Hybrid working is here to stay, but what does it mean and how can you get it to really work for you and your team?
A few months ago, I spoke to a senior leader in an organisation that I’m working with, who was working on her company’s strategy for a hybrid model of working as people were coming back into the office. She was horrified at the attitude of some of the people in her team, particularly one person who, when she was told that the organisation needed her to be back in the company and in the office, threw her hands up in the air and said..
“but I’ve moved three hours away now. And I can’t make it back into the office, especially not every day.”
They had to have a discussion about it. In the end, they decided to part ways. The organization was fixed on the fact that because of the climate in the company, they wanted to have people in the office, and this person made different choices, life choices related to moving away.
Do you have anybody in your team who’s really struggling to get on board with whatever model it is of working in your organisation or who’s made a different choice?
At its simplest level, what hybrid means is a mixture of homeworking and office work. The problem that I see is that organisations are still trying to fit this into a very traditional clocking-in and clocking-out model of working, which really isn’t relevant for a lot of organisations today.
People have been successfully achieving their objectives whilst working from home and meeting organisational goals.
After some adjustments, because a lot of people struggled to start off with, employees have actually started to enjoy this way of working and enjoy this freedom.
It’s like a reward, which they don’t really want to give up.
It’s almost like you’ve given somebody a raise in their salary, or you’ve given somebody a company car. Then suddenly you change the rules and you take those away – even though they’ve been meeting their objectives and be as productive as ever, if not more.
This is how some people are really experiencing, having to go back into the office. It’s like a reward has been taken away, even though they have been doing amazingly well. So I’ve got some points for you to think about so that you can create a model that works for both you, the organization and your team.
First of all, make sure that you communicate your business objectives, your vision really clearly, and what it is that the organization needs to deliver because setting this out will enable people to get behind it. So what you want is to focus on something that people can agree on.
Get people to agree on the vision and objectives for your business and start from there, from something that you can agree on. Then..
Secondly, ask people what it is that they want and need – keeping those goals in mind.
Keeping the organisation’s goals in mind, ask them what they need.
Thirdly – really listen. Listen truly in order to understand and be able to enter into conversations. The vision and the goals of the team and the organisation are not negotiable, but how you achieve them could be, and that’s what you need to listen to.
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Fourth is to structure for results rather than for structure’s sake.
Sometimes what can happen is that we get caught up in a way of doing things, a standard way of doing things and it’s difficult for us to change. It happens to all of us. It happens to me and it’s easy to stay in that same lane, but times have changed and people have changed.
It’s possible that the structures that you’ve had so far are not relevant anymore. So structure for results rather than a structure for structure’s sake or because this is how we’ve always done it.
Fifth is to ensure that there’s time for people to meet. I’m all for working from home. I work from home and have done so very successfully and I’ve run teams of people working remotely from their homes.
However, I know how important it is also to meet people too, when we can touch people, to be able to hear them and see them and be together. It’s a way that we become creative, that we can share our ideas collectively and come up with the things that we need for our organisations and for ourselves to thrive. We are social beings and therefore we need some time to be spent in a social setting.
That includes for work and therefore make sure that there are set times to meet that people can put in their calendars, that they can allocate time and resources and babysitting if necessary to and organise themselves and make sure that those times when the team meets are non-negotiable. There are always times for other ad hoc meetings between people, but make sure that there are some times that are in the diary for everyone to meet.
The sixth is to ensure that all meetings are either offline – face-to-face or online. Don’t have some people in the meeting online and some people in a room in a meeting together, because that is very, very difficult to manage.
People that are online will always feel that there are side conversations happening because there will be when people are in a room together because that’s just our nature. Even if you try and police that it’s likely to happen. So no hybrid meetings, everybody online or everybody offline.
And lastly, number seven is to review whatever structure you put in place, review it regularly to make sure that it’s still fit for purpose.
Our organisations, our world is constantly changing and constantly evolving.
And if we don’t regularly check that the structures, the processes that we’ve put in place are still working for us all, we’re going to end up with models that don’t work.
So to recap everything, in order for you to decide on what hybrid will look like for your organisation and to make it work for you, here are the things to keep in mind:
- Make sure that you communicate and agree on the overall objectives of your team, your business, your organisation and get buy-in.
- Make sure that you ask people what it is that they want.
- Really listen, listen to what it is that they want with the real intention of understanding bearing in mind that the objectives are non-negotiable.
- Structure for results rather than for structure’s sake.
- Ensure that there is time for people to meet and to meet in person
- Make sure that all meetings are either online or offline
- Review the structure so that it’s still relevant. And hopefully, that will allow you to come up with a structure that works for you. And that works for your team.
Out of these 7 things to keep in mind, which do you think is the most important thing to consider? I would really love to know your thoughts!
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