Five Key Steps If Your Company Plans to Revise the Hybrid / Remote Policy

How is your company preparing to hit the ground running in September? Are executives looking to ramp up days at the office or optimize flexible hybrid/remote arrangements? How are leaders planning to unite, empower, and upskill talent to meet future business needs and build strategic competitive advantage?

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Here are five useful steps for deciding what updates make sense for your current work policies:

1. Study the Studies?- Consider carefully which research is useful for guiding your company’s decisions. For example, key studies recently cited in the media compare employee productivity before and just after the pandemic started. Is this data relevant to determine your work policies post crisis?

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The Economist [6/23] cited “Working” Remotely?,” a working paper by Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington, uses data from a US Fortune 500 retailer gathered mid 2019 through most of 2020. ?The research seeks to unpack and interpret changes in the number of calls answered when call centers were closed due to Covid-19 for formerly on-site workers in total and comparing their performance to that of workers already-remote pre-pandemic.

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This May, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a revised version of the original working paper from 2020 updating the initially reported 8% increase in the number of calls handled per hour by employees—who had shifted from office to home working—to a 4% decline. Adding to their updated analysis in a June article, the authors concluded “To the extent that the pandemic has freed firms from a prisoner’s dilemma of under-provision of remote work, the seismic shift in remote work reflects a lasting positive impact of the pandemic.”

The Economist article noted further research showing fully remote working’s negative effects, such as “A study of data-entry workers in India found those toiling from home to be 18% less productive than office-frequenting peers.” This “Work from Home and Productivity” study analyzes employee productivity from April 2019 to August 2020 for 10,000 skilled professionals at HCL Technologies, a large Indian IT services firm. The study’s summary details include:

-???????“Total hours worked increased by roughly 30%, including a rise of 18% after normal business hours. Average output did not significantly change. Therefore, productivity fell by about 20%.”

-???????“Uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably.”

-???????“Employees…. received less coaching from and one-to-one meetings with supervisors.”

-???????“Employees with children living at home increased hours worked more than those without children at home and suffered a bigger decline in productivity than those without children.”

During emergency conditions, so many people were coping with challenging home arrangements. However, this is not our current environment.

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Decision Factor: Confirm the timing and types of work of externally-sourced data to assess its relevance in determining or supporting any policy changes.

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2. Review Not React - Many media headlines about remote/hybrid models are “clickbait”, designed to rouse emotions that drive clicks and ad revenues.

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However, our elevated sentiments also influence interpretation of these articles and hinder our processing the information from a neutral viewpoint. Doing due diligence for any prospective, impactful policy change, ensure all decision makers review resources with a measured, non-judgmental, and unemotional approach. Issues and data can then be analyzed and prioritized appropriately and informed, rational decisions taken.

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Decision Factor: Reread any articles influencing policy decisions after removing the headline. A short break can be helpful to reset any emotional and or assumption-based reactions.

3. Competitive Conditions - Your business's competitive situation is vital to evaluate when considering what revisions to make to work-related policies.

Do you know your top competitors’ current hybrid/remote policies and associated results? How much have their employees been complying with any mandated office-based days? How flexible are the options they offer? What challenges or successes are they experiencing in attracting and retaining top talent? Find out what you can about work arrangements your competitors—and other companies in your business ecosystem—have been testing, their employees’ reactions, and what updates might be planned for September, if any.

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Decision Factor: Assess how specific changes to your organization’s current work policy could impact your business’s competitive positioning relating to talent and business responsiveness.

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4. Meaningful Metrics - Productivity is a frequently mentioned, but often misleading, metric that is difficult to calculate accurately across different departments and disciplines during predictable times. Current uncertainties with changing KPI’s complicate consistent monitoring considerably.

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Moreover, there is little agreement or clarity about how to assess the productivity of the growing numbers and types of knowledge workers and their evolving tasks. How does your company measure, compare, and track different roles’ “output”? For example, consider:

-???????Strategy work – should we count gathered data, derived hypotheses, and report iterations?

-???????Sales – simple purchases can be logged, but how about sales reps’ progress during months-long complex SaaS sales processes in uncertain conditions?

-???????Tech development – lines of code are trackable. But if Chat AI apps are writing chunks of the code, how should developers’ productivity be calculated now?

Decision Factor: Determine trackable deliverables and outcomes for teams/groups with relevant timeframes that optimize new ways of working and incorporate ongoing upskilling needs aligned with business needs. Assess iterations and updates when needed.

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5. Internal Intelligence – Critical information comes from your coworkers—at every level—who are incentivized to develop effective, long-term, competitive solutions.

Transformations across our companies and business ecosystems are complex—interdependent, multifaceted, and unevenly distributed—and in progress. Operating and work-related flexibility is necessary to respond to ongoing technology developments and changing customer behaviors. Decision-making is increasingly decentralized to enable rapid responses to market developments, so no leader is the single source of solutions as we constantly assess next steps. Now, broad-based internal intelligence gathering is critical, also stimulating valuable contributions from diverse positions, perspectives, and all generations.

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Decision Factor: Solicit employees’ inputs frequently, especially before making any policy revisions. Encourage open-minded listening to all ideas for improving engagement, business flexibility, and performance. Test reactions to possible policy changes—especially from Gen Z employees.

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As your company readies to ramp up after the summer, executives must carefully consider how policies impact employees’ working lives and business results:

-???????External data must be relevant to guide policy changes.

-???????More flexibility is needed, not less.

-???????More training is needed to adjust to new ways of working, rather than falling back on old ways of working.

-???????Regressive changes are often interpreted as indications of uncompetitive mindsets and approaches.

-???????Optimize for your specific business and workforce by sourcing data.

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Now, over to you. The future of your business may well depend on the strategic, work-related policy decisions company executives make next.

If you are interested to find out more about the new era of business and work, modern mindsets, human-centric ways of working, and much more, please check out my book “Empathy Works: The Key to Competitive Advantage in the New Era of Work ”. Take a look at my new LinkedIn video course?Engaging and Retaining Gen Z with a Skills-first Approach and my popular podcast “Transforming Work with Sophie Wade ”. Upcoming episodes discuss the real estate market turmoil and how to make internal change management effective.