Developing a Holistic Approach to Enable the Hybrid Workforce

Ahybrid workforce is defined by a mix of employees, some of whom work in an office, some of whom work away from the office, and all with the ability to move back and forth between both environments. While some employees have worked remotely for decades, the recent boom in virtual work necessitates the creation of a larger and scaled infrastructure to support it.

混合工作的爆炸已经将曾经是员工住宿的东西转移到了有目的的战略性公司范围内的方法中。这是由于需要确保员工安全，降低成本并满足员工对灵活性的增加需求。对员工和组织都有影响。为了构建富有成效且令人满意的工作经验，两者都需要负责创建有效的混合场景。

Addressing the Challenges of aHybrid Workforcewith四种关键策略

Ahybrid workforcehas challenges—real and perceived. There are concerns about how employees will continue to collaborate and innovate if they are not together. There is a heightened awareness of digital fatigue, and personal wellbeing is increasingly being highlighted. Still, others wonder if productivity and effectiveness can be sustained. Business leaders worry that the organization’s culture will suffer if employees are physically scattered.

Going forward, new approaches need to be imagined related to career development and learning while simultaneously ensuring there is equitable treatment across all dimensions of the organization.

There are four critical areas that affect organizational performance that need to be addressed:

1. SustainableOrganization DesignandChange Management
2. IntentionalLeadershipMindsets and Skillsets
3. SupportiveTechnology
4. AConnectedLearningOrganization

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as employees deciding where they will work. Successful and sustainable hybrid workforce models are those where leaders take a holistic approach and build sustainability into their hybrid workforce model.

Business leaders can accomplish this by setting a clear strategy,aligning organizational capabilitiesto support the strategy, and enabling people to deliver.

Setting a Clear Strategy Across Your Hybrid Workforce

虽然一些团队正在通过的问题of hybrid individually, business leaders need to look across the organization and ask more targeted questions. For example: What organizational capabilities are needed to function globally and regionally in this new hybrid work model? How does the organizational structure need to shift to align and organize around those capabilities? How do we get the right people, and how do we support them from a training and leadership perspective? What are we measuring to determine the organization is shifting successfully?

These questions are important, but start by reviewing the current strategic priorities. Determine if there are critical impacts to these priorities that need to be addressed. The strategic priorities are designed to help the organization grow and compete in the market. They establish the roadmap by which an organization can extend and protect its core, deliver managed growth, and capitalize on new growth areas. As such, it’s not enough to take the existing strategy and layer hybrid work models on top of it.

因为它关系到战略,组织需要to evaluate potential effects on the strategic priorities and determine how best to address them. Organizations often see effects in the form of performance failures. These failures can come from an inability to make decisions rapidly, to react to market changes effectively, or perhaps allocate resources appropriately.

Once the current strategy has been reviewed and redefined, leaders must able to confirm that capabilities are aligned to deliver on this strategy.

Aligning Organizational Capabilities in a Hybrid Workforce

Organizational capabilities are assets or characteristics that, while often intangible, are critical for success. Collective skills, expertise, and alignment of people across an organization often come to mind when discussing organizational capabilities. Other examples that affect the strategy include cross-functional collaboration, unique technology, decision-making agility, talent management, and readiness for change.

尽管developing strategy is a strength of many organizational leaders, it is often done without thorough consideration of the capabilities or characteristics of the organization and the people in it. Additionally, as the strategy shifts, capabilities needed to support that strategy may also shift and must be considered.

As the way work gets done changes, we must reexamine the existing workforce capabilities and expectations. New systems may replace existing teams. New agile collaboration models may require a shift in structure. As the work processes and roles are shifted, jobs must be reexamined for fit within the new framework.

Enabling People to Deliver

当工作场所继续进入一个hybrid workforce model, organizations must prepare and enable people to deliver in that environment. Although this is primarily an employee-driven change, not all employees are excited about it. For many, it will create new challenges with a lack of social interaction, struggle with separating work from home, and difficulty fully engaging with their work. For those who prefer a traditional face-to-face set-up, the landscape of the workplace and society as a whole may have shifted such that it is actually challenging NOT to engage in this. Regardless of opinions surrounding the new nature of work, people must be enabled to flourish.

