How to Achieve Hybrid Working Success

How do we make the right #decision for our organisations and our people?
Our latest #Distinction podcast is all about the essential and intensely topical subject of #Hybridworking. Hybrid is a once in a life time opportunity to reimagine the way we work. If we can approach this with intention, We can transform the effectiveness of our organisations and improve the lives of our employees. ​However at this very moment, organisations are sleep walking into it

In this highly practical session, we share the steps you need to take and the skills you need to develop to make the hybrid decision and to manage your hybrid team. Dani and Garin have been working extremely hard to collate, curate and break down the latest research into practical strategies you can take immediately to make the right decision for your organisation. As consultants helping clients navigate hybrid everyday we understand the real challenges that organisations are facing.

You can access our 2 playbooks which support the session:

Download Your Free "How to Make the Hybrid Decision Playbook" here:
https://distinction.live/designing-fo...

Down Your Free "How to Manage Your Hybrid Team" Playbook here:
https://distinction.live/managing-a-h...

Benchmark Your Decision-Making Skills Here:
https://distinction.live/benchmark/

Your Speakers
Dani Bacon:

Thanks for listening!

Distinction is an evidence-based Organisation Development & Design Consultancy designed to support modern, progressive organisations to bring out the best in their people and their teams through training, consulting, and coaching.

Our professional and highly skilled consultants focus on delivering engaging, results-focused and flexible solutions that help our clients achieve their business objectives.

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Transcript

How to Achieve Hybrid Working Success [Distinction Podcast]

 

 (00:00) Garin Rouch

Hi! This podcast is all about the essential and intensely topical subject of hybrid. And hybrid is a once in a lifetime opportunity to really reimagine the way we work. And if we can approach this with intention, we can really transform the effectiveness of our organisations and in the process improve the lives of our employees.

My name is Garin Rouch, and I've been an organisation development consultant for the past 16 years. And organisation development is the third of the HR disciplines. And it's all about working with organisations, and treating all of its components as an entire system in order to achieve high performance. Dani and I are experts in work with organisations to overcome the challenges caused by geography, time differences, and team and divisional boundaries as well. 

Dani and I have been working incredibly hard to identify and curate the latest research overlaid with the real life experiences and challenges of organisations. And we've managed to put together a wealth of information into one short sharp podcast, accompanied by guides that you can use immediately. And Dani, do you want Introduce yourself.

(01:08) Dani Bacon

Yes, so I'm Dani, I'm also an organisational development consultant. And I've led and worked with hybrid teams for the last 15 years, I've also been part of the senior leadership team that was operating with a hybrid model. So I've got plenty of firsthand experience of how it feels to be a hybrid team and lead a hybrid team and how it works in practice. And also what can go wrong. 

Garin and I started this Distinction podcast as we knew there was extensive research out there that can support leaders and organisations. But we also have a shared frustration that so much of it doesn't have a pathway into management and HR practice. So the podcast is all about bridging that gap. We've covered topics like leadership and remote teams, optimizing team performance, decision making, and now we're looking at hybrid. So the name distinction is a nod to the idea of academic excellence, the things that make an organisation standout. But also helping leaders and HR professionals make that distinction between myths and facts when it comes to the issue of practice. And there's lots of those flying around, particularly about hybrid.

(01:57) Garin Rouch

Great. So in this particular podcast, we're going to cover four key areas. So the first thing we're going to cover is, we're actually going to identify what are the building blocks of hybrid? So what are the ingredients and they not really what we think they are.  And then the second thing is how you actually design your hybrid solution. And the third part is, once you’ve actually made your decision is how do you actually manage your hybrid team? Or if you're supporting managers, how can you equip them with the skills to do so. And then the last bit is how to actually grow your hybrid capability within organisations. 

We want to make it as easy as possible. So we put all of our best thinking into two playbooks. And at different points in the podcast today, we're actually going to share the link with you. And if you're watching this on LinkedIn, or if you're watching this on YouTube, and you can actually see the link to the playbooks in the comments as well, I really encourage you to download it. It's just packed full of tools, templates, and just great insights. So before we get started, just in the comments, we just want to find out where you are. We're intensely curious because the research is emerging at the moment, we want to know how advanced are your return to workplace plans at the moment, is it you know, you haven't even started thinking about a year? Is it that some concepts have been discussed in your organisation, but there's no aligned vision or plan? Or is it there's plans in place in the communicated and you started, you're either running pilots or you actually enacted your plan as well. So please feel free to leave them in the comments, which is really want to find out where you are in your journey. 

