gleb Tsipursky Hybrid Office Strategy hybrid work hybrid work culture

Are Return to Office Mandates the Real Reason Behind Quiet Quitting?

31 March, 2023

A behavioral scientist shares the data to prove it and offers best practices to minimize quiet quitting and lower productivity concerns amid a hybrid return to office.

Quiet quitting—a term that has become all too familiar for business owners—refers to doing the bare minimal tasks of your job description well enough that you don’t get fired. Introduced in March 2002, it only started to gain traction as an issue of concern among business leaders when US government data on productivity, released in August 2022, showed a sharp, unexpected drop in Q1 and Q2 of 2022.

Is remote work responsible for Quiet Quitting?

Many traditionalist leaders rushed to attribute this drop in productivity and rise in quiet quitting to remote work. For example, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink attributed the drop in productivity to remote work. He called for requiring employees to come to the office to address this problem.

Yet the claims of traditionalists don’t add up. If quiet quitting and the resultant drop in productivity stemmed from remote work, we would see a drop in productivity right from the start of the pandemic, when office workers switched to remote work. Then, when offices opened back up, especially after the Omicron wave at the end of 2021, we would see productivity going up as workers went back to the office from early 2022 onward.

In reality, data shows the opposite trend. US productivity jumped in Q2 2020 as offices closed, and stayed at a heightened level through Q4 2021. Then, when companies started mandating a return to office from early 2022, productivity dropped sharply, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

So what explains the drop in productivity associated with quiet quitting? According to Ben Wigert, director of research and strategy for workplace management at Gallup, forcing employees to come to the office under the threat of discipline could lead to disengagement, fear, and distrust. Gallup finds that “the optimal engagement boost occurs when employees spend 60% to 80% of their time—or three to four days in a five-day workweek—working off-site.” No wonder, then, that mandates forcing employees to come to the office full-time could result in quiet quitting.

How to solve Quiet Quitting in the mandated return to office

When I show this data to my consulting clients, they often ask what they can do to address this problem. First, I remind them of a joke from the famous comedian Henny Youngman: “The patient says, ‘Doctor, it hurts when I do this.’ The doctor says, ‘Then don’t do that!’’’ Then, I share that the best approach for the future of work is a flexible team-led approach, where team leads determine the work arrangements that best serve the needs of their team. Team leads know what their teams need, including how to maximize productivity, engagement and collaboration.

However, it’s not always easy. They might face an inflexible Board of Directors, or the C-suite might be united in demanding that employees return to the office for much or all of the workweek. What then?

In that case, I help them identify best practices for returning to the office that minimize quiet quitting concerns. You might imagine that it’s as simple as increasing their pay. And indeed, a conversation about compensation should always accompany a return-to-office initiative.

What I find works best is to pay for fees associated with specific office-related costs, rather than a general salary increase. In other words, pay the commuting costs of your staff: IRS per diem for miles traveled, public transportation fees, etc. Pay for a nice catered lunch. Pay for their dry-cleaning costs.

Such payments help address the initial discontent and reduce the attrition typically associated with the mandated office return. But they don’t address the quiet quitting that results from people coming to the office and doing the same thing they would do at home, except with a two-hour commute.

That’s the scenario that leads directly to quiet quitting. We know that people are much more productive on individual tasks that require focus at home. A Slack survey confirmed this impression: 55% of respondents preferred to do “deep work” at home, while only 16% cited the office as a better place for deep work.

Make the office a collaboration destination

Instead, make the office a place for socializing, collaboration, and in-depth training, especially for newer employees. To address socializing needs, it’s valuable to organize fun, team-building exercises and social events as staff come back to the office to build relationships.

To facilitate collaboration, it’s critical to consider how in-office staff works together with those working from home. A number of my clients have staff who come in on different days of the week, requiring hybrid collaboration and meetings. To facilitate such collaboration between in-office and remote staff, it’s imperative to improve AV to facilitate hybrid meetings that empower effective collaboration.

