E161 – Leading & Managing in 2023: Hybrid & Remote

James. This is the world of work podcast with James and Jane, and just before we start this episode, we wanted to remind you that we don't simply produce podcasts. We also design and deliver leadership and management development programs for a wide range of organizations, and we help leaders understand and improve their teams and organizations, cultures and ways of working, to learn more or to work with us. Check out our website, www dot World of work.io For more details, or send us an email on Hello at World of work.io today, we've got episode number two of our special mini series looking at leading and managing in 2023 we are in december 2022 now, and we're going to be looking a little bit at trend. Number one, key focus area, number one that we think is going to be something that leaders of people and managers should focus on. Just as a quick reminder, we called out in the last podcast that there are four main areas that we think we should focus on. Those are number one, hybrid, remote and flexible working, and that's what this session is all about. Number two, employee well being. Number three, people and skills for future. And number four, responsible and kind business. So Jen, what are we going to do today? How are we going to bring hybrid, remote and flexible working to life? Well,

I think what we're going to do today is you're going to talk a little bit about what some of the big reports have shared recently, so places like LinkedIn and Gartner and Korn Ferry, then what we're going to do is we're going to mention and just share a little bit of the kind of work we've been doing in this space. And then I think you and I are just going to pick out some of our favorite, I guess, discussion points or reflections that we've had in this period and what we think they mean for other people, brilliant. So

why don't I start off with some of those reports and share some of the things that we've seen. So as part of our annual review process, which this series of podcasts is really all part of, we go out and we read a lot of reports from organization to writing on topics we think are important. So we're just going to share some of those takeaways for you. And I've got a couple quotes from reports by LinkedIn, by Korn Ferry and Gartner, and you can get references for all of these on our website as well. So if we start with LinkedIn, they've got a state of a global workplace report that they produced in october 2022, and in it, they've got a couple quotes that we like. So Quote number one, they say candidates increasingly want remote work, even as employers scale back on remote job postings. So people want this stuff, right? Employees want to be able to working in a remote way. Employers are maybe sort of pulling back on that a little bit as global restrictions reduce. They've got some also stats that we think are interesting. They say us remote job postings on LinkedIn reached an all time high in February 2022 at 20% so 20% of jobs were posted as remote. These 20% of jobs attracted over 50% of all applications in February, 2022 by September, remote job posts fell to 14% but about 14% got 52% of all applications. Remote Jobs are also popular around the world. So we can see that even as the number of remote jobs being offered is reduced, the number of applicants to those roles is increasing, and that data is very much focused on the US, but that's a trend that remains seemingly intact around most of the world as well. And I guess LinkedIn key takeaway is that even facing an uncertain future, people still highly value work life balance and flexible working arrangements, including remote work. I expect these two attributes to root main top talent drivers for years to come. So LinkedIn, clearly, very much feel that there's a lot of remaining desire from employees for flexible working and everything that it brings, for hybrid working and everything that it brings. The next report we're going to touch on is Korn Ferry. And again, you can find references in our on our website. Korn Ferry say that COVID 19 has shown that work can get done effectively, even more effectively remotely. They say 49% of professionals say they would turn down a job if a company mandated that they go into the office full time, so just under half, almost half, would turn down a job if they needed full time in office work, they say. But while productivity is up, many leaders tell us that culture, team dynamics and depth of relationships are suffering, so we've got this sort of disjoint between productivity and the sort of experience and culture that lives within and they also say organizations offering choices that match candidate expectations in terms of working at home, in the office or both are likely to have a distinct hiring advantage over those that are not. So again, there's a little bit of competitive advantage that can come out of the approach that we take to hybrid. And then Gartner, in a report, again referenced on our website, they say that hybrid work is here to stay. That's quite a line in the sound statement, isn't it, hybrid work is here to stay. They say 52% of employees say flexible work policies will affect their decision to stay at their organizations. So this is a retention issue. They say 75% of hybrid or remote knowledge workers have been agreeing their expectations for working flexibly have increased. So 75% of them have an increased expectation of flexible working. They say if an organization were to go back to a fully on site arrangement, it would risk losing up to 39% of its workforce. So that's a huge number. Lastly, Gartner say you must create a new human centric model for a hybrid environment by designing work around employee driven flexibility, culture, connectedness and human leadership. So we pulled out those three sets of quotes and three reports because we think they kind of paint the overall picture of some of the sentiment that exists in these large consultancies and in their research about how the world is viewing hybrid work going into 2023 and we think that sort of covers a wide range of areas to think about.

