Being productive when working in a hybrid way

[This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA-NC]

In our July blog, we shared three principles for hybrid working and four practical steps to set your team up for success.  We also invited you to consider how you might consider supporting your teams as they re-learn how to work in an office space, as well as re-define what being productive looks like in a hybrid world. In this blog, we help you to consider that definition of productivity in more detail and how you, and your team members, might select different types of work to do, or ways to spend your time, from home versus when in the office in order to be productive.

How would you define ‘being productive?’  Google it and you get the following results: ‘producing or able to produce large amounts of goods, crops, or other commodities’ or ‘achieving a significant amount or result’.

In our experience, working from home has felt more productive than the office for many (not all) hybrid and remote teams that we work with.  Microsoft’s Work Trend Index survey reinforced this, the results showing that the self-assessed productivity of more than 30,000 global workers external to Microsoft remained the same or higher. 

For those of us who don’t produce ‘widgets’, we measure productivity day to day by how productive we feel.  Feeling productive could be the number of back-to-back calls we can endure in any one day, or the number of emails we respond to, or the number of actions we tick off our never ending ‘to-do’ list. We all have our own internal metrics, of course but it’s ultimately a feeling we have. Too often in the last couple of years that feeling has been accompanied by working longer hours which has a negative impact on our well-being and for some, burnout. 

Returning to the office can have very different feel to it than pre-Covid.  It can feel very noisy compared to the relative quiet of home.  It can feel like there are constant interruptions, making it difficult to do anything that requires focus.  It can feel intrusive when someone stands behind us, looking over our shoulder. All of this leads to claims we have heard repeatedly: ‘I feel so unproductive in the office’ and ‘I end up having to catch up on work in my own time’. 

On the other hand, we also constantly hear the same things when we ask, ‘What have you missed about being in the office?’ -the people, the relationships, the social connection, the water cooler moments. In practice, however, these moments that matter feel less productive and, in some cases, even like a luxury.

[Credit: Svetlana Ikriannakova]

What is productivity NOW in the office?

We would encourage you to consider how you could redefine productivity in the office:

• Consider the benefits of spending time together to build relationships within your team, across teams and with clients.  Could stronger bonds and greater trust speed up decision-making and problem solving hence enhancing productivity?

• Consider how the on-boarding process could be more effective in person and allow new starters to better hit the ground running, enabling them to quickly understand ‘how things work and get done here’ and who to go to for what.

• Rather than assuming over-hearing other people’s conversations in an open plan office is disruptive noise, what if overhearing other people’s conversations was the opportunity to learn from colleagues (learning by osmosis)?

• What if you considered what types of meetings would have the biggest impact in person.  A weekly status update meeting that is purely to inform may feel like a waste of time, whilst complex problem solving, or a creative process that will benefit from a group of people being together in a room and bouncing ideas off one another, will feel impactful as this Harvard Business Review article suggests. 

• If less time is being spent at desks on your days in the office (due to the collaborative nature of the tasks), could you discourage the use of email and instant messaging on your days in the office and therefore lessening the need to ‘catch up’ in your own time.

• And remember greater connection and social bonding is likely to have a positive impact on well-being, motivation and job satisfaction.

As we have stated in earlier blogs, returning to the office, and is not necessarily going to be easy, and a satisfying and productive experience must be intentionally designed but its as important to then re-design your remote working days.   Could speedier decision-making and those informal conversations in the office, remove the need for constant Teams calls and never-ending email chains at home? Could you build in more time on your remote days for more focused work and follow up from days spent together with your teams? Remember also that just because you have built in time to connect in person on your days in the office, it’s as important to virtually connect and check in with colleagues on those days working remotely. 

There is a critical role for the team leader in facilitating this process, but it’s a genuine opportunity to understand what motivates your team and what makes the commute worth it for team members, for you, and for your team as a whole.