There’s no replacement for face-to-face experiences for in-depth training around soft skills, such as effective in-person communication, conflict mediation and resolution, and ethical persuasion. My clients find that if they offer valuable training regularly once their employees return to the office, there’s a reduction in quiet quitting and a boost in employee engagement and productivity.

While a mandated return to office will inevitably lead to some quiet quitting and loss in productivity, smart leaders can ameliorate this problem. Focus on helping employees socialize, collaborate, and get great professional development and mentoring—thus showing them the value of the office—will reduce quiet quitting and boost performance.

Contributed to EO by Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, CEO of the boutique future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, who helps leaders use hybrid work to improve retention and productivity while cutting costs. He wrote the first book on leading hybrid teams after the pandemic, his best-seller Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams, as well as seven other books. His cutting-edge thought leadership comes from over 20 years of consulting for Fortune 500 companies from Aflac to Xerox and over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist at UNC-Chapel Hill and Ohio State. A proud Ukrainian American, Dr. Gleb lives in Columbus, Ohio.

For more insights and inspiration from today’s leading entrepreneurs, check out EO on Inc. and more articles from the EO blog.

Categories: Best Practices Crisis PEOPLE/STAFF Productivity

Tags: Ben Wigert Disaster Avoidance Experts Dr. Gleb Tsipursky entrepreneurs' organization Gleb Tsipursky Larry Fink

How to Slay the Four Horsemen of the Mandated Return to Office

27 January, 2023

As more and more companies require employees to return to the office, they run into the buzzsaw of what I think of as the “Four Horsemen of the Required Return to Office”— specifically, challenges with resistance, attrition, quiet quitting, and diversity.

Resistance

The Four Horsemen stem from the fact that workers who are capable of working remotely prefer to do so for most or all of the time. Thus, workers facing inflexible return-to-office mandates show resistance, the first of the Four Horsemen. For example, when GM announced that all salaried employees would have to return to the office three days a week, it sparked intense employee backlash. This led to GM walking back its requirements and delaying any required return to office.

In a survey, Gartner found that only 3% of companies would fire noncompliant employees, and only 30% would have HR talk to those who don’t show up. Large US banks trying to force employees back to the office are meeting with high rates of up to 50% noncompliance. And many other employees are showing up for a part of the workday, from 10am to 2pm.

Attrition

Given this resistance, some workers simply quit, joining the Great Resignation—making attrition the second of the Four Horsemen. That includes top-level executives: Ian Goodfellow, who led machine learning at Apple, quit in protest over Apple’s mandated three-days-a-week return to office. European banks, which offer more flexible hybrid work policies, are using their flexible policies to lure talented staff from less flexible US banks. Smaller and more flexible financial planning firms are headhunting financial planners in larger and less flexible companies.

Quiet Quitting

Perhaps even more dangerous than resistance and attrition is the third of the Four Horsemen, quiet quitting. Quiet quitting can be worse than the much more obvious resistance or attrition, since quiet quitting rots a company’s culture from within. Gallup research finds that “the optimal engagement boost occurs when employees spend 60% to 80% of their time—or three to four days in a five-day workweek—working off-site.” Forcing employees to come to the office under the threat of discipline leads to disengagement, fear and distrust, according to Ben Wigert, director of research and strategy for workplace management at Gallup.

Loss of Diversity

The final of the Four Horsemen relates to the serious loss of diversity associated with the mandated office return. A Future Forum survey found that 21% of all White knowledge workers wanted a return to full-time in-office work, but only 3% of all Black knowledge workers wanted the same. Why? Because Black professionals still suffer from discrimination and microaggressions in the office. Companies that are less flexible have DEI staff ringing alarm bells about how the desire for remote work among underrepresented groups threatens diversity goals.

