In the past 2 years we’ve experienced the biggest disruption to work since the introduction of the 5 day working week – our work-life boundaries have been forever blurred and for many we experienced a new found autonomy. Our behavioural norms have been turned on their heads and we can’t just go back. As a leader of a team, you are navigating what this means to your team and no doubt considering how you can ensure that your team is engaged cohesive and high performing. This month’s blog is the start of a series, co-written with coach and facilitator Geri McKenna, focused on what it takes to set your team up for successful hybrid working.
What is Hybrid working and does it work?
In March 2020 many teams were thrown into working virtually for the first time and had to find a way to make it work. As we return to the office, hybrid working is now becoming the norm – hybrid working means providing flexible working options enabling employees to work from home at times and to be in an office at others. This sounds great in theory but isn’t always successful in practice and there are conflicting reports about whether hybrid working is the best thing to happen in the workplace or is emotionally exhausting and impacting productivity and performance.
What’s your experience so far of hybrid working? Are you finding it is enabling you to get focused work done at home and then purposefully meet others in the office to connect and collaborate?… or, are you being told you have to be in the office on certain days only to find you are the only one there, or you are sitting on back to back Zoom calls?
Mutuality is key
It is easy to make the mistake of seeing hybrid working only through the eyes of the employee or the eyes of the organisation. Employees have got used to better balancing work and life while working at home – but is it acceptable to decline a work meeting because it clashes with an exercise class? Perhaps? Perhaps not . Some employers, are demanding their employees back in the office full-time, assuming that productivity will increase.. There needs to be a middle ground – a mutually acceptable solution which provides the best of both worlds.
Your role as Team Leader:
Returning to the office and designing effective hybrid ways of working is not necessarily going to be easy. It’s a transition of experimenting with new way of working that needs to be intentionally designed – there is a critical role for teams to play themselves in this process. As a team leader, you will not get it right first time but we invite you to see it as an opportunity to understand what motivates your team members to come into the office and what would drive them away. Recognise that some team members will be excited by the prospect of a new hybrid working world while others will feel threatened.
We would invite you to pause and take stock. Reflect on what has worked well over the past 2 years, what do you want to keep doing and what would you happily let go of. Why would you come together in person? To collaborate, to connect? Could your in person interactions create efficiencies that support those days when you continue to work from home?
It will be important to involve your team to co-design new ways of working; we are currently reviewing the recent hybrid working research (so you don’t have to!) to determine the best ways to set yourself up for hybrid working and in next month’s blog we’ll share more about how you can approach this with your team. In the meantime, we invite you to start by having a conversation with your team based around three simple questions:
With the aims of meeting the needs of the business, the team and individual engagement, efficiency and effectiveness:
- What’s working well in our current hybrid working arrangements?
- What’s not working well?
- What can we do differently?
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