Employee Experience 2.0: Engaging Employees In a Hybrid Work Model

The hybrid work model is here to stay. Over half (55%) of U.S. employees say they prefer to work remotely at least three days a week and 83% of employers say the shift to remote work has been successful for their company (Source: PwC). Different companies may be implementing different hybrid work models, but all business leaders must embrace this new way of working – and they must take a new approach to employee experience (EX) in it. 

Companies must re-design EX to incorporate both in-office and remote work and to capitalize on the strengths of each element of the hybrid model. EX must support flexible and asynchronous teamwork across a dispersed workforce while promoting organizational culture and robust connections among employees. Designing “EX 2.0” requires leaders to adopt a new mindset about employee engagement, as well as new strategies and tools.

Embrace Hybrid

To engage employees in a hybrid work model, the first step is to embrace a new mindset. Business leaders can’t afford to assume that they can go back to EX the way it was in the “before times.” No company’s culture has remained unchanged after more than a year of disruption and almost all employees’ lives have been impacted in some way. EX 2.0 must address these changes -- and employers can harness them to positively impact employees. 

Diane Gherson, CHRO at IBM, sees how disruptions caused by the pandemic have actually improved EX. She told CNBC, “Digital technology has flattened hierarchies, with everyone connected and getting information at the same time, and so many channels for employee input and involvement in decision-making in real time.”

Executives must also challenge prevailing myths about remote work. For example, while it may seem that employees would less productive outside the office, Gartner has found that giving employees more choice over where, when, and how much they work actually results in greater productivity than does supervision. Moreover, tracking outcomes makes more sense than tracking activity since doing so reduces employees’ stress and increases their accountability.

“Trust is so important,” explains Remote Year CEO and founder Greg Caplan. “In a remote environment, you have that trust and people are generally getting more work done. They're more productive and are able to succeed."

A willingness to experiment with new approaches and proactively collaborate with employees on solutions also characterize the new mindset needed to design EX 2.0.

Boost Remote Work

In addition to a mindset that embraces the hybrid model, employers must adopt new strategies and tools that create new EX.  When designing EX for working remotely, companies shouldn’t try to replicate the in-person experience – a futile and potentially detrimental effort – or downplay the limitations of remote work -- which is just as unwise. Instead they should seek to maximize the benefits of remote work: increased flexibility and productivity. 

Virtual work allows different people to work in different time zones and on different schedules. While this might purport to hinder progress on group efforts, asynchronous work can actually be more inclusive and productive. Leaders should leverage new technology platforms and new work protocols to give people the time and focus they need to produce their best work while integrating everyone’s individual efforts seamlessly. For example:

• Pharma company AstraZeneca uses Workplace from Facebook to give employees access to content that enables them to contribute to meetings and group work more effectively. To get up to speed on a topic before a meeting, employees can easily and quickly access and search for key information or create a comprehensive view of activity from conversations, articles, and recent workstreams. Employees can also make their insights and learnings available to colleagues on-demand and with the appropriate permissions through the platform’s integration with Box, a cloud content management and file sharing service.
• GitLab, a DevOps platform company, has been using a remote work model for nearly 10 years. It has implemented a host of tactics to maintain a start-up pace of work and an inclusive culture while being 100% remote. An agenda and Google Doc is attached to every meeting invite so that people can submit questions and input asynchronously in advance, and catch up on documented outcomes afterwards. In lieu of weekly stand-up meetings, the engineering management team creates a weekly announcement video and slides to be viewed at a time convenient for each team member. And, new team members create brief video introductions and post them on a company Slack channel.

Since EX 2.0 is no longer place-based, companies need to ensure employees have great experiences regardless of where they work and what access to the Internet they have.   

• Over 80% of the 20,000 employees at Ennismore, a London-based developer of hospitality brands, don’t have email addresses and most of them don’t work in a central location. At the company’s Gleneagles estate, for example, workers are spread out over the 1,000+ acre property. But since everyone uses the same mobile tool, they are able to communicate, stay connected, and coordinate schedules and work seamlessly. 
• To enhance EX for teams challenged with liaising across the globe, AI software company Fusemachines replaced email communication with Workplace. Employees are now able to centralize communication, project management, asset sharing, and gathering feedback across offices in New York, Kathmandu, Canada and the Dominican Republic – and managers use the tool to provide hands-on guidance and keep everyone focused on quarterly KPIs.

Optimize the Office

New strategies and tools are also needed for EX while working in offices. To optimize the in-office experience, employers should prioritize the “high touch” nature of in-person engagement through new approaches to office design and interactions.

Certain types of collaborative activities – such as brainstorming, prototyping, and hands-on working sessions – are better when done in-person. And, spontaneous informal cross-pollination of ideas is more likely to occur when people are in the same proximity. So, employers should design in-office workspaces to promote these aspects of collaboration. For example:

• Google is implementing outdoor meeting spaces and indoor “team pods” at its offices. Open-air tents make it possible for large groups to gather and work together safely outside, and the pods inside buildings incorporate modular furniture and moveable whiteboards and storage units that teams can configure to their specific needs. 
• In a Harvard Business Review article entitled “Designing the Hybrid Office,” the authors share how the International Olympic Committee (IOC) designed its headquarters with a grand staircase in the center to cause employees from different departments to encounter each other as they walked to and from their desks. The company also added comfortable furniture and coffee machines around the staircase to encourage people to stop and connect. 
• The authors describe a manager at another organization setting up a big board that displayed all the insights her team collected on a project. She positioned the board in a central area in the office where people often passed through and she held team meetings around it, encouraging passersby to listen in and even join the conversations. 

In-office EX should also promote communion – that is, communal experiences, empathetic connections, and personal sharing among employees. Although technology platforms can facilitate networking and team-building, in-person experiences increase the intimacy and energy exchange between people.   

• Frog, the design consultancy, builds rituals into its in-office EX such as “Monday Morning Meetings” for cross-functional presentations, “Wellness Wednesdays” for shared experiences in wellbeing such as yoga classes, and daily afternoon coffee times and frequent happy hours for informal socializing. These rituals, the HBR authors observe, offer opportunities for employees of all levels to mingle, share personal and work stories, and informally ask for advice.
• At design and innovation firm IDEO, chief creative officer Paul Bennett decided to locate his desk in the center of the office space alongside the company’s IT group. Positioning himself literally in the middle of everything allows him to feed off the team’s fun energy and encourage people to approach him on a more informal and personal basis.

EX 2.0

The new hybrid work model presents an opportunity to address the shortcomings of EX in the past, which have ranged from biases toward certain types of employees and working styles to inconsistent access to information and tools. Moreover, this new world of work opens many opportunities to improve employee engagement. Companies should seize the moment and design new EX to connect, equip, and empower employees whether they are in-office or remote.

This post is sponsored by Workplace from Facebook.