Hybrid working: is it working for you?
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It’s hard to believe we’re now almost four (!) years on from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the seismic changes it made to so many people’s working lives. With that in mind, I thought it would be a good opportunity to use this edition of the Leadership Fix to talk about hybrid working.
An important side note here is that, while hybrid working might be taking up a lot of air-time when it comes to the changes in working life, we should remember this conversation is only relevant to those who work in an office or are desk-based. A huge number of the working population don’t have the choice about where they can work from.
Much like furlough and social distancing, hybrid working wasn’t a phrase many of us were familiar with before the pandemic, but it’s now part of our everyday vocabulary and continues to be a challenge leaders must get to grips with as we explore what works best for our organisations.
What does it look like for us now four years on? And have we fully embraced the opportunities it presents? What difficulties do we continue to face? Because, let’s face it, while COVID-19 brought it to the fore, hybrid working did not begin in 2020. We’ve been working in hybrid, or flexible, ways for many years. The pandemic simply hastened a move towards what would, or should, have eventually happened anyway.
For me, hybrid working is about far more than how many days a week you spend in the office. It’s a fundamental shift in changing our working lives to fit better with the society we now live in, the technology we have available to us and the balance we are all seeking. Rather than focusing on the ‘hybrid’ buzzword we need to look at it in its wider context, as flexibility.
My view, in the immediate aftermath of the first wave of the pandemic, was that the changes forced on to us by COVID-19 could actually prove to be a huge opportunity for organisations to change their working practices forever. It demanded we recognise that work is not the same as it was 20, or even 10, years ago. Technology is different, life is different, the division between work and home is different, the idea that we work until we’re 60 and then retire is different… Add to this the impact of globalisation and it’s clear the idea of ‘out of hours’ work has simply ceased to exist for many.
The pandemic forced us to look at society and work as one and stop trying to separate the two in the same way that we’ve done for years. Change of this scale was never going to be an overnight fix, solved simply by allowing someone to work from home for two days of the week, so it’s no wonder that organisations and leaders are still grappling with it. Wholesale organisational change takes time to explore and embed. Now that the novelty has worn off and the threat of COVID-19 has receded we can see more clearly the day-to-day realities of our roles and exactly what is needed in more ‘normal’ times.
We may even have realised that some of our employees actually prefer being in the office environment and that working from home is not the answer. Impromptu chats and water cooler moments are impossible to recreate in the same way on a Zoom call and, as a society, I believe we’re increasingly understanding the importance of those doses of social connection, however small.
If you’re still battling with getting the balance right in your organisation, there are things you can do to help embed hybrid working for the long term. Below are my top four recommendations.
You may have done all, or many, of these at the start of the pandemic but getting flexibility right needs to be a continual conversation. Could now be the time for your organisation to revisit this list?
Understand the symptoms and what they mean
I think we’ve got much better at this, but you need to identify the problems your teams are experiencing. Are people struggling to get to the office because they have moved or due to childcare? There are lots of symptoms (frustrations, lateness, not coming to the office) but you have to understand what is driving them on an individual level.
Align to your values and culture
Every individual, every team and every organisation is different. We cannot try to standardise by industry because there are simply too many variables. Are you guilty of trying to apply a ‘one size fits all’ approach to the flexibility you offer? Take time to work out, together, what people want and need and what the organisation needs to be efficient. Trying to follow the crowd won’t get you anywhere.
Think about how your organisation has changed
Are you still trying to work in the same way but with some minor tweaks? Could you think differently about the options available to get work done? In the pandemic we had to lift and shift but what has changed long term? Just because it’s how it has always been done doesn’t mean it should be that way now. If what you do is changing, you need to change how you do it.
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Give everyone a voice
I always talk about ‘freedom within a framework’. Give people the chance to share their ideas about what they need. Make sure you obtain this information without a bias on hierarchy, team or individual, and really listen. We need to show that action is being taken and demonstrate what ‘being human at work’ (another pandemic buzz-phrase) actually means. Make sure your line managers are equipped for these conversations too and know what the organisational views are on what is and isn’t ok.
I’ve mentioned that this is bigger than locations and in 2021 I wrote about what I knew would become the Pandemic Revolution. I’ve spoken before about a great book that I read during the pandemic called Rebel Ideas by Matthew Syed. In it he talks about the impact of the invention of electricity on the industrial revolution. Far from being an overnight success story that transformed organisations and made them more efficient, it actually caused the failure of many businesses. Organisations failed to see the true opportunities electric motors offered to streamline their operations. Instead of rearranging their factories to optimise the new technology, they simply dumped a large electric motor in the middle, as if it was a substitute steam engine, completely missing the point. We need to make sure that we’re not doing the same with our businesses. We can’t put electricity (people) in the same place we had the water and steam engine.
True flexibility is not about doing the same things we’ve always done but just from a different place some of the time. It’s about fundamental change in our organisations and embracing a new working era. We need to reimagine work in its entirety to embrace the changes that need to happen. It’s not just the pandemic that’s driving this. It’s globalisation, societal changes and advancements in technology.
There is a real impact on the organisation’s success to consider too. People need to be given the ability to manage their work around their time or you will start to see burnout, unhappiness and low retention rates.
Have we got it right yet?
What are your experiences of the transition to flexible working, four years on? Do you feel your organisation has got to grips with it? What have you done that’s been a success? What challenges do you still need to overcome?
Additional resources on hybrid working:
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