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’re going to be talking about hybrid working, but I want to explain a bit about how each episode’s going to work so that you know what to expect throughout the series. In each episode, I’m going to choose a topic today that is hybrid working, and it’s a topic that’s impacting organisations and causing chaos and each episode will cover a topic like that. Because I specialise in helping organisations go from chaos to calm. I’m going to spend around 15 minutes explaining what the chaos will look and feel like, how you can get to the root cause of issues, and then how to create calm. So there’s going to be advice at the end on how you can make changes inside your team or your organisations.
Going from chaos to calm requires a diagnosis of the root cause, and that’s to ensure that the solutions are long-term. Now, there might be some quick wins in there. But diagnosing the root cause means that you are addressing long-term issues. Now, I can’t diagnose what’s going on in your organisation today, but 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, which is my model, which I apply to organisations and teams, and there are three phases to the field model, which are; understand, diagnose, and fix. And this is how we’re going to approach each topic in each episode, and I’ve added some details about The Field Model in the show notes for you as well.
Hybrid working is the topic of 2021. Now we’ve been talking about hybrid working as the style of working where people spend some time in the office and some time at home. Hybrid in the sense of you are in a mixture of locations and nearly every organisation that I’m talking to has completed a survey of some description to find out what people want from this new world of work, and specifically really how many days they’re planning to be in the office or how many days they’re planning to be at home.
So today we are talking about hybrid working. So what is it and why is it causing chaos?
Now, I’ll talk about why doing that survey isn’t the solution shortly. But interestingly, what we’re seeing is people standing quite firm that they are more productive at home and we’re seeing leaders struggling to find a way to bring teams together, to work effectively with so much change going on that this is the bit that hybrid working is really starting to impact for organisations.
And what’s interesting here is that the change around hybrid working is that it’s change that’s now in the hands of employees. It’s a power that has shifted and it’s shifted forever in organisations because of the pandemic. Employees now have much more power, much more say in where they are willing to work.
So, it’s causing chaos in multiple ways and I mentioned that I didn’t think the surveys we were doing were particularly helpful, part of that is because there is a lot of individual aspects to consider here. So that chaos is coming from almost that survey data that we have because there’s just so much of it, that it’s very, very hard to make any kind of plan from it.
We’ve also got chaos in the way of people not wanting to change how they’ve worked for the last 18 months, people are very set with how they have been working and therefore don’t want to make any changes. We’ve also got the issue that we are focusing just on locations, the very nature of hybrid as a term signals that we are just looking at a mixture of two things, and actually that’s where we’re going wrong, that’s what’s distracting us from the real changes that need to be made.
We also have chaos from a society that’s more polarised than ever. We have quite a strong fear narrative that’s running through most of what we’re doing, which makes it quite difficult to build trust. We have line managers unsure how to lead and how to manage teams remotely. We’re also seeing collaboration being impacted for some industries, specifically industries that maybe have worked at a slower pace over the last 18 months or so. Things are now starting to ramp back up, and they’re struggling as to how they can collaborate in this new world of work.
We’re seeing some challenges on onboarding processes, specifically around creating a sense of belonging, and we’re also seeing a very strong focus on office workers when so many people who work in organisations are deskless or frontline workers, and with the focus on hybrid being location based, with forgetting those workers who are actually not based in an office.
So that’s what the chaos can start to look like. That’s how it can start to manifest in different organisations. So what do we do to diagnose? What do we do to get to the root cause?
Firstly, we go deeper into the topic and we have to change our focus from locations to a focus on culture. We have to stop asking people what they want without a hypothesis or an idea about what that might look like. What we are seeing is we’re asking people, what do you want? We are seeing people follow the herd, they’re following what we are hearing everybody else saying, because everybody’s reporting similar things. So if we don’t have that hypothesis of what we think we want to be able to achieve, what we think is likely to happen, we’re asking people questions without some kind of base point.
Now when I talk about hybrid working at events, I talk about a link to the Industrial Revolution, and this is inspired by reading Matthew Syed’s book, Rebel Ideas over the Summer, and he talks about what happened in the Industrial Revolution linked to innovation. Now, while he has linked it to innovation, my link is to the pandemic and the potential missed opportunity that’s in front of us.
So if I take you back to the Industrial Revolution, I’m specifically looking at factories and how they were designed, and they were designed around their source of power. They were designed around where that was coming from. So in this case it was steam or water. It was inefficient. There were lots of pulleys and levers and all sorts of things that allowed things to work inside that factory with everything linked to that source of power. Now, when electricity came in, they didn’t reimagine the layout of the factory; they just replaced the source of power with electricity. They just replaced the water with the electricity. They didn’t think about how different that factory could look and feel and operate with that change.
So with that issue comes the fact that we’ve just replaced like-for-like. And the impact that it had in the industrial revolution was that it left things rather stagnant for around 25 years. It took us that long to realise the opportunity that came from electricity, the opportunity that was a reimagined factory, a different way of laying it out, a different way of organising things that were more efficient, that allowed things to work more seamlessly. 25 years, and I can see that playing out for us today. To me, hybrid working is the same. If we just focus on locations, we are not addressing the opportunity that’s in front of us. Now, I’ve already said that the surveys won’t help you. Now, that’s not particularly helpful if you’re just running lots of surveys to try and diagnose that root cause of the chaos.
