How to build a fair hybrid workplace?

What comes to mind when you hear the word workplace? Over the past few years, our collective approach to the notion of work as centered around a place where colocated individuals performed tasks has been upended. More and more individuals and organizations now define the workplace as a space where employees can create value, and be productive and successful. This notional change has helped usher in the concept of the hybrid workplace which combines in-office and remote work to offer flexibility and support to employees. The proliferating adoption of remote, distributed, and digitized work supported by the digital workplace combined with employee-centricity has become the foundations of the hybrid workplace model.

What is a hybrid workplace?

A hybrid workplace provides employees with the choice of where to work from, when to work, and how to deliver their best work. It is a powerful infrastructure of tools and processes that allows people autonomy to design their work and life in a structure that enables productivity, purpose, and happiness. The hybrid workplace essentially is location agnostic, providing an option to work from home offices, company offices, or even coffee shops, with processes in place to enable optimal collaboration, engagement, and business success.

In practice, the hybrid work model allows employees to go to an office space at will or whenever needed, perhaps to meet clients or to experience an office setting. Some organizations are also offering the flexibility to work a select few days or a select few weeks from the office, depending on?the team's needs and the employees' preferences.

What’s causing unfair practices in the hybrid workplace?

Lack of visibility

When team members are located on and off-site, there is a concern that remote individuals, their efforts, contributions, and challenges might go unnoticed by the rest of the team that is co-located. This?lack of visibility ?snowballs into many problems for the remotely located teammates that are forced to adopt unsustainable work practices such as staying always digitally plugged in, or seeking high visibility projects that might not be their area of expertise. For people managers that are managing a partly remote team alongside a colocated team, there is an issue of not having enough data or factual knowledge of the bottlenecks or challenges faced by remote team members.?

Most often, digital introverts, junior or new staff, and women and other minority groups are at increased risk of having their efforts go unnoticed because the management team lacks data and knowledge to make objective and fair work assessments.

Strained communication and collaboration

A number of hybrid teams include teammates working in multiple locations with probably differing time zones leading to strained communication and collaboration. Since most of these teams are only now adapting to working in a hybrid model, there are increasing instances of information lags, incomplete information and resource sharing, and ineffective communication, particularly between colocated and remote teammates.?

Flawed adoption of async work

The haphazard adoption of async work has caused many teams to work synchronously even while working in distributed locations. This sync work is adding immense pressure to the digital well-being, productivity, and effectiveness of remote employees. The stop-gap solution, unfortunately, has been shifting critical projects to on-site teams, leaving valuable resources untapped.?????

Bias

The hybrid workplace has brought into focus the many biases that a majority of the working world adheres by. One of those being the notion that people will not work without a manager monitoring work within constrained physical locations.?This prompts management to take extreme steps such as monitoring remote employees, thereby leading to dangerous implications for team cohesion, well-being, and productivity. This also places remote teammates at a disadvantage when it comes to management reviews and assessments, leading to several long-term issues such as employee churn, burnout, and loss of engagement.?

In-group & out-group mentality

In hybrid teams, there can be a mismatch between the cohesion amongst colleagues that work from a shared space and those that are remote. This lack of cohesiveness leads to long-term challenges in group dynamics with the onsite and remote teams becoming siloed in operation and in forming connections. These dynamics lead to increased bias and lesser visibility.?

Work analytics as a solution

Technology-native companies that succeed at managing hybrid teams are increasingly leveraging on the wealth of data generated as exhaust from their existing tech stack. This de-identified and aggregated data offer insights into several aspects of employees’ day-to-day work activity, giving leaders much-needed visibility into how they can best help their teams to thrive.?

Improving visibility: work analytics that provides a comprehensive snapshot of every team’s work effort, task progression, and contribution, allows managers to acknowledge and recognize team members to?create more fair and transparent management. Factual visibility can also help managers to?avoid cohesion and power imbalances?within their dispersed teams by allocating fair workloads and providing equal opportunities to all team members using data logs and visualizations.?

Aligning team effort: Often, a factual and comprehensive view of the type of work completed by a team can provide managers insight into the productivity and alignment of their team. Equipped with this data managers can get a deep understanding of how workflows can be optimized to support business goals. Such analytics can help managers implement?productivity strategies?and watch out for inefficiencies.

Promoting better communication: Analytics can help managers systematically manage and visualize the effectiveness of their teams’ communication practices. This allows for an understanding of how?effective connectedness and information sharing?are within a cohort, notifying decision-makers of anomalies such as meeting fatigue that can impact?employee well-being or that might signify risks of bottlenecks or strained practices.?

As we build the hybrid workplaces of the future, organizations that create sustainable, fair, and seamless work environments have the advantage of defining the paradigm of the future of work. In this monumental task, leaders should depend on data to guide their decisions.

??Hatica enables engineering teams with data-driven insights from work analytics to help build a fair, productive, and sustainable future of work. Discover how Hatica can help your hybrid engineering teams thrive, request a demo.