Tagged: hybrid work culture

5 Activities That Require Hybrid Employees To Come To The Office

2 August, 2023

Hybrid employees don’t hate the office — they hate commuting to it, surveys show, since commuting can take over an hour per day and cost several thousand dollars per year. Peer-reviewed studies find clear associations between longer commuting times and lower job satisfaction, increased stress, and poorer mental health.

Given that data, when I consult for organizations on determining hybrid employee work arrangements, a primary consideration involves minimizing staff commuting time. That means using data-driven methods to determine what endeavors offer the best return-on-investment for in-office work to make them worth the commute. Then, we develop a communication strategy to convey the value of these face-to-face tasks to hybrid employees, to get their buy-in on coming to the office for high-impact work pursuits. In turn, we convey a commitment to minimizing their time spent in traffic by bunching as many activities requiring face-to-face presence together as possible. Doing so helps improve hybrid employee retention, engagement, and morale while reducing burnout.

What kind of work should hybrid employees do at the office?

The large majority of hybrid employee time is spent on individual tasks, such as focused work, asynchronous communication and collaboration, and videoconference meetings, which are most productively done at home. There’s absolutely no need for employees to come to the office for such activities. Still, the office remains a key driver of value for high-impact, lower-duration activities that benefit from face-to-face interactions.

1. Intense collaboration

Intense collaboration involves teams coming together in person to solve problems, make decisions, align strategy, develop plans, and build consensus around implementing ideas they brainstormed remotely and asynchronously. Face-to-face interactions empower team members to observe each other’s body language, picking up on subtle cues like facial expressions, gestures, and posture they may miss when communicating remotely. These nuances carry much more weight during intense collaborations.

2. Challenging conversations

Any conversation that bears the potential for emotionality or conflict is best handled in the office. It’s much easier to read and address emotions and manage conflicts face-to-face, rather than by videoconference. That means any conversations that have performance evaluation overtones should rightly occur in the office. The content might range from weekly 1-on-1 conversations between team members and team leads that assesses performance for the past week and what they will do next week, to quarterly or annual performance reviews. Similarly, it’s best to handle in-person any human resource concerns.

3. Cultivating team belonging and organizational culture

Our brains are not wired to connect and build relationships with people located in small squares on a videoconference call, they’re wired to be tribal and connect with our fellow tribe members in face-to-face settings. In-person presence thus offers an opportunity to build a sense of mutual trust and group belonging that’s much deeper than videoconference calls. As a result — whether at the level of small teams, mid-size business units, or the organization as a whole — in-person activities offer the opportunity to create a sense of group cohesion and belonging.

4. In-depth training

A survey by The Conference Board reveals the key role of professional development for employee retention. While online asynchronous or synchronous education may suffice for most content, face-to-face interactions are best for in-depth training, by allowing trainees to engage with the trainer and their peers more effectively. Physically present trainers can “read the room,” noticing and adjusting to body language and emotions expressed by trainees. In turn, peer-to-peer learning helps create a learning community that builds trust and facilitates mutual understanding and retention of information by adult learners.

5. Mentoring, leadership development, and on-the-job training

Whether integrating junior staff and providing them with on-the-job training, mentoring and coaching current staff, or developing new leaders, the office provides a valuable venue for such informal professional development. If team members are in the office, mentors and supervisors can observe the performance of their mentees and supervisees, and provide immediate feedback and guidance. Doing so is much harder in remote settings and can result in biases.

Similarly, mentees and supervisees can ask questions and get answers in real time, which is at the heart of on-the-job training. It’s certainly possible to do so remotely, but it takes more organization and effort. Mentoring and leadership development often takes subtlety and nuance, navigating emotions and egos. Such navigation is much easier in person than remotely. Moreover, mentees need to develop a sense of real trust in the mentor to be vulnerable and reveal weakness. Being in person is best for cultivating such trust.

Conclusion

The best practice for hybrid work involves helping employees reduce commuting by asking them to come in to the office only for high-value face-to-face activities. These tasks include intense collaboration, challenging conversations, cultivating belonging, professional development, mentoring, and building weak connections.

Contributed to EO by Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, who helps leaders use hybrid work to improve retention and productivity while cutting costs. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. He is the best-selling author of 7 books, including the global best-sellers Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters and The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships. His newest book is Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training 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.

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Categories: Company Culture PEOPLE/STAFF

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

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.