Ratcheting down the tension in the hybrid world

Taking deliberate action

As such, Nick Gallimore, director of innovation at business software and services provider Advanced, believes that UK plc is currently at an “inflection point”. “The decisions that organisations are making here now will have far-reaching, long-term implications and are critical,” he says.

But a key problem is that because of the huge amount of rapid change experienced over the past two years, “very few organisations have deliberately designed how they’ll operate in order to maximise hybrid working and deal with the risks of adopting it”, says Gallimore.

While underlying challenges, such as an ageing workforce and a need for new, evolving skillsets, mean that planning for change was always going to be necessary, “headwinds” such as the pandemic and Brexit have “accelerated the issue and brought it to the surface quicker,” he adds. A good example of a company doing just that is Virgin Money with its A life more Virgin initiative, he points out.

Waller also agrees that taking intentional action to address these issues is important. A key tension that exists in many hybrid and flexible working environments, for example, is in ensuring employees have a sustainable work-life balance while also performing at their best, he says.

The issue here is that although performance and productivity have traditionally been used as the most important measures of employee and managerial success, people tend to work both harder and for longer in remote and hybrid working set-ups.

Louis Asber, chief technology officer at freelance marketplace Catalant Technologies – formerly known as HourlyNerd – says the lack of clear delineation between personal and work life that such working models engender often make it tricky for people to set boundaries and get the balance right. In a digital environment, managers also find it more difficult to pick up social cues indicating whether something is wrong.

Boosting employee wellbeing

But this situation, particularly during full lockdowns, unfortunately resulted in widespread mental health challenges, such as stress and burnout, which ultimately led to staff absence and retention challenges. As a result, Waller advises that “employee health” metrics should be added to “employee performance” measures in order to create a more sustainable way of operating. Employers that have already done so have seen staff productivity levels increase by 17%, and employees are 1.7 times more likely to stay with them, says Waller.

Other measures to boost wellbeing that Asber and his fellow executive leadership team members have introduced include closing the office once a quarter to ensure staff have more downtime and encouraging employees to go home early after big in-office meetings. “We try to force it a bit to ensure people unplug,” he says. “HR has also been excellent in coming up with quick and easy tactics to check in, such as asking everyone in the team if they’d had lunch, which are really important if you’re online and don’t have soft cues but want to know how the team’s doing.”

But this idea of “rest and recovery” is not just important for employee wellbeing, says Gallimore. As with top athletes, it is also imperative to ensure peak performance. “Performance science is clear that people need good-quality goals, an effective coach and access to feedback about how they’re doing – but none of that is enough if they don’t have the opportunity to rest and recover,” he says.

Translated into a workplace context, this means line managers also have a vital role to play (see box below) in ensuring (sustainable) high performance, particularly when using ongoing, as opposed to annual, performance management approaches.

Another important element of employee wellbeing, says Christin Owings, partner and member of Boston Consulting Group’s People & Organisation practice, is about people feeling a sense of belonging and connection with colleagues, as well as engaging with the organisation’s purpose and values – something that can be tricky if they are not spending much physical time together.

“It’s much more difficult if they’re working a lot remotely, particularly for young people just starting out,” she says. “It’s led to higher levels of employee turnover as they’re not getting that fulfilment from somewhere where they feel they belong.”

What Catalant has done to help address this challenge, says Asber, is ensure that time is always made for teams – no matter what their location – to engage in non-transactional interaction, whether that involves taking time out to brainstorm or play cards together. “It’s very easy when you’re online a lot to fall into a pattern of transactional conversation, so ‘is this done?’, ‘yes’, and move on,” he says.

“The problem is that it erodes trust and, while it is important to recognise there is a spectrum of personality types who have different preferences in terms of how they interact, it’s also important to ensure people don’t feel disconnected.”

Ultimately, though, to make certain the shift to hybrid working is effective, Owings believes it is vital to consider the “full employee experience”. This means covering everything from upskilling managers to support and empower their staff to offering them a wide range of learning and development opportunities.

Another key factor is ensuring that the right company structures, resources, tools and incentivisation schemes are in place to encourage people to “do the right thing”, says Owings. “It’s about how to rewire the organisation to capture talent potential in a more hybrid world – and there’s a lot of experimentation going on at the moment.”

But getting such considerations right is perhaps even more important for CIOs than for their peers, says Gartner’s Waller. This is because tech staff are more in demand and are job-seeking more actively than other workers. They are also often better positioned to work remotely.

To illustrate this point, Waller says that in the fourth quarter of 2021, just under one-third (32%) of IT employees were actively looking for a fresh position, compared with only 19% of non-IT personnel. Also, of those IT staff that changed jobs last year, 76% had at least two other offers on top of the one they accepted, compared with 43% of non-IT workers, implying high levels of bargaining power.

“Everyone in the C-suite has this dynamic going on, so it’s not only CIOs who are finding it harder to hire,” he says. “But it does seem that CIOs have more to win or lose than most in a hybrid world.”