(03:17) Dani Bacon

So welcome to hybrid. So there's headlines every day about hybrid everywhere and every day. And they are a real mixed bag, as daily updates as different companies are announcing their hybrid decisions. Either you see everybody go back to the office or others deciding to go fully remote. And there's a fair few are opting for a number of covers set number of days working from home each week. This is sort of compromise. So last week has announced that his headquarter staff could choose where they work, they call their approach work where it works. On Monday, the Bank of England's announced it's going to be asking staff to work in the office one day a week. And that's in quite sharp contrast a lot of the other banks hardline approach and insisting in full return to the office for everyone. And then there was Monday's announcement to the Prime Minister, that all restrictions going to be lifted from the 19th of July, including that requirement? Well, I think it's fair to say that reaction to that is really mixed. So there's a lot of uncertainty. So what might our teams be thinking about hybrid? Well, there's lots of surveys out there, they're getting a sense of our teams might be thinking, but they also paint a mixed picture. So we've just collated some of the stats here, they've got 57% of people worried about commuting time, if they have to return to the office, you've got 54% more in that career progression to the hybrid world. You've got 30% saying they're likely to switch job if they can't work remotely. And you've got 13% that are worried about how can we offer new pet if they have to go back to the office, but actually work life balance, flexibility and wellbeing top of the list of both hopes and concerns about hybrid working that was in a poll that McKinsey ran very recently. So it's really fun with their current decision. What happens next with workplaces, especially just an experiment, there's no one right solution and they've got all the answers. And this is uncharted territory for lots of people to watch the pandemic brought into the number of people who are trying out with hybrid working, adopting as a permanent way of operating in business as usual, rather than covering the extremes of a pandemic is like is feel very different. So deciding on best of you to work in a major versus complex of in part is the ultimate extension of the personalization of the employee experience. For every individual desperate continue working remotely, there's another person desperate and impatient to get back to the office, not all people want the same solution are going to be productive or effective with the same solution. And equally, we know, we know things like people don't be very far apart from communication to suffer. So there was some research done by Thomas Oliver of MIT that showed that when engineers move just 25 meters apart, the communication dropped, almost nothing, you know, got some more recent research by Microsoft earlier this year. And they found that the number of employees really connected fell from 91% in April 2020 to 71%, by February of this year. So it's really certainly leads to feeling unsure on how to move forward, more research by McKinsey found that 40% of employees have yet to have here any visual premier organisations about post COVID-19 work, it's got to look like a further 28% say, but what they have heard remains vague. So that at the moment is 68% of the working population who are unclear on how they're going to be working and carrying out their roles in the very near future. So that sense of limbo is going to slow down decision making, delivery and ultimately affect organisational performance, as well as a really significant impact on people's wellbeing. Although it's not clear cut, you could generally feel things like savings, office space, improved flexibility, environmental impacts are likely to be potential positives of hybrid working things like culture, collaboration, innovation, coordination of things that are cited concerns. And then there's a whole host of things like work life balance, productivity, talent, management, inclusion, productivity, where people just aren't sure whether it's going to be an upside or downside of hybrid so that people are sitting on the fence. So that the right answer, unfortunately, given preference for simplicity, is much more likely to be independent, depends on the organisation, it depends on strategy, it depends on the nature of the work tasks being carried out. And it depends on the individual's will central planning and strategy. So I would really like to find out what you perceive is the biggest upsides and downsides of hybrid. There are some ideas on the screen. And we'd love it if you can pop your email if you're listening on YouTube, or LinkedIn popular thoughts in the comments. So now we're going to look at how you actually go about making the right hybrid decision for your organisation. Corporate can work brilliantly, but it's not without its challenges. And the initial beta remote working for organisations is a rushed decision in a chaotic context of a pandemic, actually, hybrids different strategic decision. So we're hearing from lots of organisations that they're approaching their return to the workplace as a series of tasks to be completed. And in part, that's right, because return to work is challenging and complex. You know, different teams likely come back at different times, it could be a staggered process, it could be marked by uncertainty, as somebody is going to be returning to unfamiliar surroundings, with masks, social distancing, that can be wondering their coworkers and vaccinated and potentially we're going to be working with colleagues, they've not met yet, they've been recruited over the last 16 months. But many organisations are delegating sorting out hybrid today, best logistics and office management people. And once that's a really important component, there's also a lot going on underneath beneath the surface. That's what the role of senior leadership comes in. So that role is all about making a unifying experience for people. So this is opportunity to take stock a directory and take retrofit what was missed in the rush to move to remote working, you know, we can review what's worked for ourselves and our teams, we can identify what proved more challenging. You know, Garin and I are working with organisations have been really purposeful about hybrid about designing, planning and executing the project hybrid, as you would any other business critical decision, by simply not sleep walking into drifting into it. And equally not rushing into it. Just because that requirements work from home, if you can, is being lifted on the 19th of July, there's really huge benefits and taking some time to work through the right solution for our organisations. Before we go any further, I think it's worth defining what hybrid is. So much of the hybrid discussion in the headlines simplify into a simple choice about the number of days we're going to be working in the office and the number of days you are going to work from home and actually reducing it's such a binary choice really limits the scope and potential to take it to its full completion, hybrid could offer any number of combinations and possibilities. And Gartner, a global research and Business Insights company suggest we take this as an opportunity to move from designing work around location to design work around humans. So we are the individuals that stable pillar, around which we will design our working practices. When we talk about hybrid, we look at four core building blocks of hybrid. And the trick is when you score and cap, what's the best blend is going to support organisations. So first up location and this is one that most people focus on. This is about where people are working, that might be at home, it might be in the office, or it could be a much more mobile and nomadic way of working that could be centered on one country or it could involve complete global freedom. Next up is working pattern. So we'll be looking at a fixed or hybrid working pattern with a specified number of days or weeks to give people complete flexibility about the pattern they choose to adopt. And we can have the same role for every team or every individual or we can have different approaches for different organized sections, the third building blocks time horizon. So are we looking at our hybrid patterns over a week, are we working, or even a year, some remote companies that really only gather together once a year or twice a year, and gather and use that as their connection time. And then lastly, the fourth block is the one that's most often overlooked and that’s about synchronicity.  So that's the extent synchronous versus asynchronous working that we're going to adopt. Asynchronous working if you are not really familiar with the term is that where people work and communicate with each other, but not in real time. So people complete tasks, and they respond to them in their own working hours. And those working hours will be really different to those of colleagues. So rather than communicating and meeting in real time, asynchronous working might take the form of written communications, it might be commenting and working together on a shared document, sharing voice or video messages, and using platforms like slack to reply when and when it works for you. So we're now going to look at the process for making hybrid decisions.

