Some Challenges Posed by Hybrid Working and How We Can Meet Them

Hybrid working, for many a necessity induced by lockdown, is rapidly becoming a work pattern of choice for the future. Goldman Sachs are one of the few organizations so far to have declared against the trend with their boss David Solomon rejecting the idea of remote working, labelling it an “aberration”. The more common view seems to be that the working pattern has changed for good. Google, for example, expects 20% of staff to work from home permanently in future, while Microsoft is to make remote working a permanent option. This shift towards more flexible working patterns poses some tough questions for managers and leaders.

How is it being done?

1.     Who gets to work in a hybrid way?

An educational organisation I know identified this as a key question as staff began to return to working on the campus after the year of home based working. Each function’s stakeholders had different expectations of instant access, face-to-face contact. It was clear that the same offer of hybrid working couldn’t be made to all staff. How to decide? Nationwide answered this dilemma earlier this year, saying that the 13,000 of its staff who do not work in branches would be allowed to work from wherever they wanted, making for a very clear two-tier role-based system driven by a need for customer access. Is this a fair way to decide? Will staff agree? Which raises a key challenge, whatever route forward is decided, how to ensure it is fair?

2.     How to make it fair?

We know that people’s experience of working from home during lockdown has been highly variable. Some have really appreciated it while for others it’s been a seemingly endless struggle of juggling demands and battling technology. Estate agents report that many people have moved out of the city centres, thrilled at green spaces and lower rents while others, it seems, have experienced extreme pressure on their mental health from isolation or family pressures, and can’t wait to get back to the order and sociability of office life. Any system that assumes the impact of a move to permanent hybrid working is the same for everyone, is unlikely to be perceived as fair.

3.     What will the impact be for the organization?

The big advantages of everyone coming into a central working space tend to be relative ease of communication and information flow (I did say relative!). It is easy to reconfigure the network as needed: call everyone together, split them into small groups, create ad hoc spaces for people to meet and congregate. In this way information snippets get passed on while relationships are stoked and nurtured. Virtual platforms do their best, but they are not the same. The hybrid organization will have to pay special attention to the challenges of connection and communication. It is very easy for those remote from the buzzing centre to miss out on accidental conversations and to quickly feel they’re out of the loop. Once they start feeling disconnected, they can quickly start disconnecting.

4.     How to ensure equality of access to opportunity?

Many of the benefits and perks of working can involve being in the right place at the right time to seize an opportunity, whether that’s an opening to meet a client, a chance to go to a trade show, or an invitation to give a presentation at a meeting. If you hear your colleague or boss fretting about being unable to be in two places at once, you can make the offer to help out. Face to face training sessions often have incidental network boosting benefits that can be nurtured and developed in the coffee break. We can beam colleagues in for the training but enabling them to roam freely in the breaks is impossible to replicate. How to ensure that the more remote workers don’t become out of sight, out of mind when a career-enhancing opportunity arises unexpectedly?

5.     How to ensure hybrid-working doesn’t become hybrid-washing?

It’s no secret that large organizations have spotted a money saving opportunity. HSBC, the UK’s biggest bank, is moving to a hybrid model and plans to cut its property footprint by as much as 40% in the long term, while Lloyds Banking Group has said it will bring in working from home as a permanent lifestyle change, allowing it to cut 20% of its office space. Who will benefit from these savings? It is important that organizations are honest that their motivations to elevate hybrid working from an emergency fix to a modus operandi are multiple and varied and not solely driven by a desire to increase flexibility for staff, if they want the initiative to maintain credibility.

6.     How will the organization continue to develop?

There has been a move over the last thirty odd years to recognize organizations as systems and to work with them as such. Approaches such as Appreciative Inquiry and Dialogic OD are predicated on the benefits of getting the whole system together to address development challenges and opportunities as an inter-connected, inter-dependent living system. How can this be done if people aren’t able to gather in the same physical space?

What helps?

