Organisations must ‘personalise the hybrid working experience’ and avoid getting caught up in policies the promote a uniform approach to splitting the week between home and the office.
According to Gary Cookson, director of consultancy EPIC HR, employers need to challenge their beliefs about what hybrid working is – and what it is not – if they are to get the most out of their people.
This means ensuring that working arrangements and the office environment reflect individual working styles and how people they like to work when they are at home, he told delegates at last week’s Public Services People Managers Association (PPMA) annual conference.
“There is rarely a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to hybrid working; every employee will experience it in different ways and therefore the personalised experience to hybrid working is inevitable,” said Cookson.
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He said HR teams and managers needed to look beyond policies that focused on the needs of the many, and ensure individuals are treated as such.
“We’ve got to give people choices to enable them to achieve whatever balance means for them at whatever point [in their lives] they are at… Telling people to come in for two days is not really going to achieve that for anybody,” he said.
By encouraging individuals to build a picture of what proportion of their activities need to be undertaken in a particular place or at a set time, employers can make more informed choices about what their hybrid working approach should look like, said Cookson.
Organisations should also take inspiration from how people like to work in their own homes to make better use of their office space, noting that many people have multiple home working spaces that are suited to different tasks.
He said offices now needed different workspaces. They should include “touchdown” spaces where people can bring their laptops to complete a short task before moving on to another area; hot desks that people can book in advance to work alongside other people; quiet spaces where staff can work uninterrupted; flexible spaces with desks on wheels, where teams and build a temporary workspace for a few hours; and traditional rows of desks for people who prefer or need to work in the office more regularly.
“The balance of your workplace needs to change, and what you should see if you get hybrid working right is people moving around from space to space,” Cookson said.
“This is way more complex than just [telling people to work] two days here, three days there, and more complex than the HR team writing a policy – it needs input from the facilitites team, IT team, and senior leadership team.”
The balance of your workplace needs to change, and what you should see if you get hybrid working right is people moving around from space to space” – Gary Cookson, EPIC HR
The attitudes and values of leaders also needed to shift to enable successful hybrid working, said occupational psychologist and chief executive of leadership development firm Real World Group, Juliette Alban-Metcalfe.
She outlined five tips for leading hybrid teams:
- Managing by output, not by control – by being relaxed about the hours worked and allowing flexibility in individual’s agendas
- Acting fairly and embedding fairness – by being aware of and addressing any bias towards team members they see more often
- Actively empowering teams – by developing collective responsibility for getting tasks done in a way that suits everybody
- Ensuring work is efficient – by ensuring people turn up to meetings prepared, and are only invited to the meetings they need to be in
- Treating people as human beings – by building personal relationships
She said: “Managing by outputs rather than control is something that relies on people being able to trust their team and also relies on psychological safety.
“Research has found that successful hybrid managers managed by output rather than visibility at work. They tried to be relaxed with their teams around hours at work, allowed them to put the washing on during the day [for example]; allowed them to be flexible with their agendas, such as early or later starts; and they tried to allow their teams to make their own choices about how much they’ll be in the office.”
She said it was important for leaders to be firm about expectations, including about when office attendance is required. “It’s frustrating to arrive in the office for a meeting to find that nobody else has bothered to turn up,” she said.
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