(10:54) Garin Rouch

Yeah, so we're going to give you a very clear process for making your hybrid decision. And what we want to do is we want to help you ask the right question based on the right information that engages your people, that allows you to choose from the best options available that allows you to apply the optimal decision making process, encourages you to communicate the decision clearly and therefore increased buying and also allows you to approve things continually ongoing basis, because the situation is very fluid, and it's going to continue to change in the next few months as well. So the first thing we're going to look at is to prepare. So number one is how you actually frame you’re starting questions is critical. The most common questions that organisations are asking and we're hearing quite a lot is that is the question is the question, how many days should employees be in the office versus working from home? So we're hearing what they thinking is four and one, is it three and two, you know, we are sort of hearing of major organisations  going right well, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday in the office, Monday and Friday at home. And that's just causing chaos as being mandated. And what this does basically is this actually really creates a narrow focus for your question. And what it often means is that you get the least bad option for the combination of your employees, your managers and your organisation. So the way to actually Borden a question and answer better one questions you could ask is, how do we best organize ourselves to deliver on our strategic priorities? Or what arrangements will allow our people to do their best work? And what happens is these broader questions actually open up possibilities, they're inviting your people to be creative. And this is really an opportunity to reimagine how we work, rather than just overlaying hybrid, on top of the outdated processes and ways of working that, you know, kind of sort of based in the 20th century. So well, hybrid actually fills up new territory. And many organisations, it's actually worth saying that it's not entirely new global organisations have been wrestling with this for years, and actually working asynchronously in lots of different ways. You know, we work with UK and UK, US and UK based organisations for a number of years. And the way they work often is that the UK office workers will do their work during the morning. And then when it gets to one o'clock and American open starts to open up, they then start to calibrate. So rather than just relying on your intuition to make this decision, and in the last webinar, we talked about the role of intuition, and that intuition works best in stable environments. This is not a stable environment. So we can't necessarily trust the cues. And this is more of a data point or intuition. So what we want to say is data is our friend during this process, because this is a human decision. So we really need to collect the perspectives as our of our people, as well as the harder performance metrics as well. So we really encourage you to conduct your own research within your organisation and the ways in which you can collect that research is extensive. You can run surveys, you can run focus groups, and you can run on my discussions, you can run hackathons, you can run meet special meetings, you can run appreciative inquiry, and you can even run pilots as well. However, what we do say is don't expect to get a uniform view back. Our people are complicated. And motivation is complicated as well. To give you an example, General Motors, actually, which employs 150,000 people ran a survey. And I think that senior managers like right, here we go, and we’re going to get an absolute answer back. And what they found is that they got such disparate range of views that they can actually come up with one policy, so they just gave an instruction to their staff, which was to work appropriately. I think the other thing is remember when you're getting the data in is that not all data is equal. A lot of the research is based on what people say they will do, rather than what they will do. So what happens is, this got to say information is not as reliable, and the picture is going to continue to emerge. And we're going to start getting a lot more data, which is a lot more reliable, because it's actually based on behavior. So keep an open mind, keep new visits in the data, keep asking your employees, what they're looking for, and start to iterate around that. The next step is engage. And so you really need to be clear about how you're going to engage employees in the decision making process and this can be a very simple own goal for organisations. So the way in which we end ballpark, employees in the organisation really matters. So if we actually involve on teams and decisions, it's been shown to increase employee engagement and job satisfaction. If you involve employees in decisions and changes that affects them, it actually reduces uncertainty and makes people feel less vulnerable. So we're just going to just share this on the screen and talk them through it is, it's basically as a spectrum of decision making tool. And it just helps you to decide up front how you're actually going to involve people in it. And you can actually talk to people about what goes wrong. So we've got basically five areas of inspection. So the first one, on the left hand side is mandate and inform. And that's where senior leadership decided in isolation. And there was quite a lot of data taken on them. And the next one is where we actually consulted decide. So see leadership consult with the team gather their views, but they actually reserve the right to get the final decision. And the third one is manager lead. So individually, individual managers decide on the approach for their teams, and they're making local decisions. And the next one is co creation. So people are actually invited to discuss and co design the solution with their manager or with HR. And then the final one is there is the furthest thing, whatever, which is self-determined. So responsibilities actually devolved to the teams and they actually make their own decision. Now, there's massive pros and cons to all of those areas. So if you're looking for a speedy decision, then it's got to be mandated, informed all day long. But that actually is a false economy in some respects. So yes, you make a very fast decision. But the buying of staff is much more reduced. And self-determined is a lot slower. And it means you have a lot less control over the outcome. But it means that people take a lot more ownership. And one of the things about library is it's about collective responsibility. It's not just senior leadership, who are responsible for this work, everybody is responsible for it. So if you do decide to let people decide for themselves, it's really important to just don't abstain or dump your responsibility, and work alongside with them to actually help support them as they make a decision. No, set the parameters and say, what's in the scope of what's out of scope. What are the things that you just these are non-negotiables, you have to be able to coach people to make sure that they actually consider the impact of their plans on other teams, and also across functional, as well. And also really encourage them to be really clear about the work that's going to be done at home and the work that's going to be done in the office. So we're really interested to get some data from you guys. So where are the decision making spectrum? Is your approach to hybrid form? Or is it enlightened? Is it going to be in mandated form? Is it consultant decide? Is it manager lead? Is it going to be co creation was going to be self-determined by employee so please feel free to leave your comments, or just drop us a line via LinkedIn. We're really keen to hear what your thoughts are and what your experience is going to be now.