1.     Pay attention to perceptions of fairness

Equity theory and research has made it plain that perception of fairness is key to feeling fairly treated; and that are perceptions of fairness are made by comparison by those around us. We compare what we put and what we get in return against what we see others put in and receive. We also value different things, and so experience their loss or gain differently. My son, who regards work as a necessary evil and values his leisure time highly, had to continue to go into work during lockdown and thought it mightily unfair that many of his mates were on furlough. Many of them though, were bored and lonely, drifting from day to day and would rather have been busy with work. All this means that while stakeholder expectations might dictate who can work away from the central office, attention will need to be paid to the specific impact for individuals. The greater the choice individuals have in accepting changes in their working patterns, the more individual preferences can be accommodated, and the greater the attention paid to perceptions of fairness, then the greater the likelihood of maintaining good motivation and morale.

2.     Make the shift from thinking of physical place to virtual space for development activities

One of the big adjustments for organisational development practitioners was how to run team development, training sessions or organisational change processes in an online environment.  We gathered and shared information on resources and apps and learnt that it was different, but it could be done. Consultant Gwen Stirling-Wilkins moved from thinking that bringing groups together to host and facilitate transformative change was unlikely to be productive, or effective, to writing a book about her experiences of successfully doing just this, leading and delivering a transformational project entirely online with 600+ people from five organizations, none of whom she ever met physically. Her book ‘From Physical Place to Virtual Space’ pulls together all her learning as a pioneer and is highly recommended.

3.     Make use of new online tools to enhance the online environment

There is an explosion of apps attempting to humanise the virtual workspace. From a psychology perspective I want to mention Deckhive, an online training app that has a fantastic and growing set of cards to support all sorts of training and development activity. The card sets include strengths, positive organisational development, motivation, creativity, coaching questions and emotions. They are useful for online coaching, performance reviews, career counselling, team development, training sessions and even organisational development. Moving, flipping and sorting cards on a virtual tabletop is as near as you can get to physically manipulating cards. I find it invaluable in making training sessions as experiential as possible.

4.     Pay attention to the rewards in the environment

There are rewards associated with social environments: smiles, verbal strokes (appreciation, thanks, compliments), shared laughter, physicality, shared non-verbal communication (winks, raised eyebrows, complicit smiles), acts of generosity (‘oh I’ll get these’ at the coffee bar). All these little incidental ‘blips’ of positive emotion have an effect on our sense of mood, wellbeing and morale. It is this continuous drip-feed of mood boosting interactions that is difficult to replicate in a virtual environment. Conscious effort needs to be made to introduce jokes, quizzes, rounds of positive news sharing and other mood boosting and rewarding activities into the online environment. And take a ten-minute break every fifty minutes minimum, if you want to maintain online energy.

5.     Review and revise

For many organizations going hybrid so extensively is going to be a new experience. Treat it as an experiment. Don’t assume you are going to get, or have got, it right first time. As the pressure on everyone to work from home all the time lessens, take time to discover what you, as an organization, have learnt so far about what works and what doesn’t. Plan how to build on that, then review how the new arrangements are working for everyone after six months: is the work pattern working for clients and stakeholders? Does the new work pattern feel fair? Is everyone getting fair exposure to opportunity? How are the work patterns impacting the organization (look for the unexpected consequences, good and bad) How are they impacting individual, team and organisational growth and development?

The shift over the last twelve months to hybrid working patterns has been emergency driven and ad hoc in execution. We have the opportunity now, as the ship steadies, of transforming them into intentional, strategic, thought-through beneficial ways of working that offer a win-win for people and the organization. This won’t happen by accident or by assuming what’s worked for the last twelve months will be good enough for the next. Instead we need to take stock, learn, re-negotiate the possible and launch pro-active plans that recognize the complexity of the opportunity, and the challenges it holds.

Other Resources

Sarah Lewis is the owner and principal psychologist of Appreciating Change. She is author of ‘Positive Psychology in Business’ ‘Positive Psychology at Work’, ‘Positive Psychology and Change’ and most recently ‘Co-creating Planning Teams For Dialogic OD’. She is also the lead author of 'Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management'.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organisations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715. A selection of strength card packs are available from our online store.

If you want to know more about implementing approaches and processes that positively affect people’s happiness, engagement, motivation, morale, productivity and work relationships, see Sarah’s positive psychology books.

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