Hybrid team working together in the office
Teamwork makes the hybrid policy work.
When it comes to hybrid work, 46% of employees reported being engaged when their team determines their own policy of when to come into the office, according to a November Gallup survey. By contrast, 41% of respondents are content to make the decision individually, and just 35% reported being engaged if leadership determines the top-down policy for everyone.
It makes sense when you think about it. Team members know best what they need in order to collaborate and socialize together effectively. After all, the only useful function of the office is to facilitate collaboration, socialization and mentoring: people are much more productive on their individual tasks at home. It’s often the case that rank-and-file teams want to determine what works best for their needs.
But in reality, according to the survey, only 13% of employees say their team actually determines their approach to hybrid work. That’s unfortunate and undermines engagement among hybrid workers. And it’s easy to fix.
From my experience consulting for 21 companies in determining their hybrid and remote work arrangements, the best practice is for leadership to provide broad but flexible guidelines for the whole company. Then, let teams of rank-and-file employees determine what works best for them.
Empower each team leader to determine, in consultation with their members, how they should function. The choice should be driven by the goals and collaborative capacities of each team rather than the personal preferences of the team leader. Executives should encourage team leaders to permit, wherever possible, team members who desire to work remotely to do so.
To set the stage, first, conduct an anonymous survey of your staff on their preferences for remote work. All companies are different, and you want to know about your staff in particular. More importantly, employees want to feel that they have input on major company decisions. That applies especially to policies concerning working conditions. You’ll get a lot more buy-in, even from staff who may be unhappy with your final policies, if they feel consulted and heard.
As part of the survey, have respondents indicate who their team leader is: that keeps the survey answers anonymous, but can be provided to team leaders to help them understand the desires of their teams.
The reason it’s important to ask this in the surveys is because many lower-level supervisors feel a personal discomfort with work from home. They feel a loss of control if they can’t see their staff and are eager to get back to their previous mode of supervising.
That’s why there’s a low level of engagement when team leads are given sole discretion to make the decisions. You need to have team leaders understand what the actual preferences of their team members are, without any team member feeling inhibited by giving the person in charge undesirable information.
While you may choose to ask a variety of questions, be sure to find out about their desire for frequency of work in the office. Here’s a good way to phrase it: Which of these would be your preferred working style going forward? (Fully remote, coming in once a quarter for a team-building retreat; 1 day a week in the office, the rest at home; 2 days a week in the office; 3 days a week in the office; 4 days a week in the office; full-time in the office).
In all the companies where I consulted, there were never more than a quarter of workers who wanted to go back to the office full-time. In fact, one company with over 3,000 employees had 61% of its staff express a desire for fully remote work (and it wasn’t even a tech company).
In the highly probable case that your results aren’t too different from the typical company, you’ll want to institute a hybrid-first model, with some flexibility for employees who want to work remotely full time and whose roles permit them to do so.
Next, make sure that team leaders justify the time their team needs to be in the office. That justification should stem from the kind of activities they do. Team members should be free to do their independent tasks wherever they want. By contrast, many—not all—collaborative tasks are best done in-person.
Team leaders should evaluate the proportion of individual versus collaborative tasks done by their teams. Then, they should use that proportion as a basis for a discussion with the team to determine the frequency when team members come to the office. And it should be a consensus-based decision-making process, informed by the surveys, with a focus on collaboration, socialization and mentoring. All team members should come to the office on the same days of the week to facilitate collaboration.
There should be a very good reason if the team leader desires more than two days in the office per week.
For example, in one company for which I consulted, the sales teams who placed outbound sales calls decided to do full-time office work. The team leaders argued persuasively that sales staff benefited greatly from being surrounded by other sales staff during outbound calls. Such calls are draining and sap motivation; being surrounded by others on the sales floor making similar calls boosts motivation and energy. Moreover, hearing others make calls offers an opportunity to learn from their successful techniques, which is difficult to arrange in telework settings.
However, such exceptions are rare. Generally speaking, no more than 5% of your staff should be forced to be in the office full time. Surveys show that about 80% of workers who are capable of working remotely expect to do so.
For maximizing employee engagement while also facilitating team collaboration, the best practice involves having teams make the decisions. Using this technique will enable you to seize competitive advantage in the return to office.
