Scoring Your Flex Work Strategy: How It’s Impacting Team Health (Part 1)

So you’ve been asked by your leadership to evaluate whether your company's flex work strategy is working. The question was bound to come.?

We’re 3 years into this experiment and we’re seeing behemoths like Amazon giving up on the flex work dream. Your CEO is no doubt under pressure and being asked by your board what makes us so special??

So how do you go about evaluating a flexible work strategy?

We’re helping organizations do just that.?

Whether you’re fully remote, structured hybrid, or somewhere in-between, you’ll want to build a flex work scorecard that evaluates your work policy’s impact on Team Health, Workflow, and Individual Engagement.? In this 3-part series, I’ll dig into each area in turn to share some of the key metrics we use to score flex work policies.??

Part I:? How Flex Work Impacts Team Health

Plenty of remote work skeptics contend that flex work benefits the individual at the expense of the team.? But what does the data really say?

Here are 4 metrics that we use to assess the impact that flex work policies are having on team health & cohesion.?

1. Are managers reaching out to their teams?

Metrics to track: Manager 1:1 frequency or Manager co-attendance of meetings

As mentioned in point 1, the strangest predictor of quiet quitting is lack of manager engagement. In flexible work environments it is more important than ever that managers are proactive about keeping regular contact team members. In particular managers play a critical role in ensuring that remote and/or distributed team members remain connected with their teams.? Flexible work strategies are highly dependent on engaged managers.

2. Are people maintaining their networks or becoming isolated?

Metric to track: % of people who are highly isolated

A common risk we’ve seen in distributed and flexible organizations is that certain people on the fringe are more likely to become gradually less connected to peers. In the most extreme cases, this can result in people becoming completely isolated from their teams and the rest of the org. This is often just a natural consequence of being ‘out of sight, out of mind’ and the organization failing to proactively encourage healthy connection. A successful flex work strategy needs to take this risk into account and take action to minimize it.

3. Is your organization becoming more siloed?

Metric to track: Average number of cross-functional connections per person

Our research shows that with less in-person face time, people’s networks tend to narrow. They may still work just as much with peers in their direct workflow, but over time, they lose broader connections in other departments or functions. The net result is that flex work organizations can become significantly more siloed. A successful flex work strategy must include a plan to maintain these cross functional networks that are vital to innovation and maintaining healthy culture.

4. Are people visiting the office frequently enough to stay connected?

Metric to track: Cross-functional network size by frequency of office visit

One way to address the potential increase in organizational silos is to encourage more face-time. Time in the office increases serendipitous connection and thereby the breadth of people’s networks. By combining badge and collaborative network data one can get a good sense of how often people should come into the office in order to take advantage of this effect. The frequency required depends heavily on the quality of in office time. If time in the office encourages broader connection then it tends to be far more beneficial in this regard. This data can help drive guidelines for recommended frequency of office visits.

5. Are people quiet quitting?

Metric to track: % of people who have become severely disengaged

Quiet quitting is a sensitive topic but regardless it is top of mind for many leaders when it comes to questions about flexible work. Leaders may worry that flex work is creating an environment that encourages people to completely check out.?

In previous research, we found that this extreme form of disengagement is relatively rare. But even when it does occur, it is usually driven by factors within an organization's control.?

The most significant predictor of quiet quitting was found to be lack of manager attention.? For instance, remote team members without regular manager 1:1s were significantly more likely to become disengaged over time.?

Presenting this aggregate level trend data to leaders along with ideas for actions to mitigate the occurrence of this issue can go a long way to easing their concerns. Pretending it doesn’t exist is a good way to lose leadership’s trust in your flex work program.

Look out for part 2 of the series on how your flex work strategy impacts people's workflows next week.