1.6 Hybrid culture: what does great look like?

A hybrid culture develops in an environment that blends virtual and in-person work arrangements. Although changes in the world of work have dominated our thoughts for the last couple of years (and with good reason, since work is a huge part of our lives), workplaces are not the only environments considering what it means to have a hybrid culture (Cooks-Campbell, 2022).

What seems to be clear in the HEI sector is that the rapid pivot to online as a knee-jerk reaction to the pandemic has caused a great deal of cultural tension for both staff and students.

According to an article by Stanier et al. (2022), a hybrid culture will only work if you treat everyone as working remotely. This ensures that everyone gets the same information, tools and opportunities to succeed, and it doesn’t differ according to where they sit and whether they are working at a desk in an office, hot-desking in a collab space, or at home. They feel that a successful hybrid culture needs consistent action from leadership in the five areas listed below and, as a leader, you will need to ask yourself some of the questions included in each area.

• Embracing asynchronous communication – Do your employees have equal opportunities to participate in communication? If they don’t, you need to move your synchronous exchanges to asynchronous, which can be achieved through moving to written or recorded communications. Do you really need to have that daily stand-up? Are there people unable to attend? If so, you could create a chat channel with short updates or provide a recorded video to replace a company-wide live meeting. If something really does need to be live communication, ensure that you provide a recording and a transcript for those that were unable to attend.
• Making communication boundaries clear – Do your employees know when and how to get in touch with each other? Are your current employees annoyed at being interrupted when they are working? If so, start to create some rules of engagement per platform. Do you expect instant messages to be answered instantly? What about emails? Are meetings optional or compulsory? By making this really clear and part of your culture, it can reduce anxiety and stop the fear of missing out among your employees. Do your employees make their work hours clear with each other?
• Championing documentation and artefacts – Can your employees find content and information easily? Do you use collaboration tools to enable employees to collaborate remotely in real time and make comments on documentation? If you don’t, start to identify tools and technology that facilitate this, as this can really cut down on wasted time in duplication, and also increase employee morale and feelings of ownership, according to Stanier et al. (2022).
• Broadcasting communication – One thing employees really missed during lockdown was the ability to just talk and have what some call ‘water cooler’ conversations. One-to-one conversations might have been possible in a small office environment but it is really difficult to scale them up (Stanier et al., 2022) and not possible in a hybrid culture. Instead, Stanier et al. suggest that leaders need to develop a culture of written or recorded messaging to convey the heartbeat of the company. This can be achieved through regular newsletters or recorded weekly messages. On a smaller scale, teams could be encouraged to self-manage this sort of communication, sharing successes and achievements and working with other teams to provide updates and share what they are working on: ‘A company of sharing encourages further sharing’.
• Providing the tools to succeed – Do you have digital tools that enable your employees to work effectively? Do you have a plethora of tools available, but none that are widely used? Do your employees have a safe and comfortable working environment at home and in the office? During the pandemic, many employees just had to adapt to what they had, even if that meant working from their sofa, their bed or even in a chaotic family kitchen. It is the company’s responsibility to ensure that employees are successful wherever they are.

In the following video contributors share insights for developing shared values and inclusive organisational cultures.

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ELISE LOCKYER

How do we enable you to bring, be, become your best selves within Sonovate? And by your best selves, it means your individual best self, you. Every single person within the business is different. Every single person is driven by different things, motivated by different things. And we want to understand each and every person's individual motivations, drivers, desires, skills to be able to enable them to come on the journey, their individual journey within Sonovate, but as part of a wider, more understanding team that will enable them to join their career and grow.

In terms of employee experience and the impact that it has on culture, they sit absolutely hand in hand. If you're driven to provide your employees the best experience that they can have along the whole employee life cycle with you, then culture is going to be pretty important to you. It's going to be at the top of your priorities. And a culture is really something that's created by tying together all of the experiences of all the individuals and what they bring to the business.

So organisations need to consider how it comes down to the employee lifecycle. It comes down to every single point that an employee will travel on throughout their journey within a business. So you need to think about how you want to operate as a business. What are your values? What are your behaviours? What's really important for you? What's the strategic vision of the business? What's the vision? What's the short-term plan versus what's the long-term plan?

And I think the most important thing to note that historically you would have had a very-- if you think of push and pull style of communication, you would have historically had a very push style of communication potentially within organizations where the senior leadership team or the executive team would have pushed information down to their employees and not necessarily had the opportunity to have two-way conversations for them to ask questions to really gain an understanding. And even if they did, they may not have fully listened to what was truly being said.

JACOB MORGAN

There are ten things for culture, there are three things for technology, and there are four things for space. But broadly speaking, those are the three environments. And organisations, leaders, just need to understand that, hey, these are the three things that we can design and create for. That's number one.

Number two is I think leaders need to understand the moments that matter in the lives of their employees. We traditionally have this concept of the employee lifecycle, which a lot of people know, it's this circular image, and it's attract, hire, nurture, retain, transition, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The problem with that is that that's not how employees view their time with you. If you were to go to any one of your employees and say, hey, what stage are you in? They're going to look at you like you're nuts, like, what do you mean what stage am I in, and who are you?