(17:44) Dani Bacon

Right now, take a look at how you actually make the hybrid decision in that run. To simplify complex problem, there's a real danger with hybrid that we don't innovate, that we don't consider what options we could come up with if we're less blinkered by the patterns and ways of working. So we remain recommend working your options around our four building blocks of hybrid, because how you're going to get all of those four to interplay with each other. It's also worth noting the generating more options actually increases our chance of a successful outcome. There was a classic 20 year study carried out by Paul Nut that found that 71% of organisation decisions are actually binary choices. So for hybrid that might look like we did two days in the office or we did three And in that study, they found that decisions with just one extra option load the failure rate 50% to 30%. Things that automation, AI augmented reality, are really pushing the boundaries of what's possible with remote and hybrid work. This could be an ideal opportunity to really explore what's possible before determining that a law can only be done on site or in an office. So how do we generate those options, there's all sorts of ways you can generate options. There's lots of brainstorming techniques out there, we don't have time to go into those today. That could be another whole podcast. But we're really happy for you to contact us afterwards utilize my days. But the key is to open up new horizons that leave him with an arbitrary allocation of roles that can be done at home in the office or in a hybrid environment. The importance is you look at the tasks and the activities and categorize accordingly. So the first step is to kind of map out the key tasks activities that your teams are undertaking together to do it with you, you know, which ones can then be done in real time and with people co-located. So we suggest plotting key tasks and activities on matrix. So if we imagine this two matrixes, one will be two axes, one will be about the requirement for people to be in physical proximity to complete a task. And the other is about the need for people to work in real time. Many plot the tasks into four boxes, so that any device that are essential on both scales, people will need to be co-located in real time, that might involve something like working on a physical product, or the person, you know, in parallel or something. And it's also it's essential on physical, physical proximity, but not actually on people needing to be there on the same time. You could do that with staggered working on so you're not you know, you're not restricting people to a nine to five working window, they could they could work with different types that might be required to work on a physical product than any of the other tasks that fall onto the left hand side of your, your matrix. They're ideal for hybrid working. So the key is not to be too many tasks together. What we're trying to do here is when a wisely, those tasks activities that really require physical or real time interaction, and then that frees you up to be flexible about how it was done. It's also best done at a local level by the teachers closest to the work. So once you map the tasks, you can then start to overlay employee preference for hybrid or co-location, and look at their capabilities to work that way. You know, not everyone is going to want to work remotely or hybrid, or equally, might not have the capabilities work in that way, then you could look at team preferences, capability of having a team got the skills, if you're required to collaborate remotely, have they got the skills, if they haven't, it doesn't mean you can't do it, it just means you just need to put some extra effort into helping mark skill and make that, make that shift And then lastly, looking at organisation needs. So as you work through your future approach to hybrid working, what questions likely to come up is the board with the office. So it's often seen as a binary choice for everybody in the office or everybody remote. But actually, there's lots of options in between, you know, you could use the offices of social collaboration, public or kind of social anchor for your people. You could use the offices base in the way that we have done historically, just to complete individual work. It could be in space for learning. You know, even for series of satellite offices are shared working spaces that people can drop into and out of as they need to. You can have the opposite symbolic HQ. So I've seen it referred to like, like a football stadium, you know, many fans that actually get to visit their home stadium, but they still facts and they base they have affiliation to that, that kind of stadium. And then you can have an assorted gatherings and so just bringing people together a couple of times a year, to get to know each other, and spend time with each other, weighing up the options, once you've got some options behind the growth of your organisation, the challenge is really to work out the solution, the best balance is all those competing needs that are at play. So it's likely that in most organisations, you're not going to have one single form of hybrid that works for every team or department. And actually, I think we say, if you try and apply a blanket approach, you're probably going to have a suboptimal solution. And that's going to lead to problems for you. So establish the parameters to test your chosen approaches against, we've got these two categories to consider, you know, you've got individual needs around working preferences, productivity, wellbeing capability, you know, organisational needs, which might be things like customer experience, and financial impact on attraction and retention, environmental impact. And then you've got team needs around workflow, coordination, collaboration, connection, communication. At this stage, it's really important to have robust discussions about the criteria ages and the relative importance of waiting, you're placing on those, because that will really help you work through what's important, if there's non negotiables, and then make those really clear and explain the rationale behind them. At this stage, you need to also work through the possible implications for the options you're considering. But the intended ones and the unintended ones, how they're going to impact on different teams, customers’ stakeholders, in the event, they leave you parameters and requirements aren't met, then try and be creative and say, no hybrids not going to work for us. Be creative, and look for ways to mitigate issues, come up with alternatives once you have chosen your preferred solutions, then we recommend to use a few key questions to really test a challenge, you'll find a solution or solutions that you're planning to move ahead with. And when you do this, bring in different stakeholders to help with the exercise. So you're, you're really seeing things from multiple perspectives. So the first group of questions we recommend around strategy, is the solution you're proposing aligned to your strategic priorities? Is it going to flex to the needs of different teams, as your and as your organisation grows and changes? Does it support key links across the business? So that's key relationships, key processes, as I look into that the second set of questions are about people. So do people have capabilities or skills to make these solutions work as both managers and employees, it's about skills, but it's also about personality and attributes. Everybody's going to thrive in hybrid environments, you need to work through that definitely have a sense of agency and ownership about their part in making your hybrid solution work. Everybody needs to be involved, if it's going to be success, is your solution to support the wellbeing of your team? Is it fair and equitable? And then the last set of questions around infrastructure? So if you've got the right technological infrastructure support the solution, if you allocate a sufficient budget to make it work, do you have the KPIs in place to track how things work out? Now we're going to look at how you once you've made the decision about communicating it. Over to Garin for that.

