More and more organizations are facing autumn with a new conundrum: if they want to turn the pandemic into an opportunity and embrace a new model of work – perhaps hybrid or even remote, are their people ready for it? Are their leaders ready for it? Where should they start?
Since March 2020 I led more than 200 virtual workshops for organizations in Central and Eastern Europe on remote work best practices, effective virtual and hybrid meetings, strategic synchronous and asynchronous communications, and personal branding in the new remote and hybrid world of work. My key realization was: in order to succeed in the new world of work we need three things – the right mind set, the right skill set and the right tool set. More, we need all these three assets at the same time, or we might fail.
To help people to stay productive during the pandemic, many organizations started with the latter: the tool set. They bought better technical and digital infrastructure and they started training their people on how to use it. In this process they realized what skills people were missing, so they started tackling skill development. These investments were major, and I want to acknowledge and applaud the companies who went for it, because there are still organizations out there that essentially sent their people home and let them swim during the pandemic on their own, hoping the world won’t change and they will be able to dance their way back to the office as soon as possible.
However, even the best of the best may sometimes forget that to succeed in the new world of work we also need the third ingredient: the right mindset. This is where hybrid comes into place.
HYBRID WORK IS A POLARITY
If you want to grasp the complexity of the hybrid mindset, I invite you to the following visualization exercise.
Imagine an axis where at one end you have one extreme – let’s say working from the office – and at the other end you have the second extreme – let’s say full remote work. When we fixate on one extreme, the more we insist on this extreme, the more its ugly side effects start coming to the foreground.
For example, when we insist that our people should work from a fixed office, we also start noticing the time and money spent commuting, the higher office rental and furbishing costs and, ultimately, the ridiculous choice to travel to a different country for a two-hour meeting. Sure, we may try to normalize such aberrations in the name of intimacy and relationship-building. Yet, if we were to be honest with ourselves, we would recognize that solid, trust-driven work relationships can exist despite the distance and that what quality relationships require is not necessarily physical, but full mental and emotional presence, a place where many of us have still a lot of development work to do.
Therefore, when we insist on one extreme and notice its side effects, a counter-movement will start occurring to tackle these side effects. Remote work is nothing new; the writing on the wall was there long before the pandemic, it was simply not mainstream, and the pandemic dramatically accelerated it.
So now, with this counter-movement we shift into the second extreme – full remote work, as the pandemic forced us to do. Unfortunately, sooner or later, when we fixate on this second extreme as well, its negative side effects will also start to come to the foreground, from isolation to lack of personal boundaries and risk of burnout etc. This is why, when we spent too much time in this second extreme, we are taken by a new counter-movement back in the direction of the first extreme.
A polarity is therefore not a choice between two extremes that you can make (EITHER OR); a polarity is a dynamic movement between two apparently irreconcilable forces that you are invited to navigate constantly to take full advantage of the ultimate benefits of both worlds (AND AND) for the greater good of yourself, your people and your organization.
Ultimately, hybrid leadership is the constant quest for an adequate sweet spot between the extremes of working from the office and working remotely. This is why numerous organizations, like Avast, Siemens, UniCredit, Unilever and many others have decided to embrace a hybrid model of work in the new normal.
TO SUCCEED IN A HYBRID SETUP, THINK REMOTE FIRST
On top of the first challenge – letting go of our attachment to one extreme way of doing things – the second greatest mind shift that we need to face in hybrid leadership is that, if we want to be successful, we need to think remote first.
Here is the trick: when even one single person works even half of the time remotely in your team or organization, if you want that person to perform and succeed you need to create the remote infrastructure allowing that person to connect and work basically from anywhere.
Once you have that infrastructure, it would be silly not to make it available to other people from your office. Thus, from the perspective of your digital infrastructure you have already become a remote-first organization. However, given that many of your people live probably near your office, it would be a pity not to create a space where they can come together now and then. This is why you decide to transform your former noisy open floor offices into a place redesigned to celebrate human connection, communications and collaboration.
In the hybrid world of work people don’t come to the office to get an ego boost from seeing their people or from sitting in their corner office. They come to the office to see each other, to exchange spontaneous information, to tackle conflict, to make better decisions and to drive innovations together. It is up to each organization and team how much time they recommend spending in a physical location based on their desired outcomes, the profile of their teams and the logistical capabilities at hand.
By thinking remote first AND by adding a dash of celebration of the human spirit at work you can truly enjoy the greatest benefits of both the in-person and remote worlds of work. This is the ultimate promise of hybrid: personal freedom and autonomy AND co-creation through intentional presence for our colleagues, teams and organizations. And that’s a major mindset shift for leaders – and for most of us.
Bio: Cristina Muntean is an executive consultant, trainer, mentor and coach who specializes in strategic communications, personal branding and in emotional and systemic intelligence for leadership. A former journalist, she founded Media Education CEE, a communications and people development agency in Prague in May 2010. Her clients are executive level managers and entrepreneurs with Top100 companies in the Czech Republic and Central and Eastern Europe. Cristina provides services in English, Czech, French and Romanian, her mother tongue. You can reach her at +420 776 574 925 or at cm@cristinamuntean.com.