So what have we learned ourselves over the last year, and where have we learned it? Well? So in the last year, James and I and the team at World work project have been involved in civil service organization, read work redesign programs where, effectively they've been piloting and implementing an adapted hybrid working policy post pandemic. We've been involved with healthcare organizations hybrid management, training, design and delivery, and we've also been doing a fair bit of consultation with academics and practitioners out there on their recent research in hybrid working and hybrid management, and I guess, off the back of that and the information that James has just shared, we've come to a fair number of I wouldn't go as far as calling conclusions, but definitely reflections that we feel is shaping what's happening going forward, James, what are some of the reflections you've had?

Yeah, so I've got a bunch. I just want to chuck one out to start with, and maybe get some of your thoughts on it. So one of the things that we've seen as a real trend in the UK and in other places is that employees really value hybrid, and they want it, and employers kind of see hybrid as an opportunity to save costs, right? So we know that employees want to be hybrid, and organizations are sort of changing to bring them in and to recruit more from other locations in some some circumstances, and and changing what they do so they can compete for some of this good talent. And they're also saying, Well, you know what, if everybody's working remotely, we can shrink our footprint. We can close offices. Maybe we can be a little bit more fully remote, and they can kind of hold on to all that cost saving. But we just think there's a bit of a risk around that, and we think that some stuff can get get lost in that. And so I think we've got a bit of a view that hybrid isn't exclusively a cost save. Do you want to build on that a little bit and talk about why we might need to spend a little bit to 10%

agree with you and I also, I would say the other place that people are sniffing out suspected savings is that, for some people, having flexible working or having a hybrid pattern that works for them is so valuable that it may even mean they're prepared to accept a slightly lower salary. Well, that's right. And and so there are, if you if you imagine for a moment, in a senior leadership team room somewhere in the UK, and you imagine a responsible, thoughtful finance director thinking, hey, here we go. There's lots of opportunities for cost saving here. This could really help us as an organization. It might, you know, it's been a tough time, we can definitely make savings. And then, if you imagine the people are responsible for the managers, there was a little intake of breath about, oh, how do we how do we make this work? Because for the people who are trying to manage staff, it's going to take more of their time to do it. Well, it's going to take additional resourcing around better tech tools. So instead of making do with whatever technical tools they've got or support for them, they're going to need better IT support, because it's a much bigger impact if you're stuck at home on your own and you've, you know, you've got a five year old webcam that suddenly doesn't work, suddenly you're cut off from the whole organization, um, and you're also going to need budget to be able to bring people together in different ways. Now, if it's a fully remote organization, that might be about putting time aside and giving people really top end equipment so that they can have a more immersive meeting experience. If it's hybrid, it might be about bringing people together once every quarter, physically in a overnight. Because you're trying to build those relationships. But I think overall, the biggest for us is just the widening issue of if you see hybrid as a cost saving measure, you are likely to lean towards under resourcing, the management of and support for people who are hybrid working because you're like, Oh, let me wipe out this column. But do I really need to put as much in this column over here to support them? And that, that certainly is what we've seen right not deliberately and not people aren't going out there and going, Oh, we got to take all these things away from everyone. They're just underestimating the amount of time and resource that managers will need to really effectively support people who are working less in one fixed place.

Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right. There's a real risk around that, and we need to reinvest to turn our hybrid experiences into great ones. I think that's that's absolutely right. So, so that was one another thing that we've talked about and seen is kind of the need to create a great hybrid policy, right? So we hear a lot of words about, what are our hybrid ways of working, what's our policy? And I guess a takeaway for me is that a great Hybrid Hybrid policy, a good hybrid policy, is necessary to be able to work in a hybrid way. Well, but on its own. It's not sufficient to guarantee that you'll work well as a hybrid team. It's just on its own. It's not enough, I think, something that we've seen this but to create these great hybrid ways of working, you really need to do a little bit of co creation. You need to understand what matters to the people in your organizations. You need to take people with you on this process, and you need to have hybrid policies that are flexible. So they need to be flexible in themselves. Something that we've seen is that where people have been mandated in terms of a number of hours or days per week or specific days of being in the office, that doesn't really work. You know, there's a lovely headline in the Financial Times in November, and it said finance staff ignoring mandatory office attendance demands right because people, people want to go in to the office when it's right, when there's a reason, you know, when they maybe work better in the office. So having these policies is really important, but we need to have good policies that ideally have been co created with the individuals in the organization that are flexible, that help individuals understand and help individuals meet their needs in terms of work, but give them the space, freedom and support to do their work in the right place for the type of work that they're trying to do. So maybe they've got more choice about doing deep, focused work at home, and maybe they've got more space to choose coming into the office to collaborate. But the rigidity of some policies makes it hard, and having policies that aren't co created, or at least that don't listen well to the employees that are involved, it's a really hard thing to do, and we see that leading to like, a little bit of a split between leaders and managers, a bit of an us and them type of feeling coming out. Have you got any more thoughts on that? Jane, yeah, of course.

I've got loads of thoughts on this. James, and I don't think it's straightforward, but I do think there's a couple of things that really strike me out. I just want to reiterate the point you made, which, if I could only send people thinking about this way with one thing, it would be, think about where the work best gets done, right? We have slipped into this slightly strange world where everyone is quite fixated. Let's go with on having a repeatable weekly pattern, right? It's really strong. People are really struggling to let go of the idea that there's two days a week, three days a week, three days a week on two days a week off, Mondays, Wednesdays, whatever it is, right? And partly that's a that's an inability to let go of control of and, you know, support staff to do what they want. But also partly, that's a practical thing, right? There'll be an operational push somewhere saying, right? We need to figure out how many desks we need. So it's a really practical problem. But what we know is that if the work is not best done, or is agnostic, it doesn't really matter where it's done. And I think finance, I think finance is such a great example, because I think up until a few years ago, where the tech wasn't sufficient, finance generally, was a department that was expected to be in all the time, because they weren't trusted to take the tech out, and they weren't trusted to have it was too difficult to maintain in terms of cyber security, I think. And so I think there's some finances really. I like, I love that ft thing, because I can just, I just imagine a whole sway the finance department's going I can do this at home, and I can do it well, and I can do it safely. So for me, I think that's really, really interesting. I also think the other thing that I think is really worth mentioning is that and this is slightly different, this is, this is kind of slightly different from some of the organizations we're seeing. I 100% believe in co creation, but I do think that we also need to. Listen to managers and what they need to manage their staff and their products and services well. And I also think organizations need to take a bit of a thought about what they want to be in the future. Because I think if you, if you design your organization policy solely for the people who are currently in the organization, but actually you've got a group of people in your organization who previously were all united by wanting to work for this organization in this way. But now there's a new differentiator, right? I like working in an office versus Rachel over there, who prefers working at home more. And actually, organizations need to think a little bit about what they want to be. Because for some organizations, we're already seeing the really small ones go right? We're going to be, we're going to be predominantly in office, and we want to appeal to people who want to do that, and yes, they're going to have flexibility, but generally, that's what we're going to be, versus other organizations who are seeing the opportunity to go actually, we're going to be fully remote. We might bring people together occasionally, but that's what we're going to do now. That's not going to work for everyone, because everyone currently, but at least if they write the policy for the organization they want to be it creates clarity and transparency for the people applying. And I think that's really, really important. And I think a lot of organizations are getting hooked into, let's try and make this work for everyone. And the reality is, I don't think it's going to, it's never going to work for everyone. So instead you have to, I think, like, absolutely listen and decide. But you also have to think a little bit about what do you want to be in the

