From Remote to Hybrid
The coronavirus pandemic has tested all our dearly held assumptions and beliefs like never before. And it has left us wondering where to go from here. One thing is clear, though: we are rapidly moving from remote to hybrid work life.
While many employees have willingly adapted to remote work, embracing a wide range of new digital work tools to increase their effectiveness, post-pandemic planning for a hybrid work style is far from black and white.
Choice and flexibility
Intrigued by this new working life, where digital meets physical in a wholly new way, we have delved deeper — beyond our latest Team Curation: Hybrid Toolboxes — and spent time researching and reading articles and reports about hybrid work life, and the conclusion that we can draw is this: hybrid work is a booming topic with no clear answers.
People are complex. We have long known this about ourselves. But right now this leaves us with a conundrum as no one can claim to have the answer to what our working life will look like in the future. We once thought that the office was essential to working life. But the pandemic has taught us otherwise. And during the lockdowns over the past year and a half, you could have been forgiven for thinking that remote working life was the way forward. Hybrid work life might just offer one solution. There will be no one-size-fits-all, though. It is clear that organisations will need to tailor their own solutions to the dilemma, but there is no quick fix.
The pandemic has seen an explosion in the number of digital tools available. The complexity lies in finding a solution in these that an organisation can adopt. It is obvious that remote is going to play a massive role in working life in the future as well. Choice and flexibility will be the keywords for each organisation to bear in mind. Leaders will be called upon to make an analysis of their employees’ different roles and needs so as to create the conditions that provide everyone with the conditions to do their job in the best possible way. And that means in terms of inclusion, well-being, and productivity.
An agile approach
We know from experience over the past year and a half that the digital maturity of organisations is exceedingly diverse. A company such as Spotify, for example, is native digital and proved that it has no problem with its employees working remotely. To do so, however, this implies that an organisation must be agile, made up of smaller, autonomous teams that can operate from a position of trust and accountability. These two are cited by behavioural science research as vital components for succeeding with hybrid work.
Organisations like this are the outliers though and the vast majority are far from Spotify’s native digital status — yet. The new way of working will place higher demands on an agile way of working, however. Harvard Business Review calls agility the digital age’s competitive advantage with agile practices bringing increased collaboration and learning opportunities and providing quick responses within an organisation that can lead to shorter time to market.
Embracing the agile approach seems a path not only to offering employees flexibility and choice but also to aiding the organisation in its business practices.
The Google way
Another organisation leading the charge for hybrid work is Google, which is building a hybrid work model that relies on experimentation and new ways of thinking about tech, culture, and the use of physical and virtual spaces.
The first step for an organisation to make this work is to establish hybrid working policies. However, policies alone are not enough. To make hybrid work truly successful, the employees in an organisation need to adopt these practices in an intentional manner.
The question we should ask ourselves is what these practices could look like in reality? Structuring the approach in different layers is the way to make it easier to understand. At an organisational level, focus needs to be on impact and outcomes, rather than monitoring activity and inputs. On a team level, every team member needs to be included, regardless of their location — particularly those who are not in the office. And lastly, at an individual level, people need to be intentional about communicating their availability and how they are holding themselves accountable to their broader team.
Hybrid Toolboxes
The choice for our latest Team Curation was clear to us: Hybrid Toolboxes. We have put together 15 toolboxes that offer tips, advice, and resources for employees and leaders alike when looking for solutions to adopt to create the best environment for hybrid work.
From Facebook to AstraZeneca, Google to the Government of South Australia, these toolboxes give a glimpse into the future of hybrid working life and how we can tailor different solutions that can work for us as we embrace the future of working life.
Visit toolboxtoolbox.com for more inspiration and know-how and just reach out to us if you have ideas to share or would like to do a personal curation.