So you need to have some conversations, but you need to have conversations based on some decisions. So as a leadership team there need to be some decisions made into what you want to change, and then you can test those decisions, discuss those decisions with employees. If we don’t have that starting point, it’s difficult for people to know what they don’t know, and it’s easy to answer a survey by just saying what you think everyone else is saying or what you are hearing everyone else is saying.
So there has to be a conversation.
Now, sometimes we can shy away from making those decisions because we know we need to involve employees and we need to have input, and that’s crucial to any organisation. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t make any decisions. We just have to be open to changing things and discussing them.
So I always advise my clients to be clear when something is a conversation and requires discussion and input, or when something is information because the decision has been made. They are very different, and if you’re not clear on that with people, it can make things very confusing and leave people to feeling that their voice isn’t valued or heard.
So, lots of conversations and discussions. Have a hypothesis and make some decisions before you go and talk to people.
So if that’s how we are diagnosing some of those root causes to the chaos, how do we go from chaos to calm?
Now, there are five things for you to think about when it comes to hybrid working in your organisation.
The first is that as a leadership team, you need to have a conversation about what you want the culture to be like in your organisation. Now, this is usually best facilitated to ensure that the whole leadership team is involved, but we have to start with talking about what things feel like and how things get done, and then you have a stake in the ground where you can then move forwards from to consider how that applies to different stakeholder groups, how people are impacted, and you can start to move that conversation forward. But if we don’t start with the leadership team and we don’t start with that conversation about culture, it makes things very difficult to move forwards in the new world of work. And whether that’s about locations, whether it’s about how you communicate, whether it’s about how it feels to work here, that has to start with a leadership conversation.
The second is remembering the challenge is not about locations, and this means it’s going to take time. It means that people will need some coaching and training to go through this change, and there needs to be a bit of a specific focus on line managers. Now, not all line managers are the same, so it’s making sure that you’re having conversations with them, depending on the size of their team or the locations of their team, but we need to understand what works for them, what doesn’t, how they’ve adapted in the last 18 months and what needs to change for them, whether that’s about the tools they use or the way that they work. But this is about a conversation and it’s about coaching and training some of those leadership teams across the organisation.
The third is that we have to review the communication channels, and I often talk about the rhythm of the organisation that drumbeat, how things happen, how things are communicated, how things are discussed, so what worked before the pandemic won’t necessarily work now, and in a lot of cases we’ve lifted and shifted what we did to work in a crisis, but now we need to review things in a bit more detail and just see what works. What’s interesting is that hybrid working isn’t really new. You know, I’ve passed a spider phone around a boardroom many a time in the last 10 years I’ve tried and failed to get video conferencing working in so many meeting rooms. But what’s different now is that we are not tolerating that the technology doesn’t work and we are not tolerating behaviours that exclude people who aren’t in the room. So we have to look at the changes that need to be made to how we communicate, and that requires some investment, both financially, but also in terms of time to explore what’s right for your organisation because it won’t necessarily be right for every other organisation around you.
The fourth thing is to think about freedom in a framework. We’re talking about changing how we work to make things more flexible. So therefore we can’t have strict rules around things because it goes against exactly what we’re trying to do. So if we’re trying to create some kind of framework that provides a guide for ways of working across the organisation. We are all individuals. We all have individual needs, so trying to create a solution that’s right for everyone is just impossible. We cannot create something that matches everyone perfectly so the framework idea provides that freedom within it and allows us to think maybe a bit differently about how we are working. So what’s convenient for someone that maybe has school children to pick up someone that might have to care for a family member, there’s lots of different things for us to consider, and that sort of framework approach allows us to think differently about how we work.
The fifth point is importantly that we give people a voice and we also give people time. It’s been an extraordinary year and people haven’t just been working at home for those that could, people have had to juggle lots of different things. So this phase requires us to make more changes and it’s going to take us a while to find routine, but we have to have ongoing discussions, we have to take action against those discussions, and we also have to make time to listen to everybody in our organisation. We can’t just be talking to people that are office based. It might feel easier to talk to people in that way because their work can be done from maybe any location, but if we are looking at changing how we work, making things more flexible, this has to apply to everyone in the organisation regardless of what role they are doing.
So the fix overall has to be about changing how work gets done. It has to be about changing how people work together. And we have such an opportunity ahead of us that I hope we can start to explore that with this long-term lens and one where people are at the centre.
In my next episode, I’m going to be talking about leadership and the areas to focus on if you are leading a team or an organisation, specifically looking at some of the skills that maybe create chaos, and looking at some of the traits of leaders that we might want to explore to bring teams together.
Thank you for listening and I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn, so please connect with me, ask questions, share your thinking. There are details in the show notes about how you can stay in touch.
