Establish a digital leadership academy to support the successful shift to a hybrid workplace

Businesses are exploring many paths as they shift from an entirely remote workforce — thanks to the pandemic — to some mix of office- and home-based working. While a few are requiring a complete return to office work, most are opting for a hybrid workplace.

To help navigate the complexities of hybrid work, Step Two published its hybrid workplace framework in early 2019. This gives a clear structure that enables informed decisions to be made and executed.

A framework provided to support senior leaders in the successful shift to hybrid working

Each of the elements in this framework is important, but it’s the management layer in organisations that often ends up as the ‘meat in the sandwich’, squeezed between top-down strategic transformations and the practical challenges of day-to-day people management.

As a starting point, it must be recognised that managing teams is harder in the hybrid workplace, even as new working practices deliver business benefits and improved employee satisfaction.

The Global Digital Skills Index paints a sobering picture of the challenges that managers face. Conducted by Salesforce in early 2022, it found that nearly three out of four respondents worldwide say they aren’t equipped with the resources to learn the digital skills they need. It also showed a clear gap between the digital readiness of senior leaders and the rest of the workforce, including managers and people leaders.

Alongside other technology skills and expertise, there is a clear need to focus on the digital dexterity — the ability to work effectively in a digital environment — of managers and people leaders, so they can support and guide the working practices of the teams that report to them.

Digital skills for managers and people leaders

While there is an increasingly broad knowledge base that’s useful for people leaders to have (think cloud & AI), a core set of digital skills is needed to be effective as managers of their divisions or teams.

These are the digital dexterity skills (a term now preferred to the somewhat condescending digital literacy) that managers require the ‘next level’ of, beyond the skills of many of their team members.

Digital dexterity for managers and people leaders falls across six areas.

1. Onboarding, using digital tools to reduce time to competence and foster strong, early engagement.
2. Working as a hybrid team, using collaboration tools and other capabilities to maximise productivity.
3. Managing projects, drawing on modern project management techniques (such as agile) and effectively using digital tools to manage and assess progress.
4. Leadership skills for managers, using digital capabilities to ensure effective communication and rich engagement.
5. Performance management, using digital methods when managers may have little (or no) face-to-face time with some team members.
6. Personal digital dexterity, providing the core skills enabling the productive use of digital tools for day-to-day work.

CHROs and CIOs: a strategic partnership

Many of the pieces are already in place within firms to build the digital skills of managers, but they haven’t been brought together in a strategic way.

CIOs are already responsible for change management and adoption of new technology platforms, such as Microsoft 365. To address this, most have established online resources that can be used by all employees to learn new tools and features. Usage, however, is typically patchy and there are rarely resources specifically aimed at managers and people leaders.

CHROs are the owners of HR tools that address leave, performance reviews, engagement surveys and onboarding. Most HR divisions will also have established corporate learning platforms, that are used for everything from compliance training to general skills development. Few, however, have explicitly addressed the digital skills needed by managers and leaders.

Together, the leaders of technology and human resources should establish a digital leadership academy, with the specific objective of building the digital dexterity of leaders and managers.

More than just another set of online resources, the academy can ‘move the needle’ by:

• Establishing a leadership program for all current managers, underpinned by the creation of the digital leadership academy.
• Establishing a digital community of practice for managers and leaders, offering a safe space for peer-support and learning.
• Using the full suite of e-learning tools managed by HR to establish formal learning pathways for building digital dexterity, following learning best practices.
• CIOs and CHROs jointly planning the release of new digital workplace tools, to ensure that skills development is a key element alongside traditional change management activities.
• Deploying modern employee engagement tools to provide continuous measurements that enable managers to identify team members who need greater support.
• Delivering a full suite of digital HR tools, to streamline common HR processes and to eliminate pain points for employees who are working remotely.
• Adding digital dexterity into the formal role descriptions for managers and people leaders, thereby baking it into training and performance management practices.
• Tailoring the digital leadership academy to the needs of new starters, and including it in onboarding processes.

While the hybrid journey is still unclear for many firms, what is clear is that the traditional all-office working environment is a thing of the past. Some or all of organisations will be working across a mix of office, home and on-road locations.

Digital dexterity skills for managers and people leaders at all levels will therefore be crucial to establish (and sustain over the long term) productive working approaches in hybrid situations.

By focusing on the six competency areas for managers, a digital leadership academy can rapidly build skills — and engagement — by bringing together IT and HR in a strategic way.