Culture plays a significant role in enabling people to deliver in the new hybrid work environment. Similarly, how well people are enabled influences culture. Establishing expectations without the proper development, systems, or change management to support the delivery of these expectations will damage the morale, engagement, and productivity of your workforce. Leadership must fully understand and support the shift in the approach, the hybrid model must be fully defined and understood by all employees, and systems and policies must be set up to support the new working model; otherwise, we are setting up employees to fail. We are asking employees to engage in new processes, a new way of working together, and new expectations. This is a significant shift, and effective enablement of the workforce begins with change management.

Change Management Plays a Huge Role in Transitioning to a Hybrid Workforce

Although there tends to be a natural resistance to change within organizations, in the case of hybrid models, employees are driving the change. How will leaders help and guide employees through the change while simultaneously navigating their own struggles and challenges? Key components of change must focus on leadership adoption of the change and developing leaders to support employees through it.

As organizations try to define their own models, any combination of work can be considered hybrid:

• Asynchronous
• 位置不同
• 选择何时何地工作
• Specified in- versus out-of-office arrangements
• Core working hours

“混合工作模型”没有一个定义。随着组织制定其战略，结构和流程，他们必须考虑最适合和支持其战略的混合布置。员工和领导者必须对期望有相同的理解，以使模型起作用。

Finally, for effective change, we must ensure systems are designed to support the new way of working. Technical systems will support如何the work gets done, but performance management, compensation, and learning systems are equally critical:

• How are employees incentivized?
• Is there a loop for gaining and sharing feedback?
• Are systems in place to support asynchronous work schedules in addition to differently located work?

Every decision has both intended and unintended consequences. Change practitioners need to develop an agile change management model that progressively defines the change and adjusts as the environment adjusts.

尽管organizations and employees have proven they can be productive in a virtual environment, it is the satisfaction side of the equation that may be suffering. Organizations, and their people, have proven they can “get it done.” They’ve been productive, but at what cost? Wellbeing, a priority for many employees, has suffered. Digital fatigue and an always-connect-to-work scenario threatens work-life balance. Career development has been neglected. Employees have survived, but how can leaders refocus on帮助他们蓬勃发展. Hybrid leaders need to redouble their efforts on employee satisfaction. Some ways they can do this are to:

• Understand what’s important to employees. More than ever, engage the entire person.
• Continue to talk about career development regardless of location.
• Be mindful of fatigue and burnout.
• 最重要的是，这不是一种千篇一律的方法。

领导者的思维精神和技能，领导混合动力团队

Leaders need to honenew mindsetsand apply the same skillsets in a new context.

When leading a hybrid workforce, leaders need to think digital and virtual first. In scenarios fromonboarding为了协作会议，领导者需要假设至少某些团队将在一定程度上参加。数字和虚拟需求应该是起点。

混合领导者需要从四种关键领导力的思维方式的角度思考 - agie，包容，企业和成长。他们需要将这些思维方式应用于这种新环境。

Re-Enabling High Performance Teams in a Hybrid Work Model

尽管leaders need to understand the lived reality of each member of their team, they also need to be mindful of how todrive team performanceas a whole. The same critical elements of an in-person team create a strong, high-performing team. What’s different is the context in which these elements are applied and, as a result, the nuances of application.

媒体上充斥着“美国大辞职”的故事。尽管HR technologyplays a supporting role in enabling employee-based business processes, if that technology is not “fit for purpose” to meet the needs of the organization and the employees, it can be a major factor in determining if the hybrid model is successful. How and when technology is used plays a critical role in helping to drive the organization’s strategy and improving employee satisfaction and retention.

In the shift to a hybrid workforce, organizations need to reassess how they’re usingtechnologyand analyze how well it is meeting their needs.

Employee Expectations

Nearly everyone above the age of 12 has a cell phone with easily available information, and employees expect a similar level of sophistication while working. Employees need the ability to track where they are and where they’re headed in their careers, from their skills to their opportunities, and be able to complete day-to-day tasks in their current role. The technology an organization uses needs to be an integrated mechanism to accomplish all aspects of an employee’s experience daily and long-term.

Information Demand for Agile Decision-Making

There is going to be a much greater need fromleadership for information on-demandregarding capabilities, skillsets, gaps, how to close gaps, and how to execute on strategy and vision for the organization. Executive leadership will expect to be able to access this information and understand it clearly.

