Managing in Hybrid Times

Last weeks the Change Leaders (a change agents international community of practice) hosted a change lab session for an NGO client around the benefits of working in hybrid settings. The center question was: how to organize the mix of working from home and working from the office with presence shifts, for a better work satisfaction and business performance.

We did in 2 sessions, a first one to define the issues, and a second one to brainstorm the “best” and “next” practices. The work brought back to my mind commonalities with the international setting I worked in when I was in IBM, AT&T and GE, but also some distinct issues.

From working internationally in the 2000’s …

When I was a young middle manager at AT&T at the beginning of the 2000, I remember having attended a course dubbed “Managing in Digital Times”. At that time most of my team was distributed in Europe, outside of where I was based (mostly in France, depending on UK or US bosses). Some of today’s hybrid era challenges were already there: manage people without being in the same physical space, asynchronous communications. Like everywhere else, but without the opportunity to knock next door to ask for clarification. Phone calls were there, yet needing a more rigorous organization: while you can speak with 2 people at the same time only if you are in the same physical space, you can’t be on two phone calls simultaneously. We used lots of emails : I remember having calculated at some stage an average of 70 a day, up to 300 – of course I could not open and even less process each of them -, lots of conference calls (4 to 6 hours a day), and some traveling.

1.??Basic ingredients: autonomy, delegation and feedback

No need to say that having a clear job perimeter, developing autonomy, using convenient responsibilities and powers of delegation and pertinent feedback were the basic ingredients to allow efficient teamwork. But we also had a few tricks to compensate for the distance and asynchronous relationships.

2.??Philosophical stone: make the most of the rare encounters

The philosophical stone was the event of meeting physically at least one time – I did manage some people that I have never met in person. We made the most of travelling, this opportunity to meet IRL[1], to create linkage and to ‘sense’ the other persons and anchor their personae into our mind for further timely thoughtful reference, as we might never meet in person again.

3.??Miracle tool: instant messaging, to socialize and build intimacy

The miracle tool at that time was instant messaging. It was much more practical than a phone call. It allowed us to personalize the relationship with private exchanges and jokes, but also socialize formally with individual hellos and goodbyes. I remember at that “Manage in the Digital Age” course explaining to other attendees, who were also having some of their team located elsewhere, that I was saying hello in the instant messaging every day in the morning (mine or their morning … follow the sun), and goodbye in the my evening to each of the 15 people of my team; although a bit of restrain slowed them down, my peers adopted the behavior and reported back lots of satisfaction from it.

4.??Organizing the team to create a sense of belonging

Another opportunity was to create and maintain a teamwork spirit: when your team members spend most of their office time with people from other teams – local ones -, even though they might not deal with the same roles and responsibility, you risk having their allegiance going somewhere else. We needed to invest the sense of belonging, and keep up an accurate “trombinoscope” (a French slang word for an organization chart with pictures), take every opportunity to match teammates on activities, change the pairs or triads often so that the team fully meshes.?I was in telecommunication, so we knew “fully mesh” was far superior in performance and reliability than “hub and spoke”.

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?… To supporting remote and hybrid work in the 2020’s

Working from home has exponentially increased during the pandemic, due to the lockdowns. As an executive coach and consultant now, I spend significant time discussing with my clients on “how to make hybrid work happen” – and now, almost 18 months later, “why maintain it”.

5.??From remote to hybrid …

You may say “Coordinating remote and hybrid work (the mix of working from home and working from the office) is not the same as the international setting you experienced years before.” You are right, there are differences:

• Office workers were forced to work from home by the pandemic, not by the distance – there is a sense of a fool’s game, as a virus is far less patent than thousand kilometers distance
• International workers of the 2000’s had their office space, not every home or apartment has that type of space
• That was a brutal change, with a sense of loss for many, not a basic condition to build on, with no alternative

Then came the hybrid experiment, consisting of arranging a distribution of hours from home and in the office, to save the economy and the business.

