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3 Hybrid Workforce Variations: Choosing the One That’s Right for You

Many use hybrid as an umbrella term to indicate a mix of remote and in-office employees. They also use the term blended employees. These are employees who work in-office some of the time and remotely the rest of the time. This group of employees is distinct from those who work full-time in the office and those who are full-time remote. (Note: Full-time remote employees sometimes meet with other employees for team retreats or other special events during the year. But they do not go into the office to do their usual work for any meaningful amount of time.)

There are three hybrid workforce variations to consider as an employer. Each variation has advantages and challenges.

General Challenges with Blended or Remote Employees

There are two general challenges with any of the hybrid workforce variations that are important to address, including:

  • Biases | Remote employees are likely to be disadvantaged by being “out of sight” more frequently. It requires more work to create trust and belonging with and among remote workers. Leaders who are in-person may inadvertently give more attention and perks to employees they see in person. Meanwhile, remote employees may be less likely to speak up or question decisions.
  • Equity | Employees who work remotely more of the time may be in less equitable work situations than their in-office counterparts. Their Internet service may be relatively slow and their workstations may cause pain or discomfort. Additionally, their immediate working environments may be more distracting (e.g., noise, light, temperature), and they probably won’t have access to free office supplies (e.g., printers, a dedicated work phone, etc.).

Here are examples of three hybrid workforce variations.

Hybrid 1: Full-Time Mix

One of the hybrid workforce variations is a mix of employees being either full-time in-office or full-time remote. This variation requires enough office space for all full-time employees.

  • Advantages:
    • It’s easy to know where each employee is on a given day or week.
    • Working groups/teams can develop communication and collaboration patterns for this stable configuration.
    • You need less office space when some employees are remote.
  • Challenges:
    • Communication | To the extent that working groups contain both types of employees—or remote only employees—clear and concise communication is critical. You want attendees to be able to pull out the important points of communication quickly and easily. Social time and hard conversations should definitely happen over video.
    • Collaboration | If everyone who is collaborating on a given project is in the office, there aren’t any special hybrid challenges. However, when collaboration happens among individuals who are not co-located, care should be taken to implement best practices for that situation: Use the appropriate communication channels or apps (e.g., collaborative real-time whiteboards that live in the cloud, Slack channels, polls for voting). Trust among team members is important and needs to be built and maintained. Respectful behavior is even more critical.
    • Biases | All of the general challenges above are true with this variation. In-office employees may develop deeper bonds. Thus, they may unintentionally marginalize remote employees.

Hybrid 2: Come Together

Another hybrid variation is when employees spend some time in-office and sometimes remotely. Also, they do so in a concerted way at regular intervals, so that every working group is in-office together and remote together. Everyone in the group is a blended employee. For instance, a given working group may be in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays and work remotely the other days of the week. (Or one week in the office each month, etc.)

  • Advantages:
    • Organizations require less office space when different working groups use the office on different days.
    • All working group members experience similar working conditions at the same time. So the problem of remote workers becoming disadvantaged isn’t an issue.
    • In-office time can focus on collaboration, team-building, trust-building and engagement. Remote time can be for focused individual work.
  • Challenges:
    • Communication | Best practices for communication hold. When working group members are remote, it’s particularly important.
    • Collaboration | Time in office should be for work best done collaboratively or using resources that are in office.
    • Bias | In-office time helps create and deepen belonging and trust (when the culture and the leaders promote those qualities). In turn when employees are remote they are more likely to give colleagues the benefit of the doubt. Because all working group members have the same in-person/remote schedule, differential treatment based on in-office status is non-existent.

Hybrid 3: Employee Flex Plan

Finally, sometimes employees are blended, full-time in an office, and/or full-time remote. For some hybrid workforce variations such as this one, you can set times when everyone—or most everyone—is expected to be in office, such as collaborating on projects.

