Policies for Hybrid Work

We’ve been writing about the difference between “remote” and “flexible” for half a year now and it’s time we talked about it again.

As we’re preparing to launch a campaign at PeopleNotTech to help companies who set their sights on succeeding with Hybrid Work and therefore need Psychological Safety and ways to work with teams in any environment, we look around and see overworked, stressed out and bewildered HR professionals tasked with “sorting this out” everywhere. 

Most are writing policies and agonising over office screens, pen usage and enough hand sanitiser. A few are debating the proportion - how many days in the office and how many days at home, what office leases should be left to lapse and how meetings and events will play into it. Or what should be voluntary versus what should be mandated. Some others are spending time on the pointless endeavour of working out the morality and practicality of spying remote work monitoring software. The command and control of 9 to 5 and conveyor belt work brought to online and distributed.

Very few are focused on starting with the deeper, exploratory, cutting, but oh so urgent questions:

• What is productivity/performance TO US?
• What are we really trying to achieve? How do we measure if we have?
• What matters to us as a company?
• How do we establish true dialogue and feedback loops?
• How do our people feel?

We’ve always said the future of work starts with questioning everything, well it’s time to do that questioning now as any policy that’s going to be written in absentia will add a tremendous amount to our “Human Debt” and to be frank, adding any more in conjecture with the inescapable upcoming recession could well be lethal.

What to question? Obviously, the topics above, but if we are to choose one central one the first one is the best place to start because we can’t possibly design the next steps before we’ve answered it. What does “productivity” mean to our particular situation? What is performance? Does it include productivity or are they interchangeable? Do we understand both? Which are we striving for?

To succeed in encouraging “elite outcomes” instead of what could end up being simply “office-act-of-presence but from home”, we need to take a step back and a deep breath and start at the definitions and the exploration. It’s uncomfortable and harder than reaching for some other work policy document and editing it, mindlessly replacing words and imagining ways to operate divorced from reality or real needs, but we must do so. 

HR professionals need to reach out to product makers and ask them what are they really valuing? What and how to quantify outcomes? How much of the work in a sprint can be done individually versus in a team? 

They need to be reading the Basecamp’s “Remote” and examine what Silicon Valley learned from distributed teamwork before. They need to internalise the definition of “asynchronous work”, obtain management permissions and empower everyone to protect them against negative dynamics and burn-out. 

To bring everyone to the table and leave no work process as an unexamined taboo or convention but discuss it all in light of the new normal. To ask everyone the deeply personal questions of the lessons they each individually learned over this period, lessons about homeschooling; collaboration; working early/late; the dread of the zoom carousel; working more and “loudly” so they can’t be accused of slacking; skipping meals and hundreds of coffee refills; the exhaustion, the worry; the self-care; the trust in the team; feeling like they belong or feeling like they’re frustrated and can’t express it; the fear of job loss; the online conversational turn-taking; how conflicts worked; how they found the resources to speak up; the amount of meetings they can fit without feeling suicidal; what makes them feel accomplished and impactful and what’s just painful and feels useless; the balancing of life and work when there’s no physical limitation and most importantly, above them all - how do they feel and what would they want to see in the new reality of hybrid? 

Before that’s done, quite frankly, the only policy that’s crystal clear and should be rolled out irrespective of the answers to the above should be “If 1 remote = all remote” meaning even when people will be physically together in the same meeting room in an office, if even one member of a team is on zoom, everyone else should be in the meeting digitally too. 

Other than that, if we want a priori policymaking that’s done without the work of understanding the real nature of what we need results-wise then we can focus on the “to do’s” of the people work. Those are clear and immutable irrespective of productivity and performance - if we want those two at all that is-:

1. Team leaders are to be religious about 1-on-1s and protecting against burn-out;
2. Teams are to ask each other often and with empathy how they really feel (since the company rarely does, let’s face it);
3. Teams are to keep each other honest and open - police against impression management and strive for always speaking up.

That’s a nearly-exhaustive list of all policies that can be written so far: the ones levelling the digital versus physical playing field to enable collaboration, and the ones reaffirming the permission to focus on the human work - the obsession with Psychological Safety, the interventions, the EQ enhancing moments, the learning, etc. 

Nothing else needs doing before understanding the concept-level “What would elite performance mean for us? How would our people best achieve that from wherever they are, happily?” so if you find yourself in front of a document that you are ploughing through to just get “the new normal of work” policy “done and over with” as someone or other “wants it this week”, STOP. Go back to the drawing board and call the ones who asked for it, and the ones who will do the work too, so you can collectively answer these bigger questions. And answer them from the heart. THAT is sustainable, anything else - foolhardy. 

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Don't send your teams home with a laptop, a Jira and Slack account and a prayer!

Get in touch for our Team Psychological Safety Dashboard and our Stay-Connected-When-Remote question pack at www.psychologicalsafety.works or reach out at [email protected] and let's help your team become healthy, happy and highly performant.