The hybrid workforce presents new challenges to both keeping the organizational culture alive and identifying and developing leaders current and future leaders. Culture and leadership development are closely related and culminate in employee engagement. -By INGRID JOHNSON
When the pandemic struck, organizational leaders did not have much time to adapt to the hybrid workforce. Now that the pandemic is in the past, managers face a permanently changed workforce model and must find a way to maintain the organization’s culture and support employee growth. When everyone worked onsite, people could interact and learn from each other, but in a hybrid workforce, employee interactions are not spontaneous and require more planning. Managers and supervisors must depend on new skills to keep the culture alive among all employees. There are two aspects to leadership development: developing current leaders with the skills needed to manage a hybrid workforce, and identifying and developing future leaders while maintaining inclusivity without regard to employee location. There must be more intentionality to drive employee connections that help people continuously grow and learn no matter where they work, with some preparing to be the next generation of leaders.
Adapting to the Hybrid Workplace
The hybrid workplace is here to stay, and it presents a myriad of new challenges. Two challenges are maintaining the organizational culture and keeping people connected so they can grow and learn in their jobs through interactions with others. Another challenge is identifying and developing remote employees who have a high potential to become leaders on an equal basis with onsite employees - while ensuring diversity, equity, and inclusion remain core values. Before the hybrid workforce became a common model, leadership ability was successfully identified and developed apprenticeship style. High potential employees were given opportunities to participate in teams to develop collaboration skills, obtain cross-functional training, and take on job assignments that build necessary skills. It was a mix of formal training, testing, observation, and experiential learning, all supported by frequent face-to-face feedback.
When the workforce has a sizeable decentralized population, it is more challenging to accomplish goals such as identifying and developing high-potential employees for future leadership roles, ensuring that employees remain connected, and supporting diversity and inclusion as core values. Yet these leadership skills are critical to maintaining a positive, unified corporate culture. Whether developing current or future leaders, a new strategy can adapt the apprenticeship style of leadership by utilizing technologies and offering opportunities for personal growth through job assignments that strengthen core competencies and add new leadership skills.
Adapting Apprenticeship Style Leadership Training
Apprenticeship is a training system for new practitioners of a profession or trade that includes on-the-job training and study. The apprenticeship model can be adapted to the hybrid workplace. Seasoned entrepreneur Asha Pandey, Founder and Chief Learning Strategist at EI Design before retiring, makes five key recommendations to apply the apprenticeship model to the hybrid workplace. They are to implement a robust coaching, mentor-matching, and mentoring program with feedback loops; offer experiential learning and simulations where employees can generate ideas; enable skills safe practice zones where employees can practice, fail, and iterate; offer personalized learning paths; and provide microlearning available when and where the learner needs it.
Of course, employees get leadership development opportunities when their managers recognize their capabilities and support employee connections and advancement. The Center for Creative Leadership offers five tips for better leadership in the hybrid work environment. First is reassuring people that no matter where they work their careers are not limited, and communication effectiveness is a top priority. Ensuring team members can freely express concerns and hold conversations with each other without regard to location, supported by a coaching culture, are essential to developing employee engagement.
Second, it is critical to continue inclusive leadership practices when holding group calls and virtual meetings. These are opportunities to hone communication skills and identify potential leaders, similar to in-office meetings. Third is cultivating a mindset of learning agility or the ability to adapt. Regularly talking to employees about what is and is not working are important feedback opportunities. It also offers opportunities to strengthen a sense of belonging and to identify people with innovative solutions.
The CCL developed the direction, alignment, and commitment (DAC) model for leadership, so the fourth recommendation is to develop leaders who know how to gauge the success of the hybrid workforce model. They should know how to guide team members in achieving goals, keep employees with different tasks and roles coordinated, and develop team commitment. When DAC decreases, the dynamics of the hybrid workforce model are not working.
The fifth tip for better leadership in a hybrid work environment is consciously thinking about team networks. Keeping onsite and remote employees connected is crucial to both team success and identifying employees with a high potential for leadership ability. Leaders should evaluate how onsite teams connect with remote teams and what is needed to ensure the best interactions are possible. Evaluating how they and their team members must span boundaries, including peers in different departments, management, and external stakeholders, is important.
The Role of Human Connection
Demonstrating that employee career progression is not dependent on the employee’s location is crucial to maintaining an inclusive and supportive organizational culture. Investing in the technology infrastructure, tools, and leadership skills development for current leaders and high-potential employees shows a commitment to employee success which builds trust. Technology can be used for virtual meetings, eLearning development platforms, communication via chat channels, work projects, and collaboration with onsite and remote team members and across functions.
Adam Smiley Poswolsky is a workplace belonging expert who shared tips for strengthening human connection, which creates a culture of connection in a hybrid world. He recommends shifting from an annual or biannual connection time to connecting all the time. Though bringing employees from all locations together periodically is essential, more is needed. Instead, find ways to build connection habits into the employee experience. For example, offer peer coaching programs, mentorship opportunities, ongoing in-person and virtual training, creating intergenerational co-leadership initiatives that match experienced leaders with high-potential employees, holding works-in-progress sessions to share unfinished projects, developing employee resource groups, and having transparency and accountability sessions concerning DEI initiatives. Connection activities ensure employees stay connected and are noticed for career-building opportunities. These tactics are equally crucial to onsite and remote employees.
All Connected
Identifying employees for leadership development, strengthening employee engagement, and building employee connections, are interrelated strategies that build a culture of trust, inclusion, and belonging. Relationships still matter in the hybrid workforce and in keeping the leadership pipeline full.
Authors Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Chief Innovation Officer at ManpowerGroup, and Katarina Berg, Chief Human Resources Officer and global head of Strategy Operations at Spotify, make a critical point about the hybrid workforce that many organizations are struggling to assimilate into their strategizing.
“To be clear, culture does not go away when the office is a bit emptier, nor does it cease to evolve. However, as the experience of culture the way we have gotten used to defining it has become more diffused, elusive, and subjective, it’s harder for organizations to connect with people and connect them through a homogeneous cultural experience. If work is something you do and not a place you come to, then maybe it is about time we got rid of the notion that culture sits within the four walls of the office.”
Effective leadership development continues to depend on connections and other work experiences, in addition to carefully designed development activities, and all are within the context of culture.