But instead, if you go to one of your employees and say, hey, how is it going at the company? They're going to respond to you in terms of moments. Oh, I'm working on this really big project. I just got promoted. I'm having a really hard time with this client. It's moments.

And so leaders need to understand the moments that matter in the lives of their employees. These could be personal moments or these could be work related moments. Buying my first house. I'm going through a divorce. We had our first child. What are these moments, whether personal or professional, that matter in the lives of your employees, and how do you design experiences around them? So moments that matter in the lives of your employees, crucial.

Another thing that organisations can do, you put people in positions of power who care. I can talk to you about employee experience all day long, but if you have leaders in your company who are like, nah, command and control, I'm going to tell you what to do, you shut up and do your job, it doesn't matter how much I tell you, it doesn't matter what books I recommend, that's how it's going to be. So put people in positions of power who care about employee experience and putting people first.

And the last thing that I can recommend is to treat your organisation much more like a laboratory and less like a factory. Factories are linear. They're process-centric. They're all about the status quo. It's the pyramid hierarchy, right? That's how the factories operate.

MATT WINTLE

You've got to find a balance that allows a business to run effectively. I think a lot of it's about culture. I really do. I think the core of every business is its people. And the way that people interact with one another is what makes a business run. So you have to protect that.

But you have to also mitigate the risk of people being unhappy because you're asking them to work in a way they don't want to. Plus, you have to mitigate the risk of recruiting people who actually have got an offer over here, where they can work in whatever pattern they want. So it's playing out really interestingly. We don't know the answer yet. It'll be interesting to see where it lands in the next few years.

When I think about the balance of working at home and working in the office, I think there's been a fundamental shift in what people expect from those two experiences. Our employees tell us, and certainly I feel it, that working from home used to be the time where you had the space to be able to do some of the work you'd never get to. So whether that's writing a document or preparing a board paper or whatever it might be, it used to be in the office, you'd never get any chance to do that because you're constantly busy, in meetings, talking to people, doing things.

Now I think that's completely changed because the expectation now, or at least the behaviour, whether it's expectation or not, I'm not sure, but the behaviour is you're back to back on meetings when you're at home. So that time at home that used to be, take a breath, I can get some work done, is now boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, meeting, meeting, meeting.

MYLES OGILVIE

There's at least three key patterns within leadership that we know are so important. And this is leadership at all levels, whether you're a CEO, whether you're a senior executive, whether you're a middle manager, or whether you're a team leader, you're a leader at any level, and you set the culture of the team or the team of teams or the divisions that you're responsible for.

And so in setting that culture, one thing to bear in mind is role modelling. If you're seeking to improve ways of working, you need to be role modelling those ways of working, and that means some of the things we've talked about, such as making work visible, making strategy visible, making purpose visible, measuring results, and showing you care about those results. So role modelling the focus on flow, on quality, on staff engagements, on safety, and on value.

Another item is creating psychological safety. And what you can do as a leader to improve psychological safety, which is another way of helping your teams to learn. And the third key leadership element is around offering people autonomy, but maintaining alignment.

So alignment is all around enabling purpose to be clear, helping across different teams that purpose to be clear across teams so that different teams can align to that purpose, but giving teams autonomy about how they respond to it.

So there's three considerations for leadership to be aware of. And then moving on through some of the other patterns for improving better value since it's for happier, we see your organisation structure is important, a key topic, how you actually choose to organise your teams into long-lived cross-functional units that are aligned to value as opposed to, historically, you'd have had a functionally-based organisation. You're going to find it hard for teams to continually improve the outcomes if they are in functional silos because they have a limited impact over the outcome.

NATASHA DAVIES

And so it's really important, actually, that leaders, organisations are building inclusive cultures, getting the foundations right with good policies and procedures that don't just hit the legal minimums, but actually strive for best practice, building in equality and inclusion from the very, very top within organisational strategies, making sure that somebody is championing this right at the most senior levels of the organisation, whether that's around your senior leadership table or any boards, getting the right culture in place so that making sure that policies and procedures are applied consistently, that we've got leaders at every level within the organisation who are embracing the vision and the values in relation to equality, diversity and inclusion.

And I think with culture, it's really important, actually, that focus doesn't slip because it's really easy to fall into bad habits. And then that can really shift and change the culture that you've actually got in place within an organisation. Obviously, training and stuff like that is going to be really important as well, but not just a one off, it's continued investment in development so that all staff are contributing to a more equal, equitable and inclusive work environment.

And then ultimately, it's really important that we're measuring what we're doing. Have we got KPIs in place that focus on equality and diversity? Are we carrying out staff engagement surveys to actually check whether the culture we think we have is the culture that we do have? Because if we don't measure where we are, we don't know when to celebrate successes, we don't know where we need to learn from mistakes, and we can't identify areas where we can change and adapt to be even better than perhaps we're already doing or to fix any problems that we might have.

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