Some people are working on site, while others are working remote.
Some people have fully equipped, private home offices, while others have to split the dining room table and wireless bandwidth with their spouse and kids.
Some people have deep roots and long-standing relationships of trust with colleagues, while others are new and have never even met their boss in person.
In our new hybrid reality, differences in each individual’s life stage or home situation have been elevated into potential sources of suppression in our lives of work and school. I’m not suggesting leaders are responsible for their employees’ home lives. But I am saying that the more proactive we are in trying to understand what might be holding people back, the more we’ll be able to remove obstacles and unleash their individuality.
Before the pandemic, there were plenty of individuals who were new in the workforce, still living in their bustling family home with parents and siblings, and not yet familiar with the people or the rhythm and flow of their new employer.
Those realities were part of who they were as a person, but they didn’t necessarily affect an individual’s ability to do their work, to access necessary organizational resources, or to expand their perspectives by meeting people from different functions.
Today, those life details are not just someone’s backstory that you might learn if you got to know them better over lunch. Those details are at the center of how people are working and learning today. This introduces several new challenges for leaders.
For example, according to the MetLife 2021 U.S. Employee Benefit Trends Study:
- 42% of employees say knowledge sharing with coworkers has become much more difficult since the start of the pandemic,
- while one in three managers say they’re not always aware of how much work their team members have.
Another trend mentioned in the Wall Street Journal reveals how difficult (yet important) it is to know how to lead remote teams: employers are reporting high turnover among their newest employees, many of whom started remotely and have never met co-workers in person. I feel for leaders in these situations: it’s already challenging to know people as individuals even when you’ve known them for a while and you see them every day. To have new people joining when everything is remote makes it so much harder for employees and for leaders.
How can you unleash people in the context of hybrid working or learning environments?
Consider How People Gain Access to Support Services
Many people probably didn’t even notice how much they rely on tools, resources and people on a daily basis—whether they need someone to troubleshoot a tech problem, answer a question about company reimbursement policy, help building certain functional or leadership skills, or advice on how to begin a task or project.
Every one of us needs these at some point. When we’re on site, it’s easier to know these supports exist and how to gain access to them. We might even stumble upon them accidentally.
When we’re off site, we have to be more deliberate about seeking them out—which, for some people, might feel like it draws too much attention. There are many people who won’t feel comfortable proactively asking what’s available and then requesting that access. This is especially true for those who already feel marginalized and don’t want to feel exposed, or those who have seen negative reactions when others have asked for help in the past, and they’d rather not take that chance.
Leaders:
- Find ways to make information about (and access to) resources easy to find and easy to request.
- Normalize asking for help. One way is to end each meeting by asking everyone present: Are there any resources that would help you accomplish what we just discussed? Ask the person who was assigned a task, and also ask the group if they know of resources this person would benefit from.
- When possible: proactively offer these resources so people receive them without having to ask for them.
Consider How People Gain Access to Cross-Functional Expertise
A good measure of whether your organization is suppressing or unleashing individuality is: how easy (or hard) you make it for people to break out of the constraints of their individual or team roles. Those constraints are what keep our organizations from truly allowing people to contribute their best.
The MetLife finding about the difficulty of knowledge sharing tells us there’s an opportunity to fill this gap for people. When information doesn’t flow, people can become stuck not just in their attempts to accomplish a task, but also in their assigned roles and in the ways they’re allowed to contribute to the mission as a whole.
Consider these questions:
- If a new employee is assigned a project: how easy is it for that person to piece together the expertise needed from various parts of the organization?
- How easy is it to contribute your own expertise to a project being managed by a different team? And, vice versa: how open are you to having someone outside of your team contribute ideas or expertise to your projects?
- Do your leaders have tools and resources for helping employees bridge silos and functions, to get cross-functional support to make better decisions and improve outcomes across the enterprise?
It’s amazing what people are capable of when set free to do their work without these unnecessary obstacles. Leaders: you have the power to remove those obstacles and unleash individuality.
Learn more at my organization’s third annual Leadership in the Age of Personalization Virtual Summit to discover how to unleash individuality by addressing these five critical questions:
- Who do you let in?
- How do you see those you let in?
- Who do you let them be?
- What do you let them do?
- How do you let them do it?
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September 30, 2021 at 07:30PM
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Remove Obstacles To Unleash Individuality In Hybrid Work Environments - Forbes
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