  • Advantages
    • This variation provides more flexibility to employees, hopefully minimizing attrition and making hiring easier.
    • The schedule provides working groups and organizations predictability. It also gives them the ability to make maximal use of their in-office space. There may be some opportunities to take advantage of co-location, but the people who need to collaborate on a given day may not necessarily be in the office at the same time.
    • To the extent that all or most employees come into the office at least some of the time, a sense of culture, trust, and engagement can develop. However, this doesn’t necessarily include teammates who may be on a different in-person schedule.
    • Blended employees may welcome more flexibility and control over their commuting schedules.
  • Challenges
    • Communication | Although there is a predictable pattern to who is in the office on a given day, the pattern differs for each employee. Therefore, it can be hard to track in-office employees day-to-day. In turn, this doesn’t capitalize on many of the return-to-office advantages. Because working groups may not be co-located together, communicate clearly and concisely. Best practices for communication hold.
    • Collaboration | This variation does not help in-office collaboration unless relevant employees are co-located at the same time. Thus, best practices for collaborating with mixed co-located/remote groups hold.
    • Biases | Those who spend more time in-office develop deeper connections and trust and may be more likely to receive high-status assignments compared to remote workers.

Be More Productive with Remote Workers

remote workersAre you seeking a way to enhance productivity in the office? Counter to what you may be considering, it may be beneficial for you to offer employees the opportunity to work remotely.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 24% of American employees are remote workers.  This growing class of employees is also an astounding 71% more productive than their counterparts working in the office.  But before you knock the cubicle walls down and tell everyone to go home, there are some systems and processes your company needs to support its remote workers and encourage productivity.

Encourage Productivity with Remote Workers

Becoming a virtual office can be very scary for employers.  Whether you turn off the lights altogether and tell everyone to work from home or you hire a handful of remote workers, there are many potential mine fields to navigate.  How do you ensure employees continue to do their job?  What if they become too distracted?  But when executed well, a remote work program can encourage employees to balance their lives.  Suddenly, parents are able to see their children more, there’s more time for the gym without a commute.  But how do you set up a system that works?  Try the following suggestions and your remote worker program will flourish:

  • Create a team environment in a wiki or a project tracking program.  It’s important for companies with remote workers to offer the same spirit of support and collaboration that would exist in the office.  It’s also important to make sure everyone is still involved in their projects.  Company wikis or project trackers are great ways for remote workers to catch up, rope people into ongoing projects, and offer insight into what they’re doing.  If this is a new tool for your team, there will be some period of adjustment and getting used to the technology, the new habits of tracking milestones, and communicating with others online.  But it can be very beneficial to your remote workers.  Nobody wants to feel as if they’re adrift in the company or that their only coworker has become the dog.  Encourage your remote workers to participate and collaborate online.  Without micromanagers or time wasters at the water cooler, find out just how much more productive your team can be.
  • Use video conferencing tools.  When your team is geographically dispersed, it can be hard to meet and go over project details.  This is where video conferencing can assist.  Video conferencing utilizes existing technology- a phone connection and video conferencing.  The difference is it allows team members to meet in a secure and branded environment for a fraction of the cost.  Take for example a company based out of Singapore- now they can meet securely and for a fraction of the cost- with their team members in Australia, America, or even Europe.  The possibilities are endless for these kinds of meetings.  Imagine town hall meetings on site where your satellite offices are conferenced in, board meetings, and more.  All of these are possible with video conferencing technology.  Remote workers don’t have to be left out of the loop anymore.  Now, they can be an integral part of the decision-making process.
  • Offer virtual HR assistance.  Many remote workers complain that their biggest gripe is not feeling a part of the team.  Your company can remedy this with a variety of online tools such as onboarding, training, and even reviews.  Remote workers can receive all the benefits that an onsite HR team can offer.  Encourage employees to make use of these tools to stay in the loop and develop professionally.  Working in the cloud has never been so easy and your remote workers will appreciate the opportunity to stay involved.

