hybrid work

Hybrid work and remote teams from a leadership perspective

Hybrid work is here to stay. Simultaneously, the evidence that a healthy culture helps a company to thrive is compelling: Companies with a healthy and rewarding culture have three times greater total returns to shareholders, while 70% of transformations fail largely due to people and culture-related challenges.

During the past 16 months, many organizations have learned to focus more on the workers than the work, and this may be one of the most significant cultural changes in most companies. Even if most people have enjoyed the greater flexibility of remote work, it is also clear that, especially from a cohesion, communication, and innovation perspective, recent times have been challenging.

Building purposeful offices

Moving on to a more hybrid work environment, we need to be more purposeful in the work that is done in the office, by creating an environment and in-office practices in which people find value in coming back. If someone has a long commute to a worthless meeting, they might prefer to stay in their home office. 

Leading hybrid work

To avoid creating an in-and-out group of people, we need to emphasize communications through better facilitation of hybrid meetings and by spreading the word on what is discussed during informal meetings at the office. Meetings in a split model, with both remote and onsite participants, require more facilitation rather than less. 

From the perspective of an individual leader, the upcoming fall emphasizes communication and interaction skills. You have to be intentional about your communication needs and purposeful in your interactions.  It is essential to continue to have a regular cadence of one-on-one meetings and to have the capacity to ask the right follow-up questions.

A unique opportunity

From a positive viewpoint, when we look at the upcoming fall, we rarely have such a unique opportunity to influence our culture, work-life, and business. If you weren’t happy with certain elements of your daily practices, a return to the office environment might allow you to change these elements. What is given is that more flexibility is here to stay, because based on recent research, 30% of employees were likely to switch jobs if they were required to be 100% onsite. 

If you would like to understand how Humbol can help you, as a leader, to be more proactive and systematic while you get more value from your interactions, get in touch to book a meeting with us online, and we can discuss this further.