(24:19) Garin Rouch

Yeah, this is such an essential part of that. And again, it's something that organisations can very easily overlook, the way you communicate your hybrid plans, or essentially, it doesn't. There's wonderful things that tend to share with it, it doesn't matter about the quality decision if it isn't accepted by your people. And it's very likely because this is a complex problem we're trying to solve is that it's unlikely to give everyone what they want. And however thorough and widespread your involvement in the team has been in the process. So it's really important to work through teams, what these decisions actually mean for them, the job the team and organisation and make sure you spend time with them and do it properly. So let's just take you through some of the key things that need to be broken into communication. And this isn't just about like the town hall meeting that announced it. This is like on an ongoing biases as well. So the first thing is explained the rationale. So why have you made the decision that you've made? Explain the was the evidence that you based on as well, the next thing is to actually show procedural justice. This is critical in all decisions, whether it's hybrid or not. And it's basically it's to show your workings. This is the process that we followed. These people we consulted with, this is the advice that we followed. This is the advice that we didn't follow and these are the reasons why this is the pros of the advice that you didn't follow. These were the cons and unbalanced, we've gone with it for this particular reason. So it's what it is, is communicate to people that even if they don't agree with it, you've kind of following the process. And also, it's really important. The next part is to actually be really clear what the tradeoffs are, don't treat your employees like adults, I think sometimes what happens is we're very prone to overselling the decisions that we sell, that will be tradeoffs. In some respects, it will make the lives of people more difficult, there will be some people that can't do hybrid working. And you've really got to explain this to people. And so if you really clear what the tradeoffs upfront, because people will find out what they want in due course. And they'll only be discussing those in places that you can't discuss the watercooler in the chat box, when you're having a meeting all that kind of stuff as well. If you're really explicit about it, you can actually invite people to actually help you address those things. And that's probably the next thing is to actually sit down. And this takes time, but it's very worthwhile, especially sit down to help understand the impact on the personal team level that requires actually sit down. And look. This is what it's going to mean in terms of your priorities or your resources, or the hours that you work or you know, how it might mean to actually work asynchronously with another offices, maybe overseas or something. But it's also really want to understand that it's a two way process. Because at the moment, this is an experiment, as we talked about. So there'll be them feeding in more information that you didn't have at the time of making a decision. And this can allow you to update your decision, if there's a new project that would actually make this more difficult, definitely to talk about as well is helping them understand their responsibilities. We mentioned this earlier about the importance of this being a collective responsibility. So particularly, you've gone down to consult, and then we decide on the mandate, like, you've got to make sure that they've got a responsibility for making this work. So they've got a feedback, they've got to make sure that they played their part. And don't just leave it to senior management to make it work. The next thing is about offering tools and support. And this is again, an ongoing basis. As you start to really operationalize these things, then the challenges will really start to those things you could even thought about all the ticking time bombs that have been just bubbling away during remote working period will start to surface. So it's really importantly offering support to people removing blockages, providing resources, providing tools, templates, scripts, whatever it is to help them in that process. A really nice example is an organisation that actually trained up 250 Digital ninjas to help staff adapt to benefit from new tools and technologies. Obviously, we know the Pareto principle applies with technology. We only ever use 20% of its capability. So what these big group would do is have conversations at local level and support staff to actually help using this new technology because you've got fellow returners, we've got maybe not as technically minded as others. The other thing we do when we're talking about the playbook would provide voice is to actually provide a tool to actually help managers have better conversations. There will be some managers that just take like a duck to water to in terms of providing support. There is other managers that may have been promoted because they are technically very good but they are not natural people managers, they will need some scripting to help make these meetings work well so we provided some really nice information in there about a checklist that managers can do to make sure they have a good one to ones with their people. So the last step is actually to iterate. As I said, this is an experiment, you've got to be really upfront with people, we're going to be test experiment and review findings. So this is a really nice process to follow. So if you design it, based on what you know, at the time, you implement it, you build reviewing, you build review, and that review is made from the harder metrics or performance metrics or employee engagement, whatever it is, efficiencies. And then you also bring in evidence, which is more qualitative. So anecdotal feedback, what are your managers hearing? How staff as a hearing, have an employee's steering group get that information coming back in, and then based on that new and evolving information, and probably very likely to be new government policy that's coming in and new guidelines, we then iterate, we modify. And we can do this because this is the new way of working, this is the new BAU, this is not going to change. And it's going to keep evolving over the next few months and even years as well. 

(29:42) Dani Bacon

Right? Thank you. And we promised you two playbooks. That's the first one designing for hybrid working. And we'll pop the link into the YouTube description so you can access that.

