In the US, 52% of employees said they would like their organization to adopt more flexible hybrid work models and work as per McKinsey research. Are organizations ready to accept the challenge? How can leaders overcome these issues to continue driving productivity, collaboration, and innovation?
Current company cultures tend to favor employees who work onsite, and the skills required to lead in a face-to-face may not be the same in a remote or hybrid work model. Now that employees have tasted the sweet remote work for a long period, it is hard to accept an entirely onsite working model, given that they have seen how much time and resources are saved by working from home. 33% of employees even said that they are likely to switch jobs if they have to return to fully on site as per McKinsey's research. For instance, Quora's CEO Adam D'Angelo said that "60% of our employees have chosen not to work from an office even after covid-19 is no longer a threat."
Working from home full-time (WFH) also has downsides, such as the increased mental health issues and reduced innovation. While in many cases innovation and healthy distractions were triggered by random encounters in cafeterias and meetings, WFH need to find ways to achieve these too.
The ideal workplace model for most companies then looks more like a hybrid work model where employees can work both in-company and remote. Dustin Moskowitz, Asana CEO and Co-founder, recently tweeted that Asana will have an office-centric synchronized hybrid environment, while other companies my prefer remote-first hybrids.
Still, some of the challenges are:
- Remote workers are usually overlooked during meetings, especially when all the leaders are in the meeting room, onsite whiteboards and flipcharts are used, and some issues discussed in the meeting room are not heard over the microphone.
- Promotions and assignments favor onsite employees. Quora's CEO said in Quora's blog that "in most companies, it is a significant career advantage to work from the headquarters rather than to work remotely. People in positions of power have a tendency to bias toward giving out opportunities to those whom they are familiar with."
- Employees working from home get demoralized when they are left out of decisions and projects and receive less feedback and positive reinforcement from their immediate leaders
Leaders need to work on modeling certain aspects of the culture to make it more welcoming and diverse for remote, onsite and hybrid workers.
1) Organize to work from home at least one day a week, and continue doing virtual events. The goal is to show employees they don't always need to be in the office. Some leaders insist on going to the office for meetings, but they are simply showing that being remote is not enough to succeed. Attend some meetings from home, not only to show it is OK, but also to understand what the challenges of working from home represent. Asana co-founder for instance, said that their No Meeting Wednesday policy will evolve to include the option of Work from Home Wednesday.
2) Help improve the experience of remote workers during meetings by standardizing certain behaviors. For instance, forget about the flipchart and use online brainstorming tools. Keep using an online link for every session and demand others to do so. Make sure every conversation, task assignment and agreement includes both onsite and remote participants. A Harvard article suggests that teams may need to "reestablish the team’s mission, set explicit interaction norms, consistently enforce them, create a shared team identity, make roles and processes transparent, stabilize the membership, and reduce cross-team switching costs."
3) Follow up with employees more closely to compensate for the lack of interactions and emotional cues. One-on-one meetings may need to be at least once a week; team meetings may need to be held every day for at least 15 minutes to ensure team cohesion. Leaders need to choose when is better to have online meetings or asynchronous communications and when face-to-face is preferred, such as when building trust or discussing long-term planning and private matters.
4) Improve facilitation and empowerment skills to enable team self-organization. Team leaders will not always be onsite and available, so they need to facilitate interactions among the team members and any new members to become more agile, autonomous and safe to collaborate. These skills are required to overcome more easily any upcoming changes. A good example can be copied from Agile teams in IT, who work in pairs to address the challenge of distributing programming.
Covid-19 has disrupted the workplace so drastically and at such a rapid pace that going back to the pre-pandemic normal is not an option. Companies and leaders need to understand the new challenges, embrace them and adopt new behaviors to thrive in the new normal. There is no one-fits-all approach, but the new technologies allow for choosing the perfect option between the continuum.
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June 29, 2021 at 08:00PM
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Some 52% Of Employees Prefer Hybrid Work Models: How To Overcome The Challenge - Forbes
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