Kai Kjaer, CEO of SWOOP Analytics | I help organizations improve internal communication and collaboration.
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My company, SWOOP Analytics, was ‘born’ as a remote company – we never had offices. Cost avoidance and the ability to attract talent from anywhere were more important than bricks and mortar. When Covid-19 forced many people to work remotely, I became really interested in following the debate about remote and hybrid work, which has only intensified during the current return-to-work discussion. A recent businesskinda.com article, “Why are so many leaders screwing up the return to office?” caught my attention and coincided with press coverage from the likes of Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, and others, who said they wanted their staff back in the office.
In the article, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky wonders: “Why are these leaders resisting the seemingly obvious solution: a hybrid model for most, with full-time permanent remote working for those who want it and demonstrate high effectiveness and productivity?” He argues that the reason is cognitive biases that lead to poor decision making.
Fortunately, from what I can tell, many CEOs are very much in favor of hybrid and remote working. Take, for example, the Australian health insurer Medibank. CEO David Kaczkar protested that mandating a return to the office is good for some, but not for us. He discusses reasons such as well-being, engagement and talent retention, as well as opening up career paths. Kaczkar writes, “Our focus is on the results, not the locations.” Exactly the same message comes from Vicki Brady, CEO of Australia’s largest telco Telstra, who recently wrote on LinkedIn, “For us, work is something you do, not a place you go […] We know that our people are at their best when given the choice, so we don’t waste time discussing who should be in the office and when. We are all-in on hybrid.”
While I believe Kazcar and Brady have done a good job, hybrid work is still a work in progress. People often point to the importance of creativity, innovation and relationship building as primary reasons for forcing people back to the office, but unfortunately I believe that Microsoft’s findings Work Trend Index getting closer to the truth: managers simply don’t believe their workforce is productively working remotely. According to the report, “85% of leaders say the shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to trust employees to be productive.” When managers can’t see their staff, they worry they’re not working, and we need a mindset shift to address this.
The shift we need is from focusing on hours worked to results achieved. For example, instead of thinking “I need some help with marketing”, we can reword that to “I need to increase my website visits by 25%”. Once we’ve determined the outcome we want, we can start thinking about how we’re going to get it done, the relevant resources we’ll need, and the timelines or milestones we’ll need to meet. Everything falls into place. We don’t need to have that marketing person in the office so we can check how busy they are because we know success or failure is determined by looking at website stats. Where the person is located is irrelevant.
In addition to shifting our focus from hours worked to results achieved, we need to address another core challenge to make hybrid work work: getting better at online collaboration. At the start of the pandemic, organizations were rolling out digital collaboration tools at a breakneck pace, but there was no real transformation in collaboration practices. We didn’t have time to think about how different it would be to collaborate virtually, let alone do something about it. Face-to-face meetings became virtual meetings, some emails became instant messages, and files previously stored on network drives were moved to online file repositories. We just replaced something like that.
Harvard Business School Professor Tsedal Neely says in the HBR IdeaCast Building successful hybrid teams (Back to Work, Better): “[We need to make] sure that we tailor our digital tools to the work ahead. We index too much on certain technologies, [on] video conferencing, for example, and experiencing things like technical exhaustion.”
If we want to follow Neely’s advice, we need to think about how the work should be done, who should be involved and how best to collaborate virtually to do it. Managers are ideally suited to drive this process, but in my experience they don’t always have the skills and experience to do this. And how could they? The pandemic came as a shock to everyone.
So where do we start? I advise you to start with your own team. Discuss with your team how you will work together. For example, you have to determine when you work synchronously and when you work asynchronously, where you store files and where you discuss things. This flows down to the toolset you use, so talk to your colleagues in IT and find out what your options are. Email is still a good option for external communication, but don’t make it the primary internal communication platform. Chat has replaced some or all emails for many people, but overdoing it can lead to constant interruptions. Online meetings with video work well, but if we overdo it, we won’t work asynchronously. It’s all about balance.
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