The Hybrid Five
5 guiding principles to help your business navigate the path ahead.
It’s clear that we’re at an inflection point. Half of leaders surveyed recently by Microsoft said their organisation planned to return to the office full-time. On the other hand, 52% of employees said they were considering a move to hybrid or remote work in the next 12 months.
"It's time to rethink the role of the office and adopt a degree of intentionality around the who, where and why of in-person gatherings," proposes Microsoft 365 Corporate Vice President of Modern Work, Jared Spataro.
But perhaps the issue is bigger than even Spataro acknowledges. In moments of great division, we face an opportunity to reimagine the playing field altogether. How much of our current ways of working exist due to established norms that no longer serve us?
When designing performance driven, hybrid cultures with our partners, we ask them to consider the following questions to address this:
What is the purpose of your office?
Is there a golden opportunity in this for change?
What innovation and tech support do you need, so all your people can thrive, regardless of time and place?
How does your team's bias and existing cultural beliefs shape the conversations you are having about ways of working?
As we move through this moment of rapid, radical reinvention, answering these questions can be tough. There is no tried and tested precedent to rely on. So instead, we’ve devised the Hybrid Five: 5 guiding principles to help your business navigate the path ahead.
Freedom within a framework:
One size does not fit all. Seek a balance between business priorities and optimising conditions, so that individuals and teams can thrive.
Your employees, even those in identical roles, are also people with unique needs and different demands in their whole lives. We’ve witnessed the fallibility of organisations implementing return to office mandates or one-size-fits-all solutions. Goldman Sachs’ attempt saw less than half of their employees turn up on day one. Seek out balance between critical contact, and the conditions that enable your people to thrive in their whole lives.
Dropbox is one organisation creating freedom within a framework by identifying what’s crucial to their business then creating flexibility outside of that, through setting core working hours from 9am - 1pm, where employees must be online (at home or the office). The rest is up to them.
Consider how you can use data to inform your approach unique to your organisation’s needs -what time and place constraints are fundamental to your success? Do they apply to all roles? Then seek out areas of flexibility around that so that people can thrive in the conditions that suit them best, teams can come together when optimal and the business goals can be met.
Optimise performance:
For knowledge workers it’s about output, not time on the job. Your policy should optimise and balance key output drivers, like energy, focus, cooperation and connection.
When it comes to designing future models for working, we speak to leaders, managers and people across Australia every single day. For organisations who are creating hybrid policies based on knowledge workers, time and space are less important than outputs and performance. One thing we’re hearing often is to ‘earn the commute’.
Instead of dangling a proverbial carrot to incentivise your people back to the office full time, we challenge our partners to look at how the office space can be used as a tool to elevate and amplify genuine human connection. For example, coming into the office to spend half the day or more on video conferences might not be an optimal use of time and space - nor enhance connectivity.
Tasks can be performed from anywhere, and often at any time. But mucking in around a white board to develop concepts, osmosis learning and the nuances of community connection away from screens all thrive when face-to-face.
Coming together for a creative brainstorm, strategy session, feedback or team celebration leverages a moment in time where connection builds trust, creativity, and elevates outcomes. Considering when coming together face-to-face matters most for your people and business goals, as well as how your space can be utilised to be central to those moments.
Principle of charity:
The principle of charity means assuming the most rational, best intention behind opposing points of view. Employ it when discussing hybrid work preferences with all—whether leadership or team members.
A human who is flourishing is also an employee who is performing at their best for your business. When navigating conversations with team members it’s important to coach your people managers to adopt the principle of charity, which requires them to assume the best intention behind opposing arguments, such as where an employee may request flexibility in their role.
What the past two years has taught us is that we are all very different in what conditions enable us to be our best; some prefer to work later, others first thing in the morning, some thrive through in-person interaction, whereas others find greater productivity at home. it’s also highlighted how learning and growth can be amplified through exposure - something we’ve all missed out on this last few years, particularly new generations of workers who are at the early stages of building careers. Take time to understand what is important to every individual in your team and create the safety to challenge assumptions on both sides. Hybrid is a juggling act between need and want at both ends of the spectrum – with your team in the middle.
Fairness for all:
Test multiple scenarios to ensure that your policies don’t unfairly impact or marginalise certain groups or individuals.
When developing your policy, diligently test and check your bias to ensure you are approaching all people and circumstances fairly. For example, various religious holidays fall outside of the Australian public holiday calendar, and various cultures and traditions have rituals that overlap with traditional work hours.
For example, an employee of Jewish Orthodox faith might need a flexible schedule in terms of hours, so that all tech is switched off by sunset on Fridays, while another of Muslim faith may require prayer time throughout the day. Design your office spaces and hybrid policies to be respectful toward diversity, and actively create a sense of belonging for everyone.
Ensure the best reasons:
Ask yourself ‘why’, every step of the way. Ultimately, you need to enable pathways to achieve your purpose as an organisation. Your decisions and policies must align with your purpose, values and mission every step of the way.
At We Are Unity, we know that it’s easy to get lost in the weeds of hybrid and flexible work policies. There’s a lot to consider as you define your own organisation's approach. Ultimately, you need to find the solution that will best align with your purpose and values, deliver on your mission and create the conditions for your organisation, and its people to thrive. To do that you need to keep yourself, and your decision makers honest by demanding the best reasons for your (and their) actions.
The human mind is wired to seek out what is known and what is comfortable, so test your rationale at every step along the way. Ask why, then dig a little deeper behind the true motivators (there's often more than meets the eye). We all revert back to the known - whether thats working from home, in the office, or any myriad of conditions - because it feels safe. That doesn’t necessary mean it’s the best for individuals or businesses. Make sure that the decisions, and working environment you create lives and breathes the values you ascribe to as an organisation, and will guide you closer to your purpose and mission every day.