Manager effectiveness is a key enabler of successful hybrid working. It can help to preserve and improve the culture, as well as keep productivity and engagement at best levels. But many struggle to adapt to a hybrid working environment.
I often explain face-to face-management as a very sensory experience. Managers can see and hear (and perhaps even smell) what their team are doing. But in a remote or hybrid environment there is a sensory loss. This brings with it all the emotions and uncertainties that often accompany such loss.
Much like with a sensory loss though, adapting one’s practices, unlearning and relearning skills can be a way through such uncertainty, and managers who are used to face-to-face management must do precisely that.
Do you have ‘productivity paranoia’?
My own research, some of it anecdotal, suggests that newer managers who have become so since the Covid-19 pandemic often feel more comfortable than those who were managers prior to that pandemic.
For the newer managers, the challenge may be simpler – learning about remote and hybrid management is all they have ever known. It is management to them, with nothing to unlearn.
Research by Microsoft shows the extent to which many managers are struggling. 85% say that the shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive.12% have full confidence that their team is productive, compared to 87% of employees who feel they are productive.
It is easy to see why Microsoft label this ‘productivity paranoia’, yet it is also understandable why managers may feel this given the lack of sensory information. As Microsoft also point out, these feelings risk making hybrid working unsustainable even though there is plenty of data (number of meetings, hours worked and more) to show that, if anything, employees are more active. The world of work has changed drastically, and managers’ mindsets – and skill sets – have not always kept pace. Nor are they suitable for a digitally connected, distributed hybrid workforce.
Stop winging it
A project by CMI and Timewise found that only 25% of participants understood how to design and use meetings to best effect in a hybrid environment prior to hybrid working training workshops.
Discover more key findings
Navigating the ‘squeezed middle’
Managers could also be something of a ‘squeezed middle’ here, trying to reconcile the needs of their team with the views held by senior leaders in some organisations that only on-site working will work.
Microsoft examined this and found that 35% of managers had no personal preference about how often employees came on site but felt that they had to follow company policy regardless. But such managers must follow the overall organisational hybrid approach. Managers must ensure that if they must get their hybrid employees to come on site that there is purpose to this. An on-site employee experience needs to be one that connects employees to each other and builds their social capital, while reminding employees of ways to keep connections going digitally in between the on-site time.
Managers must create this, as well as creating the digital methods that build community among their team, keeping conversations going. This will be needed regardless of what the managers may feel about remote and hybrid working, or about the approach taken by their organisation.
Here are four steps that managers can take to make hybrid working work in their organisations…
1. Empower your employees
Managers need to understand their role as the connection between the prevailing view about hybrid working in the organisation and the employees themselves. They must be given the right support, and the right level of empowerment, to make this work. Managers could struggle with understanding this role, with seeing themselves as the main arbiters of team and, ultimately, organisational culture.
Managers who have been used to being the main hub around which on-site working may revolve could find it difficult seeing asynchronous work and relationships between individual hybrid employees take a higher priority. Managers need to avoid being the bottleneck through which recognition and feedback between team members takes place but could equally struggle with letting go of such a function.
Keep reading for three more tips…
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