Organisations which adapt quickly to hybrid working will balance efficiency with innovation. Front and centre of their strategy will be profound, productive, happy, human relationships. Will your hybrid plan help people flourish or is just a spreadsheet of tasks and time?
Technology has been a fantastic communication mechanism for us, but we’ve become productive little islands, staying ‘connected’ just enough to keep the train on the tracks. For hybrid working to succeed, and speed up the train, we need to balance digital overwhelm with the beating heart of real human connection. Even a call feels better now than another Teams meeting.
My thoughts on how to make hybrid workers thrive:
- Claiming to be a ‘flexible employer’ is not a differentiator these days. It’s as ubiquitous as ‘flatscreen TV’. No one wants to work for an ‘inflexible employer’, do they? Read The New Long Life: A Framework for Flourishing in a Changing World https://amzn.to/3fFDM4E for ideas on employee engagement.
- Get a vision for your hybrid working eco-system. If you feel stuck, start mapping it out on on a white board. Try planning fortnightly not weekly.
- Take advantage of differing circadian rhythms in your staffing plan. They shift with age – from evenings (younger) to crack of dawn (me). MacDonald’s targeted older workers to fill 250,000 early morning shifts.
- Ensure you have some experienced wise elders in across the week, to mentor new or younger team members.
- Stop using technology for surveillance. Measure contribution, not screen time.
- Start getting people together now if you can, to rebuild trust, create new relationships and draw on collective intelligence. Have an agenda with just one problem, written as a question, and collaborate to solve it.
- Fix communication ground rules to build back boundaries. What is the expectation for speed of response in future and what’s the etiquette for out of office messaging? Continuing 24/7 connectedness will mean that hybrid life will just be a mixed-up soup of switching tasks, with no time for actual work.
- If you are back together part of the week you don’t need endless messaging to ‘talk’. Save your thoughts up and discuss them in a real conversation, not staccato streams of consciousness.
- Set up automatic nudges. Every Wednesday is meeting free, no internal emails on Fridays, no meetings before 10 or after 4, whatever works. Recruit some volunteers to agree collective measures.
- Stop defaulting to arranging a Teams meeting when a call would do.
- Switch from visual to auditory learning. Next time you plan a presentation, avoid PowerPoint and share a voice recording instead, for people to listen to in their own time. Measure the feedback against your usual meetings. You do track meeting performance, don’t you?
- Book one-to-one career conversations asap, starting with the most likely flight risks. What’s important to them now, what do they need, what’s changed, what have they learned over lockdown?
- We are milking existing relationships, not building new ones. Map your external and internal stakeholders and reach out.
Finally, it’s a perfect time to rethink app use and save precious time and attention.
Get digi-picky: some shock numbers
Until 1900 human knowledge doubled every 100 years.
From 1945 it doubled every 25 years and after 1982 that changed to every year.
From 2020 knowledge is doubling every single DAY.
How much of that ‘knowledge’ genuinely helps and how much grinds us down? We are flooded by energy-sapping messages and mail. Every day we send:
65 billion WhatsApp’s,
300 billion emails and post
95 million photos and videos on Instagram.
Facebook costs people an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes per day, Instagram an average of 28 minutes. That’s time gone for ever, trading-off work or re-energising leisure and family/friends time.
Filter out essential primary sources from all the noise: this is an individual and organisational responsibility.