A common challenge for building a strong hybrid and remote work culture are tensions around differences in time spent in the office. To address this, leaders must create a work culture of “Excellence From Anywhere” that focuses on deliverables rather than where you work. That’s the key take-away message of this episode of the Wise Decision Maker Show, which describes the most effective strategies for a hybrid and remote work culture.

Video: “Effective Strategies for a Hybrid and Remote Work Culture”

Podcast: “Effective Strategies for a Hybrid and Remote Work Culture”

Links Mentioned in Videocast and Podcast

• Here is the article: Effective Strategies for