future? Yeah, I think that's right, and, and it's about more than understanding what you want to be in the future. There's a whole piece that leaders have to not only help sort of shape that, but they also need to really embrace hybrid if it's going to work. So they need to sponsor it. They need to role model it. They need to trust their employees. I mean, I spoke a second ago about a little bit of a rise of sort of Us and Them division between sort of management strands and employees and and that that's just so divisive when you're in a workplace. And we know that a lot of leaders and managers find it hard to embrace hybrid working themselves. I think they need to be in they've spent their careers being in an office, and, you know, they're kind of indoctrinated into a view that this is the way things get done. And there are good reasons for those beliefs, and there are sort of habitual reasons for those beliefs that are maybe less good, but, but leaders really need to be able to walk for walk for walk with this, if they're gonna encourage other people and help other people to to work in a hybrid way well, and to create a culture that can really do it. So this whole, like, you know, somebody's working at home, so, oh, you know, they're having a day off. Are you on your day off? All that kind of, like, little language kind of seeps in and causes all kinds of trouble. And we know that when people work from home, that productivity levels are really quite high. People sort of work long and they work hard, and that's one of the reasons that well being is a bit of a challenge, is because people do tend to work hard. And there are going to be some people who, you know, don't really work at home, but there are people who don't really work when they're in the office. I think it's probably kind of similar. So we really think leaders do need to step up and do some of this trusting and something really interesting. There was another quote from a report that Microsoft have done on hybrid and remote working, and they've done a lot of great work on this. Some of our findings have it 80 sorry, 87% of employees feel they are productive working in a hybrid or remote way, yet only 12% of leaders have full confidence their team is productive. And like, what a division that, like, nearly adds up to 100 there. It's like it's so split with 87 on one and 12 on the other. So it's really tough. So I think leaders really need to sort of step into that space, to believe, to adopt, to do personal change if they're going to lead well in this space, and they need to trust their people. And of course, there's more that they need to do in terms of changing ways of working and making sure that communication channels work and making sure that people understand priorities and offering the support that people need. But fundamentally, trust is a real core of this and believing in people, people's ability to do it. So I think that that whole trust piece and building trust is really key. I think I think it is.

I totally think it is, but I do also wonder how much they trust themselves. So what I find fascinating about that stat is I can imagine thinking about some of the people we've worked with this year. Yeah, there are people at home who are productive, and whether they're full productive or close to full, or whatever, they're productive and they're doing a job. But I think if you are a leader, you are, I mean, of all the ones we've met, I would say almost to a person, they have acknowledged that they don't think the organization is working in the most efficient way to maximize that. And I wonder, to some extent a how much the skills that lead take it takes to lead and manage in a hybrid way are different, and therefore they're not feeling as confident as their own skills. Skills, I think you have to be far more I think the skills of being in a room and being responsive to the emotional vibe and environment are far different than the skills in, you know, meticulously making sure that you've ticked off everybody on a list from a high perspective, that you've really had a moment on screen with them and you feel like you're confident about their well being. I think it's very different thing. It's very different thing. And also I don't, I don't think they have massive confidence in their use of tech, I think, and I so I think there's something really interesting about you can build trust. But I wonder how much is about, how much they trust themselves, about actually good enough at doing this as well. So I think that's super interesting. But I also think that leads us to the next reflection we would have, which would be around,

