The team is the key to establishing hybrid work

By Hans Gärtner,
Partner at Radical Inclusion

Will in future everyone work at home at their own convenience, or will employees return full-time to the office? Extreme solutions are making headlines these weeks when it comes to shaping the New Normal after the end of contact restrictions: SAP stands for absolute freedom of choice in the New Normal, Apple for the end of the home office era, and Porsche lies in between with a choice of up to 12 days per month of home office.

Concepts will have to be renegotiated: the New Normal will be hybrid

Each organization will have to find its own response on this continuum. Surveys, which are currently being published do not really provide useful recommendations for action. The discussion is based on two perspectives. The first is the economic one: Here, surveys either prove an increase in productivity through work from home or the opposite. I do not consider these survey results to be relevant for action as they very much aggregate employee groups. The second perspective in discussion relates to (newly emerging) employee preferences, independently of efficiency or effectiveness criteria. Thus, employees, especially those who the company wants to retain or to recruit, might vote with their feet if their wishes for flexible work locations and hours are not met. Again, results from surveys are inconsistent, and expectations vary depending of the employees’ age and their personal situation. Ultimately, it is not possible to directly conclude any measures from these studies either. What is clear, however, is that the pressure to change necessitates qualitative consequences, and answers to the new situations and challenges will have to be found.

In this, one has to consider different levels of action:

The organizational level

• The proportion of distributed work and the flexibility of working hours and work locations associated with it will increase, so that organizations will have to have a very fundamental discussion about goals and the use of resources. This debate will not only affect office workers, who are in the focus of the work from home debate, but also those who for example have to come to the factory because they work in production.

• Existing regulations on working hours, workplaces, equipment, data protection and data security, etc. will have to be adapted to the new situation. Depending on the corporate culture, the extent of the need for regulation and the influence of the co-determination bodies, the subject areas and level of detail of the regulations will vary. The medium-term influence of cross-company regulations (collective agreements, federal laws) will also have to be taken into account here.

  The individual level

• The work from home of the post-Covid era looks different than the one during the Covid peak. Private life will change again once home schooling and dual workplaces at home for two professionals have come to an end. Couples see opportunities to organize family and work time differently and discover new career perspectives for themselves.
• Own beliefs about work and work efficiency are being readjusted, and this is also true for decision-makers and senior managers.
• The employer’s attitude toward individual needs plays a role in one’s own decision to stay or leave.

The range of possible solutions and decisions is vast. In practice, it will lead to a greater diversity of work and collaboration options. If a larger number of employees no longer come together in a fixed place at a fixed time from Monday to Friday to do their work, this will have consequences at the operational level and in the psychology of labor relations. (This clearly exceeds the range of topics of the old fairness disputes between salespeople and office staff from the past).

Concepts for hybrid work will have to be developed on team level

But what is to be done? New guidelines are needed. Without such guidance, it is difficult to shape corporate culture. Such patterns of meaningful behavior emerge over time, even in startups and in collaboration with “digital nomads.”

In my article on the New Normal, I explained that such new patterns must be negotiated primarily at the team level (or in a somewhat old-fashioned wording: department level). That is where the different individual needs and the overall company perspective meet.

Waiting for decisions from the very top makes neither practical nor systemic sense in shaping the New Normal. In the course of greater individualization and flexibilization, individuals have a higher degree of personal responsibility for shaping their work and cooperation. As a result, the task of shaping work settings is shifting more downward in the hierarchy. Self-organization is the keyword. The fact that self-organization also needs leadership is not a new insight. In negotiating a hybrid new normal, leadership must be understood as a moderating task that needs to be accomplished.

Topics for the team agenda that need to be analyzed on a regular basis

It must be clear that there is more at stake here than what is usually the primary focus: The technical equipment (company level) and the state of mind of the people who are working from home (individual level). I see five topics that hybrid teams have to deal with and that are interwined.
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1. Reorganizing task processing to include asynchronous ways of working: Technical platforms, access rights, workflows, organization and handling of written information must be clarified. The great potential for work productivity through asynchronous working methods for distributed teams is offset by an intensive familiarization process that must be sustained.
2. Balancing the work preferences of individual employees: Working hours and work location cannot always cater for all individual preferences. In addition to time and space, there are also preferences as to how one likes to work effectively: Writing, speaking, more or less meetings, more spontaneous, more planned.
3. Agreeing on regulations regarding representation, core times for being reachable, face-to-face and online meetings: In the new and more extensive distribution of team members, clarity and commitment play a major role. It makes sense to establish a team charter at the start that regulates these matters, which must, however, be regularly adapted.
4. Creating a framework for “Psychological Safety”: This term points to a need and prerequisite for successful collaboration at the overall team level. The feeling of being able to contribute openly without fear of reprisal, even when taking a risk, is shared equally by all. Achieving this is particularly challenging when you do not see each other as often as in the “co-located” world.
   Teams should be constantly vigilant about this. Onboarding, farewells and other culture-creating events need to be redesigned.

   5. Ensuring inclusion and fairness: Equal access to important information for all. The perception of inequality arises quickly in hybrid situations and can then lead to a sense of injustice. Information flows must now be more tangibly organized and readjusted.

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   These topics should be on the agenda for reflection in team meetings. If the negotiation process is successful, it will be possible to reconcile the potential of the new hybrid forms of work, which meet the needs of many, with the effectiveness requirements of the company as a whole.

    It remains to be seen whether the developments, which have already begun earlier in some organizations, have gained such force as a result of the pandemic that they will also trigger larger change processes. The sheer number of initiatives will certainly introduce completely new approaches to the discussion, which we are looking forward to. In the meantime, many people have come to realize that there will be no going back to the old normal. Virtual working has also taught us a lot about new behavior in the co-located work situation.