Now that your team has finally adjusted to working from home, you face the transition back to the office. But not completely. Your company has decided to permanently implement a hybrid workplace. Folks will be expected to go into the office 2 days a week and work from home 3 days a week. No one will have their own office. People will sign up for a cubicle and show up with their laptop, ready to get to work.
You’re excited about this change but apprehensive about how your team is going to react. Shutting down wasn’t easy but a hybrid environment could be even more confusing. You want to do your best to create positive and productive working conditions.
Want some ideas to consider how you might lead effectively in a hybrid environment?
One of the most important things to keep in mind as you plan for this transition is that people react to social threats as if they are physical threats. Our brains set the flight or flight response in motion: elevated heart rate, shallow breathing, and a whole host of hormones coursing through our bodies. This stress response has been the key to surviving as a species but it can interfere with our effectiveness and well being in everyday life.
As leaders, an important part of our work is to create conditions that enable people to do their best work. This entails keeping an eye on what’s likely to threaten people, in a social sense. Several of the almost universal sources of social threat are uncertainty, feeling a lack of control, feelings of unfairness, and feeling disconnected from others. During the pandemic, these threats have been a constant. As you plan for your team going forward, you want to do everything possible to create a sense of certainty, give your people control, emphasize fairness and foster a sense of connectedness.
Read on for some some examples of what some leaders are doing to create conditions condusive to good work in a hybrid environment.
In the area of creating certainty:
-Start off by understanding what really needs to be done in the office and what can be done at home. You can think about this by project, goal, function, role or task. Be able to explain the logic behind your decisions regarding what’s expected of people.
-If you’re transitioning gradually, let people know what to expect as far as timing. Many organizations shut down haphazardly and rapidly at the beginning of the pandemic. It doesn’t need to be a crisis this time.
In the area of giving people control:
-Recognize that a “one size fits all” approach is likely to be unwelcome by a sizable number of people. In a survey from Stanford with 2500 working professionals, nearly 40% said they never want to work from home after COVID and another 45% say they want to work from home most of the time.
-If your company has work from home days and in-office days, give people as much flexibility as is feasible about how they schedule their time.
In the area of fostering a sense of connectedness:
-Recognize that some workers have never met each other in person if they started working in the past 15 months. Plan a time when people can safely get together as a group.
-Pay attention to the challenge of having meetings where part of the team is online and part of the team is face-to-face. Consider leveling the playing field by having all online meetings. Or, develop guidelines that ensure the people who participate online are fully included in the conversation.
In the area of fairness:
-Pay attention to creating equal access to opportunity and resources no matter where people work. In order to do hybrid effectively, this has to be a key consideration.
-Attend to the “distance bias” which is the tendency to favor people who are closer in terms of time, space or access. Here’s a great article on this topic.
You might be thinking that some of these suggestions contradict each other. That’s right! Because every team and every organization is different and needs to find its own path through this time of transition. What’s most important to keep in mind is the importance of paying close attention to the potential social threats that we might be inadvertently reinforcing in the choices we make–and the potential to create rewards.
What are you doing as you lead in a hybrid world? Please add your suggestions in the Comments box. Thanks so much for reading.
PS. For another blog post on social threats and rewards, check out this post from 2016.
And the NeuroLeadership Institute has been doing a series of podcasts on how to create effective hybrid workplaces.