6.??The SWOT of telecommuting

On the occasion of the lock-downs, many people moved to the country or seaside, and did not want to come back to the city. They saved traffic jams, stress and hours, enjoyed a different pace, sometimes a better climate, polluting less and breathing cleaner air.

Many people didn’t want to come back in the office. Many also started to consider other jobs, especially in the US,?as being close to the office was no longer?mandatory. Microsoft estimated that 41% of workers would?change jobs in 2021.

But many – and politicians at their head, during the winter 2020-2021 - also wanted to “come back to normal”, i.e. 100% in the office. Oddly or as expected, this isn’t possible – the pandemic and its waves are not over, and it has changed us. There is no “back to normal” and that’s just speaking about workplace and not taking into account psychological changes the health crisis has generated in each of us.

7.??When hybrid becomes the new normal: teamwork, teamwork, teamwork

Whether it is for the business efficiency or for the employee’s wellness, many organizations are now attempting to organize hybrid work. Most of our discussion with the Change Leaders rolled around how to make it fluid and endorsed. For this, here are the issues to tackle:

• Social disconnect: loss of sense of belonging to a team, even a “territory” (our office, our corridor, our coffee place…)
• Lack of sight: fear of missing work opportunities, being less visible, and not being aware of what’s happening.
• Discomfort: unease for some – not the right space at home, children, noise, ill technology - bad network, weak webcam and microphone, etc.

Many of the contributing tools I described above can help:

• Social connect: use instant messaging to build intimacy, say hello and goodbye every day;
• Visibility & meshed workflow: display team pictures and organization charts; have clear job perimeter and roles & responsibilities., Autotomize people, collaboratively organize teamwork, with autonomous subteams as often as possible to grow linkage, have regular standup meetings (Agile name for those meetings where everyone tells other team members what’s going on for them, and what they are going to achieve in the next days).
• Comfort: have necessary tools – hardware and software, train people and acculturate everyone to the digital transformation to allow the work to be done with ease ; also, rather state the obvious than give a miss, respect local work times; working from home does not mean being on duty 24x7.

That said, something organizations cannot change is personal home settings – space, walls, noise, neighbors.?Or distance, for those who moved far away. For these groups, trying to impose hybrid work pace ends with employee dissatisfaction and stress, work inefficiency – checkmate.

8.??Hybrid success key: leaders exemplarity and collective intelligence

Hybrid work is obviously a field where differences between people are easily noticeable. Hence the need for leaders to walk the talk, whatever framework they want to encourage.

Last but not least, wherever possible, encourage rather than impose[3] a flexible framework. Give people simple rules – for example 50% of workers in the office, or 2 days a week at home – and let them organize themselves, even allow exceptions where it helps efficiency and satisfaction. The opportunity is then to define those simple rules and let the teammates self-organize. The leader’s work is to let go of the compulsion to control what’s going on.

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In my book “Managers Intermédiaires: Guide de Survie” (soon in English), I dedicated chapter 10, to the different leadership tools and practices on how to?lead the hierarchy or team… if you have the opportunity to read it, it will give you ideas to chew over transitioning your team into the hybrid era.

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What do you think, are those ideas – probably not new news for some of you – making sense? What other actions did you put in place to make hybrid work possible, practical and profitable to everyone?

#leadership #hybrid #management #socialconnect #teamspirit

This article was also posted in Medium here https://medium.com/the-change-leaders/managing-in-hybrid-times-f0bc26f1af94

[1] IRL=In Real Life

[2] Image credit SHRM / PwC https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-news/pages/hybrid-work-model-likely-to-be-new-norm-in-2021.aspx

[3] Autonomy and let-go by leaders is a growing need since we entered into the digital ear, VUCA and now the pandemic. In spring 2021, I had the opportunity to explore this when I spoke at the Leadership from Within conference about Collective Intelligence in Turbulent Times .