Designing Work for the Hybrid Enterprise
Summary of findings for the Samudra WIT
March 2023
The Workplace Innovation Trust (WIT) is a Samudra community designed to ignite leaders to anticipate future workplace challenges in order to imagine and shape environments where people can be their best selves and do their best work. It convenes driven leaders who care deeply about creating healthy and productive workplaces where people thrive. This community is run in partnership with FLYN Consulting and includes senior human resources, employee experience, technology, and operational leaders.
The Trust collaborates on three topics, annually; devoting three meetings to each topic. Our first topic for 2023 is Designing Work for a Hybrid Enterprise. Our sessions uncovered a wealth of insights and practices on what is working (and not) for our member organizations as they move beyond the pandemic.
Below, we summarize the conversations and conclusions from our three-meeting cycle. We begin by defining the most difficult aspects of this challenge; next, we consider what members are doing around three key components of the challenge; we conclude by looking ahead at what we can experiment with to make work better.
I. Define the Challenge
There are numerous challenges associated with designing work for hybrid. The WIT members came to a consensus, ranking the following top three concerns:
Promoting equity of experience and opportunity across all cohorts. This led our members to consider a broad range of levers, notably remote work policies, employee experience technology, and management skills.
How to reinforce culture and community. Under this concern, we drilled down on the use of office space, the importance of social gatherings, skills development for building culture in a hybrid world, and other methods of employee engagement.
How to strengthen alignment with the company purpose and goals. This theme also overlapped with the critical question of how to reinforce culture in an increasingly virtual organization and lots of notes on new communication methods.
The WIT opted to further narrow our focus on the top challenge of promoting equity. However, our discussions continued to raise elements of all three as being intertwined in theory and practice.
II. What Members Are Doing to Promote Equity
Our second session was a click-down on how to promote equity and sought to include outside perspectives with member experiences on three sub-themes tied to our topic: policy, technology, and the role of managers.
Purpose and Policy
“Policy is not the same as strategy,” called out one member, astutely noting that her company still needed to link its purpose, or even just a vision for its use of real estate, to the stated hybrid-work policy. Her company is not an exception.
What are members doing?
Offer flexibility! Many members have stated a return-to-office policy. Anecdotally, the default or average seems to be three days a week, coordinated at the discretion of the team or individual. However, all our participants agree that flexibility is absolutely critical. They are cautious to not drive employees away with rigid strictures. “We offer guidelines, not rules,” is a common refrain.
Real estate rationalization. Our members are clear-eyed on the need to consider budgets, tax incentives, and other fiscal concerns. One watermark: PriceWaterhouse's 2023 real estate projections cite an expected 10-20% of all office space will be cut or repurposed. They are equally clear-eyed on potential trade-offs, as one member asks, “If you push people back to the office, how will it impact attrition?”
Repurpose for social and collaboration: With varying budgets, almost every member is repurposing office space for more social and collaborative use. This also extends to rethinking the role of the office in their broader communities. For example, our member at Prudential is rethinking how their Newark headquarters can host community events such as financial wellness seminars for local residents.
Measure impact. Good news and bad news: A large scale study of data at one of the largest banks show promotion rates went up for people of color, women, and those with disabilities during the pandemic! Unfortunately, they started to decline again as workers returned to the office. “We need to validate more and dig into the causes,” shares the Head of Strategic Initiatives and Integration at the bank.
Carrots or Sticks? As noted, most members are emphasizing flexibility and are hesitant to ding employees, even as they find many self-reported hybrid workers are not actually coming into the office. If anything, attendees are looking at positive incentives. For example, two of our member companies are specifically eyeing their teams in India, where many people moved out of urban centers during the pandemic. With the goal of bringing more of these employees back to urban offices, they are offering bonuses, help with relocation, and potential deadlines for returns.
2. Technology and Employee Experience
Our members agree that the design and deployment of the right technology and employee experience platforms will be critical to achieving equity across hybrid cohorts.
What are members doing?
Enable hybrid access, wherever possible. Furniture manufacturer Steelcase shared how they have added cameras and videos throughout their offices, including in social and casual spaces such as lounges, so they can pull in remote colleagues. They are also working with their technology partners to design hybrid meeting spaces with equity in mind, for example designing curved meeting tables where everyone is visible to each other, both on and off camera.
The folks at Logitech noted that the script was flipped for hybrid meetings, where the in-person attendees are more difficult to see and hear from, and thus suffer in equal participation. Thus, they have everyone bring laptops to in-person meetings, and everyone participates via videoconference.