It’s Time to Think Differently

In the old days, companies had to have brick and mortar locations or they couldn’t survive.  Technology simply hadn’t advanced far enough to allow for workers to spend time at home and still do their job.  But today cloud based applications make it easier than ever.  The opportunities for remote workers keep growing as more companies are discovering how productive employees can be when they’re not in the office.  Whether working from your daughter’s soccer game or in an airport lounge, the barriers to productivity have been erased.  The key is to put a strong program in place to ensure your remote workers are supported and in constant communication.  Find out how productive your team can be with these simple but actionable tips.

Putting Customers First Fosters Employee Collaboration

I have worked in silos… too many times.  When I worked in the Credit Card Industry, my department (Online Channels) supported all credit card products: House Cards, Premium Cards, Co-branded Cards. We drove individual and cross-sell campaigns many times at the request of the individual product manager. This process was wrought with message duplication ie customers being upsold to premium products, cross-sold to ancillary features and, in some cases, being offered promotions for products they already had.

The same situation arose when I worked at Yahoo! In Marketing we managed over 16 properties at the time: News, Homepage, Music, Lifestyle etc. Each property had its own product manager. And each product manager wanted the traffic to their pages. Marketing’s role was to support individual product objectives.  The marketing team was divided to ensure that each product was given a point of contact.   Each product organization included representation from Marketing, Sales, and Finance. While this provided focus for each product, it also created a bigger rift between products.  As everyone was building their own fiefdom, the greater organization was feeling the impact.

Performance Is Judged On A Product Basis

I remember the year-end product presentations. Each manager stood up in front of their peers, touting performance of their respective products. Acquisition numbers were always impressive. Retention numbers were harder to attribute to individual product performance since customers tended to move between products and properties and so “claiming” credit for those customers was a difficult exercise.

In banking, the term we used was “Share of Wallet”. When it came to credit, the spend per payment vehicle became an important metric. The goal for every product manager was to increase that share of wallet at the risk of cannibalizing another product.

At Yahoo! vying for audience attention was done in a similar manner. The focus on content, special events, promotions etc was done to increase customer time spent on each property. Given the actual “attention span” for any one individual to spend time on Yahoo! it was unrealistic to grab more of the user’s attention than was readily available.

In both cases, the focus on product performance drove a culture that became increasingly competitive. In many cases, the message overload not only overwhelmed the customer/user, it also drove them away.

The competitive nature instilled in the culture continued to foster this silo-mentality. And while it drove performance in the past, over time it was clear that product managers were tripping over each other to lure customers to their respective products.

The system became more onerous and less efficient, and in the end more costly as the wasted messaging began to impact campaign performances.

Thinking Differently… And Putting The customer First

I applaud  senior leadership at both companies to recognize that the systems that once worked, needed some serious revamping.

At Yahoo! by understanding the target user behaviour on the site and how s/he traversed each property, the product managers realized they had only a limited window to capture their audience’s attention. By understanding customer value before product, the acquisition team was more likely to target people based on their likelihood to be receptive to any one of the 10+ card products within the portfolio. Suddenly relevance drove the targeting strategy.

One thing became readily evident: The product-driven environment perpetuated the silos, increased costs and created a competitive work environment that put customer retention at serious risk.

The customer-driven environment began to eliminate the duplication, create a shared focus on customer retention and began to change the way employees communicated with each other.

A Sustainable Organization Puts Customers First

I was lucky to be a player in the changes that were happening at these companies. I did not stay long enough to see them play out longer term but it was clear the organizations were well on their way.

Once the plan is set in motion, it stands to reason that this must extend to other parts of the organization.

  • operations needs some rewiring to understand customers holistically – e.g. other bank products they hold, transactions across all credit products in order to truly understand value
  • customer data processes need to ensure greater transparency and governance modifications to eliminate duplication
  • performance and compensation need to now measure true customer retention

These are just a few areas that will be impacted, but as time goes by, the steps to improve will bring greater clarity and focus for the company.

Today, my company continues to drive the message of going back to the “mom and pop shop” and truly understanding the customer first. It’s so critical in a time where the voice of the customer is much louder than the corporate voice. It’s what the market is screaming for and how the business will eventually respond, whether they like it or not.

Photo Credit: BigStockImages