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Implementing a hybrid work model: What NOT to do

With some of the biggest organisations announcing they are never going back to the office full time, they hybrid workplace is here to stay. But employees have had vastly different experiences working from home over the past year dependant on their personality, home environment and responsibilities to name a few things. If you don’t change structures to suit the new ways of working, communication, collaboration, performance and the wellbeing of your people could suffer.

A successful hybrid work structure needs to take each individual experience in to consideration. Read this article for 7 ways a hybrid work model could fail (and how to avoid them).

From the Article:

How hybrid could go wrong (and what to try instead)

Finding that new, yet more familiar, version of “normal” won’t happen automatically. Most companies are planning for some kind of hybrid work model that combines in-office and remote work. Many of them are sailing into uncharted waters. (Here there be dragons!) And any company runs the risk of designing its hybrid work model based solely on what the majority wants, which isn’t necessarily inclusive and will have negative effects in the long term.

With that in mind, we stepped through a thought exercise called a “premortem” – much like a post-mortem, except nothing has actually died yet. Because now is the time to imagine all the ways hybrid work models could fail. Now, while we can still do something about it.

Failure #1: allow collaboration to favor the co-located

Before the pandemic, most teams that had some people in-office and some remote, creating a two-tiered system when it came to synchronous collaboration (a.k.a., meetings). People in the room tended to dominate, while people dialing in struggled to express their ideas. We need to be more inclusive than that.

Here’s an idea… Instead of always sharing info and ideas in real-time, let’s embrace asynchronous collaboration. If I put my idea on a page in Confluence and share that with my team, everyone has an equal chance to take it in, mull it over, and help improve on it. Then we can meet briefly to discuss live.

Failure #2: allow flexibility on location but not on schedules

There’s no real reason to think that juggling work and personal schedules will magically become easy this year (or next year, or the year after). Caregivers still have elderly parents to make breakfast for and kids to pick up from school. Anyone struggling with mental health or chronic physical issues still has regular appointments to fit in. Not to mention the “pandemic puppies” that need to be walked. These kinds of things have always been a challenge with coming into the office.

But working from home isn’t a solution in and of itself. Atlassian surveyed 5,000 knowledge workers in June 2020, many of whom reported that trying to be a teammate and a caregiver at the same time made them feel like they were crap at both.

Here’s an idea… Instead of requiring teams to work the traditional 9-to-5, let’s allow for flexible schedules. Designate times for synchronous collaboration (meetings, etc.) that serve as anchor points for the whole team. Aside from that, the rest of the day is theirs to schedule as they see fit. For instance, at Atlassian, we’ve determined that teams need 4 hours of overlap in a given workday for collaboration.

Failure #3: only look at employees’ needs in the aggregate

People’s preferences around where they work are based on different factors. Maybe you get too distracted at home, or too lonely, or your kitchen table makes a lousy workstation, and your heart cries out for the office. Maybe you have a health condition that makes office life tricky, or you love the focus you can achieve by working at home, or you want to ditch your commute.

Here’s an idea… Instead of assuming that everyone wants to be in (or out of) the office for the same reasons, let’s have conversations with our teams to understand what’s behind these preferences so we can support each other better.

You can read the article in full online: 7 ways a hybrid work model could fail (and how to avoid them).

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