Asking WHY is the key to hybrid work

Before the pandemic a long-held myth about working remotely was that workers would be less productive. After all, how could anyone get real work done in sweatpants and not a suit? Like a lot of work-from-home-myths this year, this one has been busted. Working from home, a coffee shop, or even on a beach, does not mean less productivity. In some cases, it can even mean more. There is no one size fits all when it comes to the desire for face to face time in the office or flexible remote work. To us, the common factor remains modeling the best use of time in meetings to achieve better results and close the gap between strategy and execution with less stress.

Yes, less stress.

As this article in Fast Company reports, not having a commute or the distractions of office life, mean more time is spent working. 

They recommend three ways to make sure people remain productive in a hybrid workplace. These are summarized below with additional recommendations from our own experience:  

Incorrect assumptions about organizational dynamics

“The primary organizational concern of moving to a virtual or hybrid work environment is the desire to maintain a positive organizational culture. The problem is that organizations are incorrectly assuming a strong overlap between organizational culture and high-quality collaboration and engagement.”

Science House, the creator of Model Meetings, has a longstanding partnership with The Culture Institute in Zurich. After creating Culture Maps for many companies across industries, we discovered a persistent pattern. Bureaucratic clutter, outdated incentive structures and a constant “firefighting” mentality are among the many reasons why employees are too exhausted or disincentivized to engage in real innovation. For more on that process, see this post, Amazon Culture Decoded. 

Employee engagement means committing to new norms

“If organizations want to maintain a positive organizational culture, encourage collaboration, and facilitate employee engagement, they should consider strategically implementing predefined virtual and face-to-face team experiences. And if employees want organizations to be comfortable with virtual or hybrid work arrangements, they need to be wholeheartedly willing to participate in maintaining exceptional interactions with team members.”

Our belief is that every meeting should be an encounter that produces something new, whether it’s knowledge, ideas, decisions or plans. 

Worker Engagement Tips 

“First, have a daily (or weekly), 15-minute virtual “stand up” meeting. Everyone joins a virtual meeting where a manager or team leader gives important updates and team members ask pressing questions. The goal is to get everyone on the same page and prioritize tasks, but then let everyone get back to work.”

Many of our clients hold daily standup meetings. The ones that work best encourage unvarnished candor and transparency. It’s tempting in a standup to say everything is fine and move on, but this is the time to bring up the real challenges before they escalate. It all comes back to purpose. WHY are you holding the standup? Asking this one question, WHY, and continuing to ask until you know the answer is the key.

What have you learned this year from working at home? Any great tips? Please share in the comments.