Hybrid work: 5 challenges for communicators

Last month I delivered the closing keynote at Social Now , a conference for specialists in enterprise social and digital collaboration.

I explained how hybrid is more complicated than just coordinating office and home-based workers, and set out some of the challenges for communicators.

Here’s a summary of my talk.

What is hybrid work?

Thanks to trends in technology and society, we’re working more flexibly than ever.

While media and politicians fixate on the balance of home and office working , the real picture is far more complex. 80% of people are in frontline roles , and workers are likely to be distributed in a variety of different workplaces across the globe.

By making work independent of place, as we demonstrably did during Covid, we've enabled employees to be productive and engaged, regardless of where they are.

But work is also increasingly disconnected from time.

Organisations are working across time zones, and as the four-day week goes mainstream employees don’t work on the same days. And home working means people can work at a time that suits them . We can’t expect people to be online at the same time.

But it’s complicated

So work is becoming distributed across place and time, a shift that’s been accelerated by Covid .

But the place/time flex comes against a backdrop of change in the world of work:

• Demographics: The workforce is more diverse, better educated and older. We have three generations in the workforce – soon we’ll have four.
• Employment status: More of us are working part time, on short term contracts, maybe for more than one employer. More people are self-employed or employed by third party suppliers.
• Decline of careers: Relationships between people and organisations are now less defined by loyalty. People move in and out of organisations, creating new demands to on- and offboard people. Employers also need to ensure that knowledge is captured, to inform the people that follow.
• Technology: Technology has changed the way we work, and automation and artificial intelligence is making an impact. We’re increasingly looking at a hybrid of human and non-human work.?

Work is messy – and the future of work is messier still.

To make hybrid a success in this complex world of work, we need to embrace more social and networked modes of collaborating.

5 challenges hybrid creates for communicators (and what you can do about it)

1. There are divergent needs

Communications need to work for people in different contexts and with different working patterns.

But how do we find the right tools? How do we configure, manage and roll out solutions? Is there a platform that works for everyone??

Solution: We need to understand the contexts in which people work. We must design tools that work, and add value for people working at home, in the office, at the frontline, on the move.

Spend time identifying workers’ needs and the barriers they face when accessing your communications.

2. People don’t know how to collaborate

People are working in more distributed contexts, but our communication and collaboration lags behind.

In March 2020 people took their laptops home and most organisations used a mix of cloud-based communications that kept the show on the road.

The problem is that all this was cobbled together. People developed their own practices, often mirroring office-based ways of working.

When we work this way, we’re focused on the ‘now’ – the immediate team, the people on the call, rather than issues that stretch across time and place.

Worse, little of what anyone does is documented in Teams meetings, so we don’t get full value from the work.

That adds to burnout, disconnection and feelings of isolation.

We need to step away from the immediate and embrace asynchronicity .

But that’s a challenge. At the heart of asynchronous working is the need to write more stuff down.

That feels like - perhaps is - an additional burden, so people don’t do it. Moreover, this will feel counter-cultural to many.

Solution: By using Teams, we’ve only addressed the dimension of place.

We need to step away from the immediate and communicate across time.

People need help to do this, and behaviour change is hard. But if it doesn’t happen, we may see a drift back to old ways of working.

We need to stop describing this as anywhere working and more explicitly address any-when working.?

3. Technology doesn’t always make life easier

The average enterprise has hundreds of internal systems, and employees will use tens every day. That’s a lot of switching, which stresses people out and makes them less productive .

We also have competing or overlapping tools, and employees are faced with a mess of user experiences and a lack of clarity over what to use and when.

And as we work in more distributed ways, we rely on our digital channels for everything. When they fail, you need to waste time logging a support ticket.

This gets more complex if you’re in a non-standard employment relationship, as many of us are.

(I have five different O365 logins as part of five different digital workplaces. This will be more and more commonplace in the future with the changing nature of employment)

Solution: Social platforms help to streamline and elevate the employee experience by providing a bridge or an experience layer. They can signpost to or, better still, integrate tools and applications.

As people who understand our users, we must be champions for high quality user experiences.

4. We all have too much to read

Many of us get hundreds of emails a day – add social to the mix and you’re looking at tens more.

But if you work part time, you’ll get just as many notifications in fewer days. If you work for more than one organisation, the notification problem grows.

And, as communicators, we expect people to read news stories on the intranet every day too.

It’s too much and adds to the growing problem of burnout and the blurring of work and private time.

Solution: Make content easier to consume.

We can begin by using data to filter and target, so people receive only what’s relevant.

Using social platforms people can choose what – and how much – they receive. Minimise prescribed content and allow people to opt in to updates and communities.

There is also value in making it harder to publish. Friction is not a bad thing if makes things better for users. Ensure every piece of content has a clear purpose, and is easy to read, understand and act upon.

5. There are new barriers to communication

The ubiquity of smartphones means audiences we used to describe as ‘hard to reach’ have access to a device to communicate with work.

But the complexity of employment relationships has made swathes of workers hard to reach.

Where work is done by a blend of employees, contractors, third parties and gig workers, the definition of the internal audience is less clear.

For instance, in the UK, one test used to determine if a contractor is really a “disguised employee” – which changes their tax obligations – is whether they have a company email address or laptop.

We want people to use our social tools, but many workers may have strong incentives not to.

Solution: Sometimes we need to look at bold solutions.

This could mean re-thinking internal and external audiences and working more in the open (see these examples from Deliveroo and Barnardo’s ).

Or it could mean communicating with people less often but more directly, recognising their looser, transactional relationship with your company.

We need to start with our audience and organisational needs, rather than focusing on platforms and tools.

Hybrid work is here to stay

Hybrid work is here to stay and it’s making a complex new world of work more complicated.

Work is distributed across place and time, and across different contractual relationships. Old ways of communication are no longer fit for purpose.

But as people who champion social tools in the workplace, we can play a role in making hybrid work for people and organisations.

Enterprise social must play a part in the shift to asynchronicity. These platforms can streamline a fractured and messy employee or worker experience.

But we need to understand how and where people work, and what they need. We must communicate succinctly and encourage others to do the same.

And, above all, we must be champions for employee experience for everyone, wherever they’re working.