(29:51) Garin Rouch 

Okay, so we've made the decision, we're now going to shift gears and start to look at how you actually manage a hybrid team or how you support managers, leader, and a hybrid team. And it's really important to recognize that we have to rethink the way in which we support the employee lifecycle. So the way in which we recruit has to change. So we really have to ensure that the candidates we take on our recruitment process actually really looks to find out what are the capabilities and attributes, they're going to help them thrive in your particular hybrid way of working. So that's going to require some really good thinking there. The next thing is about the process of onboarding. So it's likely or very likely to actually take longer for people to get up to speed. And particularly people that are actually blending remote work as well. So it's really important to be clear on your expectations them up front, and vice versa to you know it that psychological contract, take the time to introduce them to their stakeholders, because they won't know the terrain. So as a manager, you've got to help them find out who they need to meet, open doors facilitate overseeing guide, you build good relationships with the managers of the people they're working with. And that will really help things as well. I think the other thing to be is about the way in which we learn and develop, just because we're moving away from traditional face to face learning model, which we've had for years. And it doesn't mean that learning development has to stop, we just have to find new ways. The L&d functions have really updated it and organ is going to give you a link to CIPD conversation. We obviously already central London, which has got loads of information that we're learning, development evolution. But it's really important to make sure that you support them. So make sure you have mentoring relationships, make sure that you develop an encourage like communities of practice. So people that are doing similar roles will come together and discuss how they're working and share best practice in that way as well. The next thing, again, you're going to get more detail later. But this is about progression and performance, it's really important to make sure that all progression opportunities that are available are fair. And given people have the opportunity to progress, regardless of their working situation is not just people that are basically close to hand for the manager. So have regular check INS, and look at things like productivity and wellbeing those kind of conversations take on even more importance as well. And finally, off boarding is probably something that we do overlook as organisations anyway. But if you get it right can make a huge difference. That good off boarding process has got a lot of benefits, including employee referral, we hiring word of mouth improves your employer brand. But often organisations just kind of just people just leaving at the moment, there's importance of ritual as well. So what it does is be creative and find ways to help people leave well, and give opportunities for colleagues to say goodbye to teams, and allow teams to process that change. So it's really important to say that managers are the critical component in a hybrid world. Now, they really are the connecting tissue between individuals and their teams, between departments and divisions, and between office and remote locations as well. McKinsey really interesting research from organisations with the biggest productivity increases during the pandemic, were the ones that are trained their managers in remote leadership. So this is really important that we support our managers in this. So managing a hybrid team actually requires actually a more sophisticated and nuanced leadership style, as you juggle all the complexities of managing people in different locations. And what's really quite good about this is that the things that we're actually promoted to do are actually relatively simple, but incredibly impactful. So what we're promoting here are four, just four skills, other skills, which are hygiene factors, but these are the four critical skills. So number one is set your team up for success. So it's first principles, two is build trust. Three is great collaboration and cohesion, four is be fair and act fairly. So the first thing is to set your team up for success. So as Dani mentioned, in that rush to move to remote working last year, many teams ended up with multiple communication and technology platforms and channels. And that's really led to a lack of clarity around how they should be used or managed. And we've many people also returned from furlough, many people haven't been trained, we're only using a small percentage of their capability. And all of this can lead to a confusing situation making communication messy, and complicated, it slows down decision making. So what we advise you to do is to actually conduct a communications audit. So it sounds like a grand title. But what it is basically is, you just go through it, ask the questions that you find actually a copy of the communications audit in your checklist. And the questions are, you know, are we sharing the same messages by multiple communication channels? Is everyone clear on what needs to be communicated by which channels and platforms? What do we use slack for? What do we use WhatsApp for? What do we use the intranet for just having real clarity around that as well. And also things are people clear about what the expected response times are for different communication channels as well. So once you've actually completed that, then sit down with your team, consult with them, share your findings, and then start to streamline the tools that you use and actually provide clarity on which channels and that's a fundamental first step before you go into hybrid. The next one is to actually agree, team norms for hybrid working. So managing the hybrid team brings lots of benefits, but it also brings lots of complexity. So it's really what you sit down with the team, and spend time agreeing the norms for how they're going to work together in this new hybrid arrangement. You've got some great experience of what's actually been successful with last 15 months, we've also found what's been challenging as well. So use all these lessons learned and codify how you're going to work together forward, you move forward, and make an agreement that's really explicit as well. And in the process, give people the opportunity to share and explore their concerns. And as you start to surface people's perspectives on what they would like, you know, use a combination of one to one meetings and team meetings, group discussions, so that everyone can know that people can agree with and say some of the critical questions that you might want to ask is how we signal when we available And when we're not? What do we need to consider to help people maintain and improve their wellbeing when we work individually or asynchronously? What elements require virtual collaboration? What requires face to face collaboration? And what do we do when conflict emerges? We've got sensitive or complex issues that we're trying to work through. The other way is hybrid meetings. Now this is a little bit meetings one on one, but a lot of the experts out there are just saying, we just need to have less meetings, we need to have less meetings, we actually got to be contrarian to that we actually believe it's not about the number is the quality of the meetings, if you haven't better means you'll just need less meetings anyway. So just a very good meeting disciplines can make all the difference. So the first one we'd say is about the preparation for the meeting. Ask yourself the questions. As you're thinking about your meeting structure. Is the meeting essential to the running of the team? Does the meeting have a clear goal? Is the meeting the only way to achieve that goal? Have the right people been invited the people they're going to impact or the people that have got knowledge to contribute? And is that meeting at the optimal time for the people that have got different working parents, before people actually attend? Have you been really clear what your expectations are? No, we're still seeing agendas that go out that just say, point for finance, point for risk, we don't actually ask, prepare people for what they're actually going to contribute in that session. And then finally, again, have agendas or advance so people can actually walk into the room and know what's required. The next play is actually just in the meetings itself. So the running of the meeting. So because Daniel pick this up in a second, which is about the importance of social interaction, meetings are just such an important point for that. So always check in at the beginning to see how people are just getting to share. And that's really important. Agree team rules? How are you going to use cameras, I'm still talking to managers. They're just like, I'm the only person in my team meeting that has a camera and it's a bit awkward. Have a conversation about it, you can get clarity, obviously, and people have gotten different working circumstances, but have the conversation to get clarity. And also make sure that you have lots of appropriate breaks because online meetings and remote meetings quite intense. He creative, again, loads of really good technology Miromentimeter engage people and make it interactive. And for if when you've got that kind of hybrid, when you've got people in the office that people were dialing in, make sure someone in the room is advocating for those joining remotely to make sure that they are involved. Sometimes the chair of the meeting can forget that there's people dialing in remotely, and the conversation just becomes in the room. So make sure that they're somebody that is inviting in the voice at the remote workers. And also just clarify how people could ask questions. People with the previous version will just often just ask a question, we will demonstrate intervention will need to think often need to think about it for giving their opinion. So how do they make sure that they're heard and they're invited into the conversation, and also ban in room side conversations? So you know, there's going to ones wherever there's a running joke going and everyone was like, what is this about and they feel left out. And then finally, just that the other bit, which is, after the meeting, again, just good discipline is when you wrap up, and surely actions are recorded and shared, you know, everyone's got a very different experience of that meeting, by having that they will get agree and sign off on them. And then also, this is an emerging process, at the end of every sort of significant meeting, take five or seven minutes at the end, and get people to review how the meeting. When, what went well, and what can we improve the next time and that will make all the difference in the performance of your meetings, we'd really like to understand your experience of remote meeting. So again, you going to write you in the in the chat in the comments on LinkedIn, or YouTube, wherever, wherever you're consuming this. Is it that you're experiencing remote meetings has been completely dysfunctional in the last 15 months? Has it been that it's been okay, but there's been room for improvement? Or is it that it's actually your, your meetings have been brilliant? How could you imagine that be better? So again, please leave your thoughts in the comments.