I guess, personalization and perceptions of unfairness. So we know that there's research showing that previously, when remote and hybrid working was less common and you had mixed teams that people are full victim to all sorts of unconscious bias around things like proximity bias, where you know, for example, you know, we're just, if we're thinking of a new project, we're automatically in our brain. And I think of the person we've seen more recently, or the person that we spent time with more recently, because they're just nearer us and they're around. And I think there's a real challenge around how do we make sure if we do have a mixed team in particular, and I think this is particularly problematic if we have a mixed team or if we have a fully remote team, but we spend lots more time with some people than than others on screen, because visibility is so important that it would be really possible that some people have less opportunities to take up development projects. Some people feel they are less seen in the way that they flex. Because maybe they're the people who aren't in the office the same day as their boss. Maybe everyone else is and they're not, but they're still doing something similar as a working pattern. And I also think we can end up with much more group dynamics happening, right? So you know, if I'm in the office with you every day, Monday to Wednesday, and Ali and Samia in the office every day, every week, Thursday and Friday, the relationship that you and I have is either going to be it's going to be stronger now, either it's going to be stronger, now, either it's going to be stronger positively, or it's going to be stronger negatively, but it's going to be stronger because I'm spending more time in your space and proximity, so I'm going to have stronger feelings about it. And I I just, I just worry about whether, Matt, well, I don't worry. I am relatively convinced that managers are not adequately prepared, supported and trained to deliberately address that unfairness that might creep in when they've got people they see more and less when they've got people who've got different experiences of work and travel when they're you know, we always joke about the person who's got to fix the printer in the office. The office, right? Because they're the person who's always in the office and so or they get asked to be picked up papers, to go to client meetings, because they're the ones that are always coming from the office and things like that. And I think, I think that is that ability to make a team feel like they are being treated in an equitable fashion is going to become increasingly hard as these as our contracts kind of vary more and more within teams. I think that's going to be super hard. And I think I mean, even in 2021 there was a survey done which said that of three, three and a half 1000 employees surveyed worldwide, only 18% indicated they worked in a high fairness environment. So if we're only 18% now, and we're going to see that variation even increase, I just think managed are going to need a lot more support

with that. Yeah, I couldn't agree more this fairness as work becomes more personalized, is such a key thing. And the skills to create perception for fairness and create fair working environments are hard. So much self awareness, so much intentional management, so much perception. I mean, it's, it's, it's difficult. And again, to our point about cost saving. You know, having with time and space to create fair working environments takes more investment from managers of their efforts. So again, a lot of these, a lot of these factors are linked, and I think that sort of leads us on to the last of a factor. So there, you know, the role of a manager needs to change a little bit to to address some of this unfairness. And the time they need to do that is different. And senior leaders, some of their work needs to change, and their capabilities need to change, and almost the whole way we need to think about work needs to change when we're in a hybrid space. And we really think that for our last point, that it's important to reframe what productivity is, and reframe, to some extent, the world of management, if we are to really create great hybrid. Teams that serve the needs of the individuals working in them and the organizations. In fact, we've got a quote from Jamie tienen again at Microsoft, who was a chief scientist there in the article, she says, we must expand the way we think about productivity to focus on well being social connections and collaboration and the innovation they bring to drive business success. So what are we really getting at here? Well, well, we know that hybrid can positively and negatively affect all kinds of aspects of our lives, be it our productivity and our well being and our group dynamics. And really, we need to change what the role of managers is in this. And we need to change what we think of as productivity, productive effort in our organizations. So, so I guess the way I think about this is, in like, the old days, productivity kind of took place in people, sorry, well, being kind of took place in people's own times and and, you know, collaboration just happened organically in the organization as we were there. Or, you know, all those, like, soft, ad hoc conversations took place, and the social connection was maintained as a function of being in these built environments and working next to each other. So we didn't think of those as productive activities, well being or cohesion. They just kind of happened. But now we're working in these hybrid spaces, we really need to think of in time invested in well being and time invested in social cohesion and connection as investments. You know, it's just as productive in many ways, to spend time on our well being and the well being of our team as it is to spend time on Doing good tasks that need to get done. And of course, there's a balance to be to be met within this, but really investing and supporting our colleagues and our own well being is a productive use of our time, just as is focusing on and creating opportunities to improve our cohesion and collaboration. That's not like a nice to have side thing that we do that really is a productive activity, because we need to have all of these things in place if we're going to be successful organizations. We need to have employees who are well and who can move towards thriving in work. We need to have teams that are connected and collaborative, and we need to be able to get the work done, and it's like this three legged stool. All those things need to be managed if we're going to not fall over, if we're going to continue to work. So really reframing what productivity is. So it includes investing time and effort in our own and others well being, reframing it so it includes time and effort, building our teams, maintaining cohesion, maintaining our relationships and social capital. It's essential to do both those things and changing the roles of leaders and managers so they see these things as key parts of their tasks, key parts of their deliverables. Is going to be essential if we're going to really make sure that we succeed in hybrid teams.

