Hybrid or Distributed—Problems and Solutions

I’d like your help on this one. Please read this article, and then weigh-in with anything I’ve missed. This is a big subject, and there is a great deal of anecdotal wisdom among all of us. I’d love it if you would donate some of your observations on both challenges and best practices to address those challenges! This article series will run for this rest of this week and possibly into next week. Anything you provide that I haven’t already included, will become part of one of the next few editions!

It seems like we have settled into a new pattern of work. Very few people —at least in startups—go to the office every day. And while many of my own clients are fully remote, lots of legacy businesses are now hybrid. They have employees coming to the office some days and they give them the freedom not to come other days.?

Whether hybrid or remote, the difference between having everybody in the office every day —or most days— and rarely having everybody all together changes a lot of things. Some of those are obvious, and immediate. But others of the consequences may be less obvious, or even invisible over the short term. We really don’t know what the implications are for later down the road. What will employees who began their working lives in remote settings think when they look back from their 40s and 50s??

Those are not questions that we can fully answer today,?

Given all of the challenges, each organization must come up with structures and processes to address them. Those policies and their consequences are worth exploring.?

I never set out to collect all of the various challenges of hybrid and remote work. But nonetheless, I seem to have a collection of them in my capture tool (Evernote—where I document most everything I ever think of). And so, in the course of noticing these various challenges, I have also been on the lookout to collect some of the best practices that address them.

There is a growing canon of research on remote and hybrid work best practices. And, as one might expect, there is both a great deal of overlapping advice and an equal amount of disagreement.?

Looking at the challenges seems like a simple task until you begin to try listing them. Ultimately, what becomes clear or is that we need a taxonomy. So, here’s a first shot at some of the themes of remote and hybrid work challenges.?

Working Day Logistics:?

These are the ways we get things done in the course of the day. Decision-making, information requests, clarifications, collaboration.?

• Information retrieval: how do you get information that you don’t have? If it doesn’t live in a centralized and indexed cloud, who do you ask? How do you ask him or her? Do you interrupt? Or do you email and hope they get to it?
• Decision-Making: Are decisions made individually or in teams? And if they’re made in teams, do they require cross functional input? Do you make decisions in meetings? Do you make them synchronously or asynchronously? How do you ensure that you don’t leave people out? And how do you ensure that in a remote environment? Everybody who has an important addition gets heard?
• Does everybody work the same hours? Does anybody work the same hours? Is there any kind of rule about that issue? How do you handle time zone differences??
• Do you allow people to schedule into others calendars? Or our calendar sacrosanct?
• Do you have a meeting policy? Do you have a no meeting day of the week?
• How available should people be? Must people have Slack open all the time? Can they defend portions of their calendar for deep work?

Strategy

• Strategic Planning- Do you have formal strategic planning? If you do, is it done in-person or remotely? Once it’s done, how do you share the result? Do you have remote all-hands or bring everyone together to a single location? If you bring them all together does that include everyone? Contractors? Part-timers? If you share strategy remotely how do you ensure buy-in? How do you take questions, feedback or counter-points? Do you?
• Strategy Execution- In executing the strategy how do you include various teams and cross functional teams? Do you manage entirely by OKRs and KPI’s or do you utilize other tools? How do you keep the strategy aligned to the vision and have it not degenerate simply into hitting metrics? Do you have additional all-hands? Remotely or In-person? Do you have town halls? Do you include strategic issues and initiatives in one on ones and ongoing performance assessment? And if so, is that done synchronously or asynchronously, remotely or in person?

On-Boarding

I think one of the biggest challenges in remote and hybrid work is onboarding new employees, and especially the youngest newest employees. Historically we would simply walk through people through the office, and introduce them to everybody. They would learn the layout of the physical plant, and where various people sat so that they could find the resources that they needed or, at least the person who could help them find that resource.?

In remote or hybrid environment, people rarely have fixed physical locations beyond their cell phone an email. You may or may not recall after meeting 20 people what each person does, and you may not know who is going to be the most useful resource to help you learn the lay of the land.

If you’re new to the workplace entirely, you may not understand the protocols of the business. What is the etiquette? When is it OK to call somebody, text somebody, slack somebody, email? How soon should you expect a response? Where do you find things? How do we format documents? How should a deck look? How do I answer my phone and what should I put in my email signature? They seem trivial until you don’t know what the answers are.?

Does your organization have new employees shadow others? If you do what does that look like remotely? Does it mean that people co-work— keeping video on while they do deep work? Do they follow a more senior person to every meeting including those they are unlikely to attend once they are onboarded?

If you don’t have them shadow somebody, how do they learn the culture of the organization? How do they learn the kind of internal language, the way that people talk to each other, the rhythm of meetings, and the degree of directness or tactfulness??

Ongoing Job Development: In the grand scheme of things, onboarding is a repeated process. Initially, it is for new employees to learn the organizations policies, processes, and culture. But it goes on over time as people move through the organization and are re-acclimated to different teams, functions and roles.

Moreover, if they move up through a hierarchical organization, the culture can be very different at the bottom, then among middle managers, and again in senior management, and ultimately different again in the executive team.

What are the best practices for keeping that entire process consistent with the organization’s values and culture. How does all of this tie into strategy? And what does it mean for the youngest and newest employees?

Performance Management

This becomes especially challenging in a remote setting, because we never observe anybody when they are not either in a meeting or in an offsite.

But the questions are not to similar to those they would be in a legacy office.

How do you assess people’s performance? Is there a formal structure?

If they are entry level or slightly above do you subject them to surveillance to ensure they are being productive? Are you paying people for time? Or are you paying them for outcomes?

If you’re paying them for outcomes, does it matter which hours they work?

Do you assess people based on productivity, or based on quality? Or is something else a primary criterion like innovativeness, strategic input, problem solving or less measurable phenomena like creating cohesion on a team or managing others well?

Do you assess them using the specific strategic outcomes and metrics? The core values? Their own goals??

However, you do all of this, what is the data that you utilize to make assessments? If it is not hard data, is it simply observation? Do you utilize 360s? Do you have people do self assessments? Are performance reviews done virtually or in person? Does it matter?

How are promotions given? When there is a new project or when the strategy calls for a new leader, do you look first internally or externally? If you look internally, how??

How do you handle performance problems? If people are put on performance improvement plans, how do you manage them? If everything is outcome based, who holds them to account?

Culture

I think this is the biggest area of challenge, and probably the least well-defined. But assuming that an organization works most effectively when it has a shared culture, and ideally, a culture cultivated to fulfill it strategy, how do you do that remotely?

How do you ensure that everybody shares the same general principles about simple things.? Does on-time mean on time or five minutes early or five minutes late?

Do we keep to our agendas in meetings? Do our meetings have agendas? Under what circumstances do we schedule meetings?

How do we get feedback? Is it direct or indirect? Is it immediate or in private? Is it always part of a formal process or do we provide correction and feedback in the moment on an ongoing basis?

How ambitious is it OK to be? Do we need to obscure our ambition?

Are we service oriented or are we sharks? Do we treat each other with respect and kindness? Or do we push each other with a kind of edge? Is sarcasm acceptable or is it seen as hurtful?

Do we have a shared management philosophy?

Do we view our organization as a shared creation? Or do we follow orders? How do we treat the hierarchy? Is it used to the limit who gives input? How do we recognize when somebody’s behavior violates cultural norms?

Are our norms, explicit or implicit?

As you can see, this is very much a work in progress. By no means is it comprehensive—or even close to complete. PLEASE, add any additional themes in the comments. Offer some best practices for specific challenges listed —or others you have identified. I can’t wait to add your thoughts to the next article.

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