尽管leaders have the same employees, when they can’t strictly see them regularly, it gets more difficult to look collectively at the group and understand their capabilities. It’s a problem whether people are in the office or working remotely.

During the shift to a hybrid workforce, organizations need to provide the technology for leaders to map employee skill levels, gaps, and learning demand effectively.

Ultimately, if technology in not intuitive, responsive, collaborative, and supportive of flexible business processes, employee satisfaction and an organization’s ability to execute effectively will suffer.

最后,如果组织及其人going to move from surviving to thriving in a virtual environment, establishing opportunities to learn and grow are critical; however, these opportunities need to move beyond simply converting training to avirtual instructor-led format. A connected learning organization needs to meet employees wherever they are, regardless of location. It also needs to take advantage of all that technology has to offer to make that happen.

In a previousarticle on virtual training，我们讨论了如何建立强大的虚拟培训实践。其中一部分包括发展生存，复兴和繁荣的路线图。大多数组织发现自己处于此路线图的第一步，将内容迅速转换为虚拟讲师主导的培训（VILT）并加强虚拟交付。但是，随着混合劳动力模型已成为首选的未来，学习团队正在升级，重建或需要重建他们学习策略and structures.

The thrive concept in the roadmap is a process to develop learning beyond simply converting training you have already to virtual formats. It is structuring learning in new ways that can support employees’ preferred learning habits with the goal to build skills collaboratively over time.

An example of a learning program designed for multiple needs over time might look like the following timeline:

The New Roles for the Connected Learning Organization

雇用预定义的角色不一定是最好的方法。员工正在学习多种技能，并正在寻找他们未来的角色。学习者自己正在成为贡献者。

以下图比较了moments of learning needwith how learning roles are changing:

Rethinking how employees access, interact with, and contribute tolearning across an organization是设计学习和绩效支持计划的核心原则。组织需要将这些思维方式构建为学习角色，以创建一个真正的联系和敏捷的劳动力以及支持它们的计划。

The Work-Learning Ecosystem

Lastly, learning teams need to put the tools, learning technologies, and structures in place to enable learning delivery and测量across an organization. Here is a sample map we use often to illustrate this point.

The main point of this is to set up a system with the right technologies to meet employees at the moment of learning need.

The Hybrid Workforce Is Redefining How Business Is Done… for the Better

The impact of the hybrid workforce explosion will reverberate for many years. Organizations that embrace hybrid and plan thoughtfully for it will be ahead of the game in terms of long-term viability. They will continue to be successful in achieving their goals and fostering an environment where people want to come to work each day—even when “coming to work” means settling into a favorite dining room chair. By focusing on strategy, leadership, technology, and learning, organizations can make sure that chair is firmly supported.

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About the Authors

利亚克拉克的高级主管领导with more than 27 years of experience inleadership, strategy, marketing, and product development. She works with organizations to bring creative solutions to leadership and engagement challenges at all levels. She is an author, researcher, and speaker at global events.

克里斯·戴维斯（Chris Davis）是业务咨询高级总监。He has over 20 years of experience delivering consulting andorganization designsolutions to Fortune 500 companies and his work has regularly helped connect strategy to execution. Prior to joining GP Strategies, he was a Naval Officer leading teams of a nuclear submarine.

Matt Donovan is the Chief Learning and Innovation Officerand is a recognized name in learning, bringing more than 25 years of experience craftinglearner-centric solutionsand leading high-impact development teams. He has a background ininstructional designand often leads workshops, speaks at global events, and has won many industry awards, including being named one of Training Magazine’s Top 10 International Trainers under 40.

Cheryl Jackson, PhD is the Organization Design and Change Practice Lead.She is a highly experienced consultant, working with organizations to improve operations through assessment, job design, learning and development, performance management, and organization design. She is a regularly published author, speaker, and lecturer at Texas A&M University. Cheryl is also the Founder ofThe Psycho Momand Co-Founder ofThe CornHer Office, a community to provide resources for women in the workplace.

John Plusquellec is the Vice President of Human Capital Technologies并且已经活跃在HR Technologyconsulting business for over 20 years. He and his organization specialize in supporting client’s HR transformations, from implementing new technologies to redesigning business processes across all industries to improve business performance.