Surprisingly for many leaders, although not so much for the remote/flexible work advocates, in some cases remote work led to boosts in morale and productivity. While there are definitely those who are happier with the more ordered approach of office life, there are others who thrive when they can work in the comfort of their own home.

The Trend is to the Remote

According to the Microsoft 2021 Work Trends Index Annual report, people’s expectations have changed dramatically over the past few years. Not only do people expect an organisation to put a greater emphasis on collaboration, learning, wellbeing, and a company’s desire to drive career advancement, they also now expect flexibility in when and how the work is done.

This brings new challenges for business. A broader definition of productivity is likely required. For example, we’ve spoken before on our blog about how some people are early birds and some people are night owls. Leaders will need to develop new performance metrics to ensure that the productivity of their people is judged fairly.

New Approaches and New Challenges

Perhaps the biggest challenge is managing people who are scattered in various locations. When calling a meeting, it is a lot easier to manage if everybody is in the room. If half your people are in one room, and the other half are at their computer screens in a dozen different locations, how can you ensure that everybody is engaged and participating in the meeting? What does this mean for creativity and gaining input? How do you manage all of this?

First, you need to understand the difference between remote-first and remote-friendly, and restructure the leadership of the business around one of these models. A remote-friendly business opts to facilitate remote or flexible working, but it doesn’t structure the management of the business around remote working. A remote-friendly approach is more suitable for businesses where people are expected to be in the office, but when there is no need for more hands-on management (e.g., when a worker knows exactly what they need to be doing) they can opt to work from home.

Remote-First

Remote-first is where the organisational structure of the businesses is built around the notion that people are highly likely to be primarily based at home. When this is the default model, there is no expectation somebody will be in the office. People may be based all over the world, and some may have never even met in person.

To develop the remote-first model of hybrid working, an organisation needs to think creatively. It needs to understand the various scenarios that may occur and take a proactive approach to accommodating them. The business needs to invest in the right technology, not only for video conferencing, but for engagement between people working in different locations. While Zoom and Teams may handle the virtual face-to-face, workflow management tools such as Slack and ToDoist will likely be needed to manage people across projects.

The Question of Communication

Vitally, leaders who adopt the remote-first approach need to understand that by definition, hybrid working results in people working at different times. That early bird might be up at 7am and cracking on, while others might be hitting their productivity peak around midday. Consequently, there is a need for asynchronous communication—the tools and ability to drive a project forward without the need for stakeholders to be available at the same time.

In the office, when an email is sent across a department, there is generally an expectation that there will be a near-immediate response. In the hybrid working environment, a cultural shift is necessary to help everybody understand that people are more likely to respond at different times. Therefore, a strategic balance between synchronous and asynchronous communication is vital to embedding the hybrid working infrastructure.

Don’t Lose Great People

Undoubtedly, this presents a very real challenge moving forward, but it is one that businesses need to meet. In the Microsoft survey, almost half of respondents’ value flexibility in where and how they work. Many are even moving to a new location because they can now work remotely. Hybrid working might not be the future for every business, but it is going to be part of the future, and meeting people’s expectations is something that leaders need to consider, else they risk losing their most talented individuals to remote-first organisations.

If you’re a business leader wanting to implement a remote-first, hybrid working culture, but find much of what we’ve discussed overwhelming then we can help. Over the past eighteen months, we’ve delivered a number of remote leadership programmes to various businesses, including Ultrapolymers and their cross-European team. Reach out to us, and we can tailor the correct leadership programme for you and your people and help you thrive in the hybrid working new normal.

The post Hybrid Working: The ‘New Normal’ of Leadership appeared first on Robin Lines Associates.

But that’s where we are now. The big question is where will be in another few years?

The Centre for Cities Think Tank suggests it is likely that we’ll all be back to normal within a couple of years. The five-day a week, 9 to 5 work schedule and the routines of commuters will become the way business is done once more, just as it had been for decades previously.

However, this goes against what a lot of clients are telling me. A lot of people have started to see the benefits of a hybrid approach where their people work partly in the office and partly at home. Some clients have even suggested that they would rather people not coming back to the office at all.

The Hybrid Approach

While the latter scenario is unlikely due to practicality, the hybrid working scenario is one that many may, and perhaps should, explore. Working from home has a number of benefits. For starters, we don’t live in a 9 to 5 world anymore. Technology has changed the way we think, and it has started to change the way we work. There are advantages to embracing these changes, from being able to connect and engage with customers on their terms and not yours, to ensuring that the potential of the early birds and night owls in your team is fully maximised.

While there are many who prefer the office environment for various reasons – they feel it adds structure, or it properly demarcates the lines between work and home life – others are more comfortable working from home. There is no long commute in the morning, which may give them a vital extra hour in bed or more time with the family before the day starts. The stresses and strains of rush hour traffic or crowded public transport are eliminated, which results in a more positive mindset from the get-go.

Home workers can make their environment more comfortable – they get the coffee they like or can listen to the music that best boosts their productivity. They can set up their workspace the way they like it, rather than feel like they need to go along with the rest of the crowd. Many will even save money working from home, as they can cut down on childcare costs, train fares, and other not insignificant expenses that mount up over the standard work week. Let’s be brutally honest, when people have more money, they’re generally happier and happy people are more productive and motivated people.

The Generational Divide

There is also a strong sense that demanding people return to the office is demonstrating a lack of trust. Not everyone can work from home all the time, but in our constantly connected, always-on world, there isn’t as clear a need to make people sit at a desk in one particular place, when they could be sitting at a desk elsewhere and still do the work. Apple asked its employees to come back to work three days a week, and the response was far from positive.

In some respects, the pandemic has highlighted a generational divide in attitudes. Managers from the Baby Boomer and Generation X cohorts, who developed their skills and techniques in the earliest years of the Information Age didn’t originally live in a world where half your life sits on a handheld device in your pocket. The idea of being always-on and constantly reachable is a relatively new one for many of them. Meanwhile, Millennials and Zoomers have largely grown up in that world. Even the oldest Millennials were no older than teenagers when the World Wide Web became public knowledge.

Consequently, whereas previous generations may be wedded to the idea of the 9-to-5, Monday to Friday work week, many of their younger employees are not, and don’t see a benefit to that mindset. Leaders will need to balance their expectations with those of their people, or they risk demotivating their people by making it look like they don’t trust them.

The Importance of Trust

In my leadership programmes, I regularly highlight the importance of trust. If you trust your people, they will trust you, they will respect you, and the overwhelming majority of them will endeavour to reward your trust with fantastic performances. For many, it’s a case of remembering that every single person wants to succeed. There are those who need a more hands-on approach to management, who don’t work particularly well unsupervised, and may not be ideal candidates for flexible working.

However, there are many who will thrive in such an environment because it is simply what they are used to, and when organisations refuse to demonstrate trust, refuse to be flexible, and make demands of them, there is a real chance they will start to look elsewhere to find an employer that is more flexible.

The best way to discover whether a hybrid approach to the workplace is right for your business is to simply talk to your people and ask them what they want, and if your people have shown the same dedication to their work over the past couple of years, maybe it is time to consider cutting the leash?

Want to Learn How to Best Manage Your Remote Teams?

Become a Virtual Presence Maestro

The post What Will ‘Back to Normal’ Look Like? appeared first on Robin Lines Associates.