Hybrid Still Isn’t Working

Hybrid work—where employees spend some time in the office and some time working remotely—sounds like a good way to balance employees’ interest in spending more time at home with employers’ interest in fostering collaboration and connection and avoiding the problems we have described. But it is not working.  One reason is that employers, having cut office space in reaction to the pandemic and to save on real estate costs, often resort to hoteling, or hot-desking.  The limited amount of office space also makes it impossible to hold “anchor days”—when everyone is in the office at the same time—to build community.

For companies that are stuck for the time being with a remote or hybrid model—either because they can’t or don’t want to expand their office space or because they don’t want to alienate employees who like working from home—a few actionable steps can help.

1. Assess the situation.  The first step is figuring out if you have problems. IT departments can help by analyzing data from corporate calendar software.
2. Create and enforce rules.  For instance, for starters, limit attendees to those involved in the issues or decisions at hand.  Another could be your camera must be on or don’t attend the meeting.  Rules must also be put in place to prevent the focus on individual KPIs from crowding out cooperation and collaboration. 
3. Revamp performance appraisals.  Managers should tell employees that their KPIs include responding in a timely manner to requests for help and mentoring or assisting new hires.
4. Revise career planning and advancement.  Rely on an array of peer assessments, such as 360-degree feedback, that focus on behavior and interpersonal skills. 
5. Establish in-office anchor days and make attendance mandatory.
6. Build social relationships.  Partner new hires with experienced mentors to show them the ropes. Create a list of important people whom new hires should meet and send introductions to make sure that those meetings happen.  Map out the groups that have critical interactions with one another, and as a start, bring them together for a series of working lunches, two groups at a time. Plan the seating to mix up team members.   Volunteering in the community can be especially powerful as employees work together on a common and meaningful goal.
7. Support employees’ well-being and mental health.  Managers should be required to have routine employee check-ins, and if these have to be done remotely, supervisors need training and access to resources on how to better assess employees’ well-being in a virtual context. Managers can also promote their reports’ well-being by establishing and enforcing boundaries between work and personal lives, especially about the hours for scheduling meetings.
8. And make connecting and communicating a management priority.