(39:36) Dani Bacon

Thank you. So we're going to look at that second important leadership skill. Now that's around building trust. So we know from our research that building trust is a critical factor for high performing teams. And it's even more important or critical for remote and hybrid teams. So that trust based relationship with your teammates, people are more likely to open up about concerns about their work, their productivity or their wellbeing. That means you're better positioned to provide support early on, you know, trust, and facilitate cooperation and effective coordination. So they're really critical for hybrid working. And trust is especially important when people feel vulnerable, there's uncertainty, and the AI is going to help you navigate change and challenges more effectively. A hybrid working is likely to bring some of those challenges. Even if he said you've got trust based relationship with your team, then they're much more likely to give you and each other the benefit of the doubt when things don't quite go to plan as you're getting used to a new way of working. So what those most important factors were building. The first step is about seeing and treating people as individuals have regular one to one with each your team members, usually check on how works going but take time to talk about wider issues. So your team know that you care and understand what they're going through and where they are. But don't be intrusive, there's a fine line. And you'll need to work out that balance with each individual. So get to know you people out there take it one step at a time. In the hybrid team playbook that we’ll share the link to you later. We've got a one to one conversation guide to help you know, give you questions to kick start your one to one conversations out we have great conversations so that they can really important thing for building trust is communication. So if you want to build trust, you need to communicate in a timely, transparent and respectful way, especially when lots of changes happening and research shows if you have a predictable cadence of communication, that can really help build productive and trusting relationships is important. You make time and you're visible and accessible to your team. And they provide practical support when people need it and show compassion.

(41:19) Garin Rouch

Yeah, and I think, you know, the Compassionate thing is really important. I think we've been trying to sort of train managers to be empathic and be more emotionally aware. But I think this is a time for compassion, and demonstrating empathy and compassion is empathy. This is I understand what you've been going through. Compassion is yes, that and here's how I'm going to help or ease your conditions and the compassionate manager is the person that can do that. And I think particularly during that transition phase, is going to be quite controversial comment because manager, organisations have gotten used to sort of setting real stretch targets in this, there's something about you know, is there an opportunity to just reduce people's goals during this transition time, we all know that the famous change curve with the different productivity, if we allow that, then that transition will happen much more naturally, and will reduce the amount of stress that people are going through. Now, people are going to be going into work, they're going to be traveling on public transport, it doesn't matter how well you set up your office, people are going to be having a pretty uncomfortable experience on the way in for a variety of reasons. Compassion can really help that. And the number one thing is can we ease their conditions more than.

(42:21) Dani Bacon

So, so important. So it's also important to really recognize employee contribution. So make sure people feel appreciated and visible, wherever they're working. So don't you know, don't forget people at home or, you know, working remotely. And when it comes to that, a share achievements is help people understand what each other you're working on, really creates that sense of pride in the whole team. If people know what the team's achieving, even if they're not co located. That block of effective hybrid leadership is around creating collaboration occasions. So social connections of cohesion are really crucial for high performing hybrid teams. We know for the research that socially cohesive teams are much more likely to cooperate and interact with each other and employees, he was satisfied with the social connections in their teams were twice as likely to maintain productivity on collaborative tasks, or working remotely. So social cohesion essentially emerges in teams where members like to work together. And even small amounts of high quality social interaction can really lower stress and improve wellbeing. Working virtually on a hybrid team doesn't necessarily mean the social cohesion has to suffer. And equally, it doesn't mean all still scheduled funds, but we know that you know at the start the pandemic, lots of teams tried to ship virtual coffee mornings to create that cohesion. You know, that worked for some but not for others. And the trick is to really know what makes your team tick. Try variety of things and cater to different interests and personality types. As the manager or hybrid team, you've got a really key role in creating collaboration and social cohesion. They've got role as a pro. Essentially, your role is to bridge communication gaps that appear, you know, be proactive and ensure that the right relationships are happening between individuals and teams, that you're connecting people with the relevant skills, experience and perspectives together, making sure they're working together, and ensuring that your team's got voice and visibility with senior leaders and decision makers. So that brings us on to the interesting point about more collaboration and innovation releasing, you know, despite high profile leaders like Tim Cook of Apple saying, talking about the importance of serendipitous meetings, the research does not actually necessarily support this. So you know, Harvard Business School has done some research that says why there's credibility in the argument that people are more likely to have conversations, if they bump into someone in office, there's always no data whatsoever to suggest that those conversations are likely to be helpful to innovation or creativity. So there's lots you can do to encourage innovation and collaboration. You know, it's innovation by design, rather than chance do you really want to risk and leave innovation to the chances somebody's bumping into somebody in the corridor. So, you know, one simple but powerful technique you can use to support cohesion and collaboration and innovation, is really to sit down with your team and map out who needs to interact with him to achieve your strategic priorities, and what tasks over the coming weeks and months. And you could use sophisticated organisational network analysis tools, there's lots out there. But a much simpler version that you can do very easily is just ask individuals to mind that their key relationships, get them to kind of score the important quality of those relationships out of 10. And then look at where the gaps are, where are the lowest scores, and you know, what can you do as a manager to work with your team members, to strengthen those important relationships. If you want to improve collaboration, and innovation, then build your virtual collaboration toolkit? We talked before about making sure people know what tools are out there to help them collaborate virtually, they know how to use them. Experiment, see what works best for different tasks, like your approaches to see if when individuals you know different people work and collaborate differently. Share successes, or recognize when innovations happening, be transparently share good practice. If you've got some people having a really effective work, virtual collaboration, then let other people know how they're doing and what's making that work. Create dedicated innovation time. So you have hackathons or innovation days, just make time and space for people to innovate, rather than that, hoping it happens by chance. Now we're on to our fourth block of hybrid leadership. But that's, that's being fair and acting fairly. So as careful as we've been with our hybrid planning, there's always the risk of unintended consequences. And that's going to be ever present. Consistency of that is really underpin organisational trust, and inclusivity needs to sit at the center of our hybrid plans. There's lots of things to watch out for a week, we talked about this in more detail in the playbook. But there's three things I've just want to focus on now. And the first one is presentism. So watch out for signs that people are starting to feel they need to come into the office to be on a level playing field. If you've got leaders saying one thing that you know, we're going hybrid was fine, it's just as legitimate as being in the office. But they're acting differently, you can actually create a culture of presentism and implicitly encourage people back into the office. And if you've said the hybrid side of people have worked remotely, then that's just going to lead up to a buildup of resentment. You also need leaders that are role modeling hybrid. So What you don't want is a situation where the leaders are always in the office, they never dial into meetings, they're never working in a hybrid way, you need to lead us to really lead the way show what hybrid, a hybrid working looks like. I like to this is kind of our dynamics, as you kind of adapt to new ways of working that's going to shift organisation dynamics, team dynamics, power dynamics. So be on the lookout for imbalances, and work out how you can readdress them. Does everybody have equal access to knowledge, information and decision making, you know, are individuals and teams being recognized consistently for the work they're doing, and you're not inadvertently introducing success to the wrong people or wrong teams just by virtue of where they're happening to be the last thing, track the long term implications of hybrid on things like promotions and regression. So irrespective of whether your organisation is still running with a formal performance appraisal process, as a manager, you're going to be making judgments about the performance of your team and as managers, we just need to make sure we therefore rate a bias start rating people working in the office will positively that those who are working remotely simply because we see the more you know in one study in a contact center found the remote workers were actually more productive, but also less likely to be promoted with their onsite peers. And there was no ONS data that showed that people who work from home were on average 38% less likely to have received a bonus compared to those who never worked from home, you know, that sort of thing carries on unchecked, then people are going to feel the need to be in the office in order to be treated fairly, even if their performance would be enhanced by hybrid working. So that can quickly disrupt your hybrid plans. 

