In this episode, Jenni addresses the topic of hybrid working – how it causes chaos, what that looks like in organisations and how to bring calm. Find out why surveys won’t help you fix things, what we can learn from the industrial revolution and Jenni’s five tips to help you move forward.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Rebel Ideas by Matthew Syed
To keep the conversation going, connect with Jenni on LinkedIn and Twitter; ask questions and share your thinking!
Transcript for this podcast:
Welcome to the first episode of my new podcast, Redefining Comms with Jenni Field. Today, we are going to talk about Hybrid Working, but I want to explain a bit about how each episode will work so you know what to expect throughout the series.
In each episode, I’m going to choose a topic that is impacting organisations and causing chaos. As I specialise in helping organisations go from chaos to calm, I’m going to spend the next 15 minutes explaining what the chaos will look and feel like, how to get to the root cause of issues and then how to create calm, so there will be advice on how to make changes inside your team or organisation at the end.
Going from chaos to calm requires a diagnosis of the root cause to ensure the solutions are long-term. While I cannot diagnose that for your organisation today, I can give you some things to try and some themes to explore to help you move forward.
In my day-to-day work, I apply The Field Model, my model, to organisations. There are three phases to The Field Model: understand, diagnose and fix. This is exactly how we will approach each topic in each episode, and I’ve added some details about The Field Model in the show notes.
But today, we are talking hybrid working, so what is it and why is it causing chaos?
So, hybrid working – what is it and why is it causing chaos?
Hybrid working is the topic of 2021. We have been talking about hybrid working as the style of working where employees spend some time in the office and some time at home. They work in a hybrid way with a mixture of locations. Nearly every organisation I’m talking to has completed a survey of some description into what people want from this new world of work, and specifically, how many days they plan to be in the office.
People are standing firm that they are more productive at home, and leaders are struggling to find a way to bring teams together to work together effectively with so much change. Change is now in the hands of employees. A power that has shifted forever due to the changes that came from a global pandemic.
Chaos is coming from multiple sources:
- Survey data that isn’t actually that helpful in enabling you to make a plan
- People not wanting to change how they have worked for the last 18 months
- The confusion that the issue is location based – it’s not and it’s distracting us from focussing on the real changes that need to be made
- A society more polarised than ever, with a fear narrative that runs through most of what we do
- Line managers unsure how to lead and manage teams remotely
- Collaboration being impacted for some industries where things were slow and have now opened back up
- Onboarding processes that create a sense of belonging
- Focusing on office workers when you have employees who are deskless or frontline and therefore things don’t feel fair
So what do we do?
Firstly, we go deeper into the topic. We have to change our focus from location to a focus on culture. We have to stop asking people what they want without a hypothesis or some idea about what might be a solution that we can test. We have to look broader at how things happen and how we work together.
When I speak about hybrid working at events, I talk about the link to the Industrial Revolution. Inspired by reading Matthew Syed’s book Rebel Ideas, where he talks about what happened in the Industrial Revolution linked to innovation. His link to innovation is my link to the pandemic and the potential missed opportunity.
Factories were designed around the source of power, which was steam/water – it wasn’t an efficient layout because everything had to be linked to that source of power with pullies and levers. When electricity came in, they didn’t reimagine the factory. They simply replaced the source of power. This left things stagnant for 25 years because it took us that long to realise the opportunity that came from electricity – it was about changing the whole design of the factory!
Hybrid working is the same.
If we just change locations, we aren’t addressing the opportunity that is in front of us.
I’ve already said that the surveys won’t help you if you’re asking people what they want from the new world of work, so how do you get underneath chaos – well you need to have conversations and you need to make some decisions.
You need to make some decisions as a leadership team about what you want to change and then test those changes with employees. Discuss it with them with a starting point. We don’t know what we don’t know, and it’s easy to answer a survey by saying where you want to work, but there has to be a conversation.
Sometimes we can shy away from making decisions because we know we need to involve employees and have input – that doesn’t mean we don’t make any decisions, it just means we have to be open to changing things and discussing them. I always advise my clients to be clear when something is a conversation or when it’s information because a decision has been made. They are different, and both are ok but don’t invite discussion and conversation if that isn’t wanted or needed.
So how do we go from chaos to calm? There are 5 things for you to think about when it comes to hybrid working in your organisation:
- As a leadership team, have a conversation about what you want the culture to be like in your organisation. This is usually best facilitated to ensure the whole leadership team is involved, but let’s start with a conversation about what things feel like and how things get done. Now that we have a stake in the ground, considering all the stakeholder groups this impacts, we can move on to conversation and discussion
- Remember the challenge now is culture, not location. This means it takes time, it means people will need coaching and training to go through this change and that means there needs to be specific conversations with line managers about how they manage their teams, what works and what doesn’t – how do they want things to work
- Review the communication channels and the rhythm of the organisation – what worked before the pandemic won’t necessarily work now. We have lifted and shifted things to work in a crisis but now we need to review things in more detail. What do we really need. Hybrid working isn’t new. I have passed a spider phone round a boardroom many a time in the last 10 years and I’ve tried and failed to get video conferencing working in many a meeting room. What’s different now is that we won’t tolerate it so we have to make changes. Changes that requite investment both financially and in terms of time to explore the right solution for your organisation
- Think freedom in a framework. You cannot provide something that is right for everyone. We are individuals and we have individual needs. We cannot create a solution for an entire organisation that matches everyone perfectly so we need a framework that provides freedom within it. This will include the hours people work, especially for those that are office based. If it’s more convenient for me to work 6am to 8am and then 10am to 2pm, then that’s ok. It’s about getting the work done, not the time at a desk. If the meeting is in person and I have no others that day, I can come in for the meeting and then go home. An office can become a place to get together and collaborate and nothing more.
- Importantly, give people a voice and give people time. It has been an extraordinary year. People haven’t just been working at home (for those that could) and everyone has had to juggle different things. This next phase requires us to make more changes and it will take us a while to find a routine, a way of working that fits with how the world has changed and just adapt. We have to make time for ongoing discussions and for there to be actions taken too – listening without action doesn’t help us build trust and it doesn’t help us create a culture where people feel psychologically safe.
The fix has to be about changing how work gets done and changing how people work together. We have such an opportunity ahead of us, and I hope we can start to explore that with a long-term lens and one with people at the centre.
In my next episode, I’m going to be talking about leadership and the areas to focus on if you’re leading a team or an organisation.
Thank you for listening. I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn, so please connect, ask questions and share your thinking with me. Details are in the show notes on how to stay in touch.
