Who is responsible for the hybrid workplace?
Change continues to rumble through most businesses, with the pandemic accelerating shifts in working practices that have been in train for over a decade.
The immediate opportunity — and challenge! — is for organisations to shift to a hybrid workplace, that combines the best of physical offices and remote work.
This will need to be a major strategic consideration that involves stakeholders from across organisations, from senior leadership down to hands-on workers. To assist with the planning and execution of this shift, Step Two has released a strategic framework for the hybrid workplace.
This encompasses four key aspects:
- Stance: the organisational position on hybrid working
- Leadership: the role that business leaders need to play
- Management: empowering managers in a hybrid environment
- Enablement: supporting employees and removing barriers
With a framework in place, the challenge becomes to engage key parties, and agree on a way forward. But who exactly is responsible for making the hybrid workplace a success?
The strategic framework developed by Step Two can be extended to address this question, as shown in the diagram below:
Let’s break this down for each of the players involved.
Senior leadership
Business journals are packed with commentary about the changing nature of the workplace and workforce, and this is a strategic consideration for the C-Suite of most firms.
While many of the practical decisions will be made lower down in the organisation, senior leaders must outline the overall stance of the business. Will everyone be gradually returning to the office, will the physical office be closed entirely, to what degree will employees be able to shape their own working practices?
These and other questions need to be framed in a way that enables the rest of the organisation to take forward steps, confident that they’re aligned with a clear strategic direction and that they’re working within clearly understood constraints and boundaries.
Facilities
Physical workplaces were undergoing a sustained period of renewal and reshaping before the pandemic hit, and many of those design decisions now need to be reassessed.
Physical offices are now emblematic of the impact of hybrid working: are they needed at all? How many employees will return to the physical office? What types of spaces will be required, and what technology will be needed?
An article by the global real estate firm JLL outlines some of the changes that can be expected:
Inside offices, space is becoming more versatile. As typical workdays involve various tasks from group meetings to private conversations to answering urgent emails, not all are easy to do in crowded offices where meeting rooms are in short supply. Workplaces are instead being transformed into different areas for collaboration, private work or relaxation and furnished accordingly.
The importance of these changes puts Facilities squarely ‘at the table’ when strategic changes are being made, not least because of the huge investments and potential costs involves.
Facilities will also be responsible for progressively — and often quickly — making changes to offices spaces and locations, working hand-in-hand with IT to address workplace technology aspects.
Transformation projects
Digital transformation projects were already making major changes, which were accelerated during the pandemic. In many instances, there are parallel initiatives underway, driven by stakeholders such as IT, HR and customer service.
A successful shift to a hybrid workplace will require these initiatives to merge, or at least closely align. The challenge is then to identify those cross-cutting issues that are best addressed by a firm-wide initiative, while pushing down as much of the detail to the business as possible.
This approach avoids the potential roadblock of a single transformation project that has become too big to meaningfully tackle, stalling decisions and delaying the delivery of on-the-ground solutions.
When done well, these transformation projects can inform the overall stance of the organisation, support leadership actions, empower effective management, and provide enablement across the workforce.
Human resources (HR)
There is no question that HR policies and processes will need to evolve in the age of the hybrid workplace.
First off, this will require a faster shift to so-called ‘digital HR’, where employees are able to self-service for most or all common activities and queries, on any device they have to hand. This includes creating ‘my HR’ views on intranets that bring together all key details into one location, without requiring employees to log into traditional HR systems.
Human resources policies will also need to be updated to reflect the shift in working environments, particularly for those now frequently or entirely working from home. These policies must now provide greater flexibility in working practices, and should also be re-evaluated in relation to holiday and leave guidelines.
Performance reviews must be re-engineered to ensure they meaningfully engage remote employees, as well as those who are commonly working face-to-face with their managers and people leaders. Technology will play a role here too, utilising ‘pulse surveys’ and other real-time engagement methods to replace once-a-year reviews with continuous engagement.
Finally, HR teams will need to provide support to people leaders and managers, guiding them on appropriate methods for recruitment, day-to-day management, and stage-of-life changes. Employees themselves will also need to be provided with resources on how to manage work-life balance and other considerations in the emerging hybrid workplace.
Internal communications
The way that the organisations communicate and collaborate is a key component of the hybrid workforce, through the simple reality that fewer employees will be in physical workplaces at any given time, and the movement of the workforce will be much more fluid day-to-day.
Internal comms teams often spearheaded rapid actions that helped to inform all employees as the pandemic situation unfolded, as well as helping people leaders to engage online in effective ways.
There was also a focus in many organisations on providing a digital employee experience to build resilience against constant disruptive changes. Many internal comms teams are rightly proud of the work they did during this period, and are riding high in terms of status and influence.
The shift to hybrid workplaces will require similar involvement from internal comms teams, particularly focusing on facilitating effective communication practices for leaders and managers. These will necessarily utilise digital channels more than ever, as in-person interactions become less common (and therefore more treasured!).
Digital collaboration practices must also continue to increase in maturity across the whole workforce, completing the transformation in working practices that was sparked by the pandemic.
Information technology (IT)
In many ways, the responsibilities of IT in the hybrid workplace are best understood. Most technology divisions already had key changes on their roadmaps, including:
- providing new devices to employees, including mobile devices
- simplifying out-of-office access and usage
- rolling out collaborative platforms such as Microsoft 365, Workplace by Facebook or Slack
- kitting out office spaces with new technologies to facilitate online or blended meetings
- providing better mobile experiences for key systems and tools
- establishing new IT support processes
In most cases, the shift to a hybrid workplace will provide even greater impetus to roll out these changes to the entire workforce.
How is your hybrid workplace coming together?
As a consulting firm, Step Two is working with a wide range of firms to help shape hybrid workplace decisions, and to put in place the structures and processes needed to help it thrive.
We’re keen to hear how this is unfolding in your business, to enable us to craft advice to help the industries that we’re working in.