(48:06) Garin Rouch

Brilliant. Thank you so much, Dani. So let's summarize what we've covered today. What we need is really to boil everything down into just two things that you need to remember. So it's basically remember five steps and four skills. So the first one is how to make a hybrid decision. So there's five steps. So number one, prepare, two engage, three decide, four communicate, five iterate. And the four skills you need to lead a hybrid team effectively are set up your team for success, build trust, create collaboration and cohesion, and be fair Act fairly, as well. So on top of all the tools and insights we've shared with you on the podcast today, what are some of the specific activities you can do that will make the biggest difference. So these are some of the ways in which we're supporting organisations transition into hybrid at the moment. And we'll just take you through. And these are things that you could potentially do yourself. So number one is to actually coach the people making the decision, make sure that they're actually bringing different options to consider that the gather evidence, you can provide the tools that we've provided the playbook today. And again, we'll give you the link to both of those players in a second. And you can actually help in the support and setting up the change teams that we actually overseeing it's over, it's your feeling that the team is exclusively logistical people, and it's missing some senior leadership strategic perspective, then obviously, then you can influence that. And also about facilitating the employees, sessions to collect their views, there's a real skill, making sure that people feel heard, they consulted to, they understand what their how their information is going to be used as well. Second, is preparing your people and the processes for the transition. So that's actually providing some leadership coaching or team training to accelerate that transition, they're going to need some new skills for this. The other one is actually just giving them Lunch and Learn impactful sessions where they need to just take them through, you've got to equip them with the skills to help them work through it. The other one is actually training your internal hybrid champions to drive transition. And the other one is actually support with setting KPIs to assess the impact of hybrid. And it's very likely that many senior teams will be leaning towards hard metrics, like performance. And as well, there's also the role of qualitative data as well. And then the third bit is actually embedding hybrid working. So actually supporting teams and maybe using some of the input reviews about how you can maximize the effectiveness of hybrid team meetings. Also, you can play a role in breaking down barriers between teams and divisions, people are much soloed going into this, they've even more soloed coming out of it, there's a role to be played. And also, this is really important is equipping your managers to identify and act on the early warning signs. We all know where things are just not starting to work, or maybe people's engagement is going down. We feel people are just not connecting or involved. And then the other thing is also making sure we sit down with everyone and make sure they understand what their responsibility is in making hybrid work, and helping them hold themselves accountable for that as well. 

(51:02) Dani Bacon

Right. Thanks, Garin. So he promised you two playbooks. This, this is the second one. So how to manage a hybrid team. And again, we'll drop the link for that into the comments underneath the YouTube video or LinkedIn. Just as a reminder, if you're watching on YouTube, there's links to both of the playbooks.

(51:18) Garin Rouch

 Great, the other thing, this is a key decision. Like it's probably one of the biggest decisions you're the organisations going to make this year. So it's important, we're really aware of what our decision making strengths and weaknesses are. So what we've actually designed, and again, the link to this is in the comments. And it takes around about three and a half minutes to complete. And it's completely free. But it's just a benchmark survey. So you can actually benchmark your decision making skills and what you get back if you get a report your results, and some strategies and tactics to improve your decision making skills.

(51:47) Dani Bacon

Thank you. Garin. So we'd love to keep on sharing our best thinking with you. So hybrid is a really big subject, it's not a one off thing is going to be ongoing discussions about it's not going away for a while to come. So, you know, we're more than happy if he's connected with either of us on LinkedIn or collected this via email. And we'll, we're happy to have conversations that if you want to sign up for our ongoing, regular typical templates, then you can, again, go to our website, distinction.live, keep in touch.

(52:15) Garin Rouch

Absolutely. We're very active on LinkedIn. So we really want to encourage discussion. This is really one of those times when its peer support. We're all going to be having our own experiences of implementing hybrid. So the more we can build up a body of knowledge in terms of everyone's like, this is what I'm finding. So please feel free to contribute to the discussion, contribute your experiences, whatever they are. Great. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to our podcast today. We're actually busy preparing for our next podcast, which is all about wellbeing and we're really looking forward to sharing all the findings with you. Thanks a lot.