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Leadership and followership
Leadership and followership

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1.1 Hybrid working

Haas (2022) describes the challenges of hybrid work with 5Cs. They are:

  1. Communication – including the technological difficulties associated with remote working, but also the fact that some people are more comfortable speaking up over screens than others, especially in situations where there may already be barriers due to power, status or language differences.
  2. Coordination – because of the extra work required to coordinate with remote teammates, they can be left out of small exchanges and minor decisions, an issue which can grow to include more important conversations and decisions over time.
  3. Connection – as well as technical connections, social connections can be lost when working remotely, potentially creating an ‘underclass’ of those who feel peripheral and disconnected from both the work and the social life that bonds them with colleagues.
  4. Creativity – both collective and individual. As well as the loss of those more fluid and spontaneous conversations, colleagues based at home miss the stimulus of a change of scenery that can also contribute to new ideas.
  5. Culture – if employees, particularly new hires, never or rarely come into the office or spend time together – how can a company’s distinctive ‘feel’ be maintained, and then how can companies differentiate themselves from each other in the competition for talent?

Haas goes on to suggest that using the 5Cs as a checklist and working through them with your hybrid team might be a way to unlock some of the issues. She recommends that you evaluate, analyse, plan and implement improvements together.

There are a number of specific skills and competencies that promote effective hybrid working. In their study of healthcare providers in a hybrid work mode, Oleksa-Marewska and Tokar (2022) identified four core remote leadership competencies that indicate ‘readiness for the challenges of remote and hybrid work’. They are:

  • communicativeness – especially crucial in communicating vision in remote work

  • credibility – both personal and professional, important in building trust and commitment

  • self-development – understood as ‘being open to the search for new solutions and acquiring industry knowledge’

  • digital readiness – referring to ‘an openness to technological solutions and a readiness to implement and use them in order to improve the work of both one’s superiors and subordinates’.

Much more will no doubt be discussed regarding the challenges of leading in a hybrid workplace – this is certainly a developing topic to keep coming back to, and the sections later this week about leadership resources will help you to do that.