So, Jen, yeah, I think, I think yeah, it's so one of the we had a conversation and one of our club with one of our clients and their managers, and we were chatting about this, and we were like, they said, people are being really efficient at cracking through work, and, you know, they're ticking off their task list, but they're less engaged. They're less likely, they're spending less time supporting each other and working on some of the big picture stuff. And it feels like we're going to, like, run out of runway in terms of thinking about the future and where we go to next, beyond what's happening in the right now. And I think, I think that has to become part of someone's job in a concrete, visible, monitorable way, so that someone is actually recognizing that when, you know, they sit down with their manager and they talk about their performance, it's not just about getting the tasks on the list done. How much have you done support the team? How much have you engaged in this process and those things have to be managed? And I always come back to, like, when we work with teams, irrespective hybrid, we work with teams, there was, there's always this trade off of, Oh, I feel like I'm always doing the urgent stuff, not the important. And I feel like a little bit this is the same, right? I'm always doing the things that are visible to me and allow me to get that self attraction of ticking things off my list, and I'm de prioritizing the stuff that feels further away, bigger, more reliable, more relatable to everyone. And I think managers definitely going to have to think about that, right? I think I just, I think, with people working more often, more independently, they've got more autonomy, which is great. They're able to structure their work in them away, but it also makes them more distant from some of the stuff, and so that, therefore, you often talk about bringing it into the light, right? So the stuff that we had in the jobs that we were doing non structured. So in an office, we were chatting, we were exchanging ideas. We were like, Oh, you might want to deal with this person in this way, because that's happened to me. None of that's happening informally. So bringing that into the definition of what a productive role looks like in your organization is going to be really critical. I just couldn't agree more. Yeah,

brilliant. Okay, well, that gets us pretty much to the end of what we're speaking about today. So today we've been talking about hybrid, remote and flexible working in 2023 and what some of our key thoughts are in relation to those like a super mini recap, we think that i. And we know that employees really value this. There's a big sense that hybrid, at least in some level, is going to sustain into the future. But organizations need to not think of it as a cost saving mechanism exclusively, because you need to invest to create a good hybrid team that's investing in your managers, that's investing in your technology, that's investing in the time that people will need to spend, building their relationships and all those types of things. So don't treat it as a cost save. We also think that having a good hybrid policy is necessary, but, but you need more than that, so that policy needs to be flexible, it needs to be inclusive. Ideally, it's sort of CO created, at least with individuals in your organization, so that people have a voice in it. So just sitting in a room and coming up with a great hybrid policy on your own won't mean that you'll work in a great way when it comes to working in a hybrid way. In addition, we know that leaders need to sponsor and role model and trust their employees and develop the skills themselves so that they can really embody great hybrid working, which can be hard, but but we think it's essential. We also think that hybrid it can cause some challenges to view reality, or at least perceptions of fairness in work, so people need to consider those and develop the skills as leaders and managers to address those and create fair working places and across all of us. We think that a key takeaway is that we need to reframe what productivity looks like, what activities are productive? And we need to broaden those out so that definitions of productivity include spending time on our relationships and connecting with each other, and spending time on our own and the well being of others in our team. So those are, I guess, our sort of snapshot takeaways. This is the second of a little mini series looking at leading and managing in 2023 in the upcoming episodes, we're going to be talking about employee wellbeing. We're going to be talking about people and skills for the future, and we're going to be talking about responsible and kind business. And then we're going to wrap up with a little summary thinking about leading and managing in 2023 more broadly, and some of the takeaways for general leadership and lifestyle. So that's it for me. I.