How to Slay Them

In working with my clients who wish to bring their employees back to the office to slay the Four Horsemen, I find a combination of strategies to be crucial. Before launching an office return, we consider compensation policies. A June 2022 survey by the Society for Human Resources reports that to get employees to stay at a hybrid job with a 30-minute commute, they would need a pay raise of 10%. Research by Owl Labs suggests that it costs an average of US$863/month for the average office worker to commute to work versus working from home, which costs about half that, US$432/month, for utilities, office supplies and so on. That data helped my clients develop a fair compensation plan that paid staff a higher salary if they spent more time in the office. Doing so helped address the first two Horsemen, resistance and attrition.

Addressing quiet quitting requires working to improve culture and feelings of belonging, such as through retreats with fun team-building exercises. Another idea centered on helping staff address burnout, such as by providing mental health benefits. To help prevent diversity losses, as well as facilitate underrepresented groups moving forward on their career paths, it’s valuable to create a formal mentoring program with a special focus on underrepresented staff.

So if you and your leadership team are committed to returning to a mostly or fully in-person workforce, remember that you need to watch out for—and defeat—the Four Horsemen. Make a plan in advance, and determine how you will overcome these problems before they threaten the success of your return-to-office plan.

Contributed to EO by Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, who helps EO members seize competitive advantage in hybrid work by driving employee retention, collaboration, and innovation through behavioral science as the CEO of the future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, and authored the best-seller Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage.

For more insights and inspiration from today’s leading entrepreneurs, check out EO on Inc. and more articles from the EO blog.

Categories: Best Practices Company Culture PEOPLE/STAFF

Tags: Disaster Avoidance Experts Dr. Gleb Tsipursky entrepreneurs' organization Gleb Tsipursky Great Resignation quiet quitting return to office

Why Productivity Paranoia is the Real Obstacle to Remote Work

23 November, 2022

Do bosses trust employees to be productive when working remotely?

A recent Microsoft study found that 49 percent of managers of hybrid workers “struggle to trust employees to do their best work.” This lack of trust in worker productivity has led to what Microsoft researchers termed productivity paranoia: “Where leaders fear that lost productivity is due to employees not working, even though hours worked, number of meetings, and other activity metrics have increased.”

That data aligns with a new report by Citrix based on a global survey of 900 business leaders and 1,800 knowledge workers—those who can do their job remotely. Half of all business leaders believe that when employees are working “out of sight,” they don’t work as hard.

That traditionalist perspective aligns with Elon Musk’s demand that all Tesla and SpaceX employees work full-time in the office—including knowledge workers. Musk has stated that remote workers only “pretend to work.”

Musk’s demand for improving productivity via full-time, in-office work for knowledge workers is something to which other traditionalist leaders aspire. A Microsoft survey shows that 50 percent of bosses intend to force knowledge workers into the office by Spring 2023. According to Future Forum, skepticism toward working from home tends to come from leaders over age 50. Leaders under age 50 are more accepting of hybrid and remote work and focus on how to do it well.

Is the belief of this traditionalist, older half of the business leadership that workers are more productive in the office based on facts? Not at all.

Even before Covid, peer-reviewed research demonstrated that remote work improved productivity. A NASDAQ-listed company randomly assigned call center employees to work from home or the office. Work from home resulted in a 13 percent performance increase and a 50 percent lower attrition rate. A more recent study from the Covid era with random assignment of programmers either to fully office-centric work or to some days worked remotely found that hybrid workers had 35 percent less attrition and wrote 8 percent more code.

Employee monitoring software confirmed that the shift to remote work during Covid improved productivity by 5 percent. And more recent research from Stanford University showed that remote work efficiency actually increased throughout the pandemic, from 5 percent better than in-person in May 2020 to 9 percent in May 2022. That’s because we learned how to be better at remote work.

And really, are workers all that productive in the office? Studies show that in-office employees actually work between 36 percent and 39 percent of the time, and spend the rest on non-work activities like surfing the web.

So why do half of all business leaders ignore the data? The key lies in how leaders evaluate performance: based on what they can see.

Unfortunately, leaders are trained to evaluate employees based on “facetime.” Those who come early and leave late are perceived and assessed as more productive.

