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Four Hidden Traps Of Managing A Hybrid Workforce

Forbes Communications Council

Nenad Lazarevic is CMO of Workpuls.

“Remote” was the buzzword of the working world in 2020.

In 2021 and beyond, I believe hybrid work is poised to be the darling of the modern workforce. Eighty-two percent of company leaders Gartner surveyed in 2020 said they will allow employees to work remotely some of the time when employees return to the office. And according to Google Trends data on web searches, interest in the search term “hybrid work” has quadrupled between January and May 2021.

Any company leader will likely attest to the challenges of managing a remote workforce. But stewarding a hybrid team is arguably even more complex.

How do you land on the most effective hybrid structure? And how do you keep employees in sync when they are in and out of the office?

There’s plenty to consider for company leaders, as we’ll explore.

What Is Hybrid Work?

For those new to the concept: a hybrid workforce is, as the name suggests, a combination of remote and in-office employees.

Hybrid work comes in many shapes and forms. Employees may split their time between the office and their homes. Or distinct segments of a team may be exclusively remote, while others are entirely office-based.

The way you structure your hybrid team should depend on many variables, like resources, office space, employee desires, industry and team functions.

Whatever structure you ultimately choose, hybrid work promises the flexibility of remote work with the centralized interconnectedness of office-based teams. What more could you want?

There are, however, some traps to navigate along the way.

Trap No. 1: Believing Company Culture Will Look After Itself

Company culture is part art and part science.

It’s a volatile state that can be influenced by leadership, hiring choices, work environment, values and how well employees nurture relationships beyond work itself. It’s a dizzying human capital balancing act that is often in a constant state of flux.

A hybrid work structure can cause a disconnect within teams. Cliques and divisions may form between in- and out-of-office staff. Naturally, the people we work with most often are the ones we tend to form bonds with.

A clear, compelling mission, vision and set of goals are still the starting points for company culture in a hybrid world. And instilling a shared set of behaviors in team members becomes even more critical. In other words, there shouldn’t be one set of creeds for internal staff and one for remote employees.

Leaders should also place greater emphasis on fairness and accountability.

Remote employees need assurances that they have the same opportunities as their in-office counterparts. And, conversely, in-office staff need to have confidence that remote employees are being held to the same level of accountability.

Establishing activities and communication lines that strengthen bonds between remote and office-based staff is important as well.

Trap No. 2: Failing To Think Contextually

Hybrid work is nuanced. Typically, leaders’ thinking centers around two core considerations. First, what percentage of our workforce should work from home versus in the office? And second, how many days should we permit individual employees to work from home?

Beyond these defining questions, it’s important for company leaders to think contextually, too. You should make your decision about how you split your team into a hybrid structure based on daily realities as much as company preferences.

Trap No. 3: Not Segmenting Company Data

High-performing teams are often driven by data.

In the nascent hybrid workforce, many companies are using employee analytics tools such as employee monitoring, productivity analytics, time tracking and project management tools. (Full disclosure: my company offers tools like these.)

In a hybrid environment, interpreting the data from these tools requires an extra layer of examination. In short, when employees are operating in and switching between different locations, you should break the data down to correspond with those differences.

In a hybrid workforce, it’s not always sufficient to just rely on what the data as a whole tells you. To find out how, when and where your team members do their best work, you should segment your productivity and performance data based on their working locations.

This more forensic understanding of your data will allow you to make calculated decisions about your hybrid structure.

For some company leaders, it’s tempting to jettison employee analytics tools for employees who are office-based. The rationale is that they can manage employees who are in sight directly. This isn’t always the case.

To ensure you have the requisite data to make a hybrid structure work, I recommend using a uniform toolkit to collect data consistently across your in-office and remote workforce. You should then segment data once it’s collected, not by how it is collected.

Trap No. 4: Rigidly Sticking To A Hybrid Structure

What is the perfect structure for hybrid work?

Is it two days in the office and three days from home? Should it be three days at home and two in the office? Should half of the workforce be in the office while the other half is remote?

Well, the answer is that there is no one right answer — nor is there a fixed one.

A hybrid structure should be fluid — ever-assessed and ever-changing — so you can find the right fit for your employees and company.

Just as remote work was before it, hybrid work is a living experiment. And like with any experiment, there are constant assumptions to challenge, results to interpret and learnings to be had.

So don’t expect the hybrid structure you start with to look the same years or even months from now.

Hybrid Work: More Than Just A Middle Ground

Hybrid work allows you to offer employees the flexibility and perks of remote work while maintaining the interconnectedness and foundation of a centralized headquarters.

But hybrid work is more than just a solution for the sake of compromise. It offers company leaders the ability to pinpoint how and where employees do their best work and structure a working environment to match those observations.

Sure, it’s not without its challenges. But with the remote infrastructure and flexible mindsets forged during the chaos of 2020, I believe just about every company is well-placed for a hybrid future.


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