Intentional facilitation: Equal participation in meetings correlates strongly with high-functioning teams; therefore our members use certain techniques and modeling to enable hybrid interactions (e.g. all participants on video, incorporation of the chat into the discussion, using raised hands features, calling on everyone, including the quiet ones, no side conversations, etc). “The role of meeting facilitator has become more important than ever.”
More feedback loops, with a light touch. Employee engagement scores, as measured by Gallup, have been steadily dropping. Our participants stressed the importance of tracking “belonging” and similar sentiment as you bring people back into the office. But be aware of survey fatigue, they caution.
Communications boost: Members are expanding the lines of communication. A few mention success with leadership ‘Ask Me Anything’ sessions. Also listed are enhanced intranets for easier knowledge flow, podcasts, and focus articles on employees.
3. Managers
Given the increased complexity and workload, managers are struggling, and our members are accordingly stepping up investments and support. For example, companies are investing in toolkits and diagnostics to help managers address systemic issues and make data-driven decisions.
Some illustrative comments on the state of our managers:
“There has been a loss of trust and connection which makes it harder to disagree, give feedback or challenge each other constructively. Middle managers feel this especially. They are asked to carry out policies or directives from senior leadership who they are not as connected to and may no longer trust to make good decisions.”
“I believe being a manager was already hard before the pandemic but has become even more challenging with Hybrid. We have created manager playbooks on how to lead within a hybrid work environment, more frequent check-ins with their employees, not only about performance but more about growth and development. We also encourage office hours for employees to check in with their managers and teams. Critical skills continue to be empathy, heightened communications, and creating a strong line of sight for employees to our goals.”
What are members doing?
Give managers a hybrid toolkit. One member described the goal as being to “provide managers with guidance on how to manage hybrid teams along with a deeper enablement for meeting facilitation, giving and getting feedback, and inclusive leadership capabilities.”
Coaching is gold. Our participants see a high return on investments in manager coaching. We observe a mix of in-house and external programs being used effectively. The focus is on developing basic interpersonal and management skills.
Shifting metrics: “As part of our DEI action plan, managers are being measured on whether they engage in the activities which comprise that plan: recognition; consistent communication; soliciting staff feedback.”
III. Imagining Forward
Our third session leaned into what our members are experimenting with, or might consider, to boost equity and productivity across their hybrid workforce going forward, as follows:
Reset Employment Agreements. There appears to be an enormous amount of flux and growing divergence between leadership and employee expectations. Just one of many examples, ‘some of our employees expect to be reimbursed for commuting into the office for social gatherings, something they were expected to do every day prior to the pandemic.’ Our Trust considers the benefits of explicitly resetting employee and leadership expectations around how and where work gets done, responsibility for up-skilling and learning, how performance should be measured, and lots more.
Build Systems of Engagement: In order to rationalize the intertwined and complex issues we’ve discussed, our members are leaning towards a platform approach. As one member put it: “Creation of a dedicated platform themed ‘Reimagine the Work, Workplace, and Workforce’ with key topics and updates on the renovations, policies, and approaches from leaders.” This also speaks to integrating a snarl of technology and tools “to enable employees to signal their work location to team members, book desks or conference space, coordinate commutes, calendaring, messaging, videoconferencing,” etc. All this is needed without constant “context switching” when workers move from one platform or system to another - a known productivity killer!
Lean into the Virtual Organization. This does not mean all virtual interactions. In fact, many are considering more localized meet-ups or “GeoGatherings for people in close proximity to get together for in-person events, e.g., meals, drinks, coffee, etc.” Others are considering allocating more budget to fly management out to hub locations for quarterly meet-ups, all hands, or roundtable discussions.
Engineer Moments that Matter. All of our participants are thinking about how to shape the experience (and purpose) of bringing people back to the office. ‘If an employee comes back in the office and hears crickets, they don’t come back again.’ In response, one contributor explains, we are trying to create “signature events to draw people into the office for specific moments in time, while still allowing freedom of choice.”
Boost Social Engineering. Members ask if technology can help coordinate informal social interaction, such as showing when your teammates or boss checked into the local office. Some considerations are more explicit, such as possibly creating cohorts by level with meetings every two or three months. “The org could engineer "informal" connections via a buddy or mentoring program, or encouraging outside interest/affinity Slack channels, or bringing staff together in person regularly.”
Create New Roles. All this activity planning and social coordination may require new roles. “We created a Virtual Community Manager role to actively manage our community.” In this member’s case, these are community managers at co-working spaces.
Imagine New Training Models. Lifting and shifting traditional classroom training content to video conferencing platforms has not been successful. This does not mean virtual training is not successful. Where models have been re-designed for shorter, on-demand consumption, interspersed with hands-on or VR applications, there is great promise. In addition, our members are considering new forms of remote job shadowing, virtual apprenticeship, or mentoring groups.