Even before the pandemic, the focus on presence in the office undermined effective remote work arrangements. Thus, researchers found that remote employees who work just as hard and just as long as those in the office in similar jobs end up getting lower performance evaluations, decreased raises, and fewer promotions.

The problem here is the proximity bias. That term describes the unfair preference for and higher ratings of in-office employees, compared with remote workers, even when remote workers show higher productivity.

A related mental blindspot, confirmation bias, caused traditionalist leaders to ignore information that goes against the beliefs to which they’re anchored, and seek information that confirms their anchors. For example, they’ll seek evidence that in-office workers are more productive, even when there’s much stronger evidence that remote workers exhibit higher productivity. In other words, these leaders trust their own gut reactions, internal impressions, and intuitions over the facts, thus failing to develop self-awareness of how their mental processes might steer them to make bad decisions.

The consequence of this trust in false impressions around which type of work is more productive is leading to the unnecessary drama of forcing workers back to the office. And the traditionalist bosses who do so will continue to lose workers as part of the Great Resignation.

The Society for Human Resources found that 48 percent of respondents will “definitely” seek a full-time remote position for their next job. To get them to stay at a hybrid job with a 30-minute commute, employers would have to give a 10 percent pay raise, and for a full-time job with the same commute, a 20 percent pay raise. With a potential recession looming, which will limit pay raises and lead to a focus on actual productivity over false gut-based intuitions, we can expect a greater shift to more hybrid and remote work going forward.

To succeed in our increasingly hybrid and remote future will require retraining managers to address the proximity bias and evaluate performance based on productivity. Companies will have to teach them to trust the data over their own gut reactions.

Contributed to EO by Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, who helps EO members seize competitive advantage in hybrid work by driving employee retention, collaboration, and innovation through behavioral science as the CEO of the future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, and authored the best-seller Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage.

For more insights and inspiration from today’s leading entrepreneurs, check out EO on Inc. and more articles from the EO blog.

Categories: Best Practices PEOPLE/STAFF Productivity

Tags: best practices Disaster Avoidance Experts Dr. Gleb Tsipursky Elon Musk entrepreneurs' organization Gleb Tsipursky Society for Human Resources

How to revise performance evaluations to improve hybrid and remote team management

4 March, 2022

Contributed by Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which helps forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. A best-selling author, his newest book is Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams. We asked Dr. Tsipursky how leaders can better manage their teams by revising their performance review process. Here’s what he shared:

The pandemic forced leaders to reconcile with the need for effective hybrid and remote team management strategies, including in performance evaluations. Research shows the benefits of replacing large-scale quarterly or annual performance reviews with more frequent, brief reviews focused on task performance, effective feedback and coaching. To survive and thrive, leaders need to benchmark to best practices on performance evaluation for hybrid and remote team management in our new normal.

Hybrid is our future

During the pandemic, two-thirds of all US workers worked remotely some of the time, and over a half full-time. Surveys show that between two-thirds and three-quarters of employers intend to permanently switch to a mainly hybrid schedule of one to three days in the office combined with a minority of fully remote employees.

The question is: If a large majority of employees work most of their hours at home, how will their performance be measured?

Performance evaluation in the new normal

Too many managers and companies still rely on “time in the office” as a primary measure of evaluating performance. This has led to employees focusing more on “time logged” rather than their actual contribution to the company.

As survey responses show, many employees and top leaders feel concerned about the possibility of hybrid and remote work undermining their career growth. To allay these concerns, employee performance evaluation systems need to stop relying on time worked.

The companies I helped guide through this transition shifted to regular, weekly or biweekly performance evaluations of team members by team leaders. Some added an occasional 360-degree evaluation component by one’s teammates and other stakeholders once every month or couple of months.

Categories: Best Practices Coaching PEOPLE/STAFF

Tags: best practices Disaster Avoidance Experts Dr. Gleb Tsipursky entrepreneurs' organization lessons learned