How teams can build the best hybrid workplace cultures

The key to building an enjoyable and productive workplace culture to support hybrid work is to empower managers and teams to be build it themselves – with some curation.

Here are some ideas that could improve the outcomes for an organisation who want to make a hybrid workplace, work better for the business:

Mandate that each team designs how they will work

Each team's needs are different, and each should define its own success. An organisation should provide high-level objectives (e.g. we want teams to meet as regularly as needed), but teams should feel ownership over their approach. Whether they end up with loose arrangements or more formal ‘team charters,’ open communication is key. 

This is not a new idea - more than 10 years ago we saw Suncorp empower their teams to design how they worked when they embraces ABW (activity based work) Each team decided on how they would best work together and it was put up on the wall and signed by each person in the team – so they had real ownership of how they worked.

Assess the quality of team interactions

Hybrid-friendly behaviours should not differ from our approach to the professional standards we expect of an employee. We don’t quantify how often to communicate with teammates, how quickly to respond to emails or how often to contribute to meetings, yet managers are able to discern who is performing in these areas or not. The same nuance needs to apply to making ‘hybrid work’. Use data where it makes sense and layer it with qualitative feedback from managers and senior people. Be careful and considerate with quantifying success. The objective is not how often or long someone is in the office, but what efforts they are making towards quality face to face interactions with their team.

Revisit how to measure output and team performance

The need for better ways to measure productivity and performance is definitely not new, but it is more relevant and important than ever. Output can be measured by adopting frameworks such as OKRs (Objective & Key Results) or implementing tools that enable teams to plan, assign, and complete tasks within milestones. Employees do have a fundamental role in making this work; they can’t demand a workplace to be built on trust and autonomy but avoid being accountable for job performance.

Train, empower and resource managers to have the final say

If success comes from bespoke team approaches to hybrid work, then the responsibility lies within the layers of management to deliver success. The capacity and capability of the managers have to be a significant consideration in the implementation of hybrid work, and they need the power to deliver success and make changes where they need to.