Optimising Flexible Working
For those businesses willing to, and capable of moving to more ‘flexible’ (hybrid) working practices, the last 18 months have seen a marked acceleration in the pace of change. What was for many a gradual ‘drift’ towards allowing ‘trusted’ (often highly educated /skilled ‘white collar’ workers) workers to spend increasing (albeit limited) amounts of time working remotely, has quickly morphed into wondering how and when workers can be enticed, encouraged, cajoled or ordered back into the offices and work places they left back in 2020.
Context/Research
Why do so many managers hanker after the ‘good old days’? Well, we were all shaped by our past experiences. We cut our teeth interacting closely with colleagues in the same office or at the same location. That’s how we learned from more experienced staff; that’s how we learned to build networks and work effectively in teams; how we witnessed what good and bad management and leadership looked and felt like. We all understood the ‘rules of engagement’; how to achieve results, how to motivate people, how to measure success or failure.
However, for all of us, the experiences of the last 18 months have shaped our future work expectations almost beyond recognition. According to one recent survey carried out for The Times newspaper:
49% of employees would try to change jobs if they couldn’t work in their preferred location
67% of employees said they wanted to switch to a combination of home and office working
What this represents is lots of active dissatisfaction! Staff who initially endured and then came to enjoy flexible working now want to hold onto some or all the benefits. Pandora’s Box has been well and truly opened and there’s no shutting it now. Sure, we could get out the ‘big stick’ and mandate that our employees go back to the way things were before, but how long will we be able to retain good people, when our competitors are offering hybrid working as their ‘new normal’?
It’s clear that hybrid working is here to stay and we shouldn’t be afraid of it. Even before the pandemic, research from organisations that practiced long-term flexible working indicated that:
80% believed it attracted/retained talent and made staff happier
77% believed it improved work-life balance and improved wellbeing
97% would recommend flexible working practices to others
Here are some key benefits of hybrid working:
- Running almost every meeting either entirely virtually, or as a combination of virtual and non-virtual offers enormous savings in travelling time and expenses
- Staggering ‘start times’ (or dispensing with them altogether!) allows parents of school-age kids to be both key employees and ‘hands-on’ parents
- Removing the culture of ‘Presenteeism’ allows businesses to focus on tangible outputs and outcomes, rather than activities
- Permanently having employees (or teams of employees) physically working only 2-3 days in the office drastically reduces office space requirements
- Reducing the necessity for roles (especially those that are hard to fill) to be ‘office-based’ expands the available ‘talent-pool’
What is clear when you look at those examples above is that ‘TRUST’ suddenly becomes crucially important. As managers we have to TRUST our people to:
Know what it is they need to be producing (in terms of outputs and outcomes)
- Do what is expected of them (without being constantly /monitored)
- Be honest and trustworthy
- Remain compliant with company policies and procedures
For those who tend to micro-manage, this will be a major challenge!
As managers we should be focusing on creating the optimal environment for people (and the business) to be successful. It’s how our people are working and what outputs and outcomes they are producing that are important – not the number of hours they clock-up, nor their ability to look busy.
As managers we need to adapt how we interact with people we’re not ‘watching’, how we recognise stress, how we provide encouragement and guidance, how we encourage teamwork and communications, how we combat loneliness. The skills we learned and which served us well in the ‘old-world’ may no longer be fit-for-purpose – we need to be honest with yourselves and be open to learning new skills and techniques. We now need:
- Managers to shift from policing to empowering
- Managers to spend much more time coaching /mentoring
- Managers to be upskilled/competent/confident in providing counselling support
- Managers to shift more towards a PULL vs a PUSH style of persuasion
- Improve our Active Listening (Testing understanding, Summarising Building & Para phrasing)
- Improve our questioning skills
Learning and adapting soft skills is crucial, but so too is ensuring that our systems and processes will enable (or not) our employees and our business to benefit from hybrid working. We also need to:
We need to:
- Have Reward and Recognition programmes that recognise and reward OUTPUTS and OUTCOMES, and HOW people are working, communicating and interacting
- Have adequate IT equipment/support/systems to allow people to work efficiently and securely when working remotely
- Have on-boarding processes that enable new employees to integrate, learn and add value quickly and efficiently
- Have Learning and Development programmes that are adaptable and flexible enough to cope with more distance-learning and solo-learning
- Have office facilities and set-ups that facilitate hot(shared)-desking and enable meetings to easily accommodate both remote and local attendees
Many of you reading this will have already reacted and adapted on a ‘needs-must’ basis but how many of you have sat down and, in a structured way, examined what ‘Good Would Look Like’ for hybrid-working in YOUR business - with YOUR people, with YOUR customers and with YOUR specific business needs in mind?
Self-diagnosis
Here are some questions to ask yourself and of your business. On a scale of 0 to 10, rate (honestly) where you are now.
- Our senior leadership and management team are crystal-clear about what they need to do to lead and manage staff effectively when hybrid-working
- Everyone understands the differences between pre-COVID working practices and hybrid-working practices
- We are all clear about the effect working remotely has had, and is having on staff and we take steps to be flexible in our approach wherever possible
- We competently demonstrate the appropriate Management & Leadership practices and behaviours required to manage the impact of hybrid-working on our business and our staff
- Leaders and managers are clear about ‘the shadow they need to cast’ to create conditions for success
- We are super-clear on our plan to enable (relevant) staff to be more productive through hybrid working
- We are all aware of the difference between outputs and outcomes and how this influences our conversations with staff leading to a more outcome / goal style of approach.
- We actively seek feedback from staff about our approach towards enabling them to hybrid-work effectively
Unless you’re getting 9’s or 10’s out of 10, you need to start working on identifying what needs to be done, what are your priorities and creating action plans. This is something we can help you with. As one of our clients recently put it:
“Having you guys (Opsis) involved as impartial external facilitators; asking us challenging questions forces us to REALLY examine if the scores we’ve given ourselves and the progress we think we’ve made are realistic.”
Click on the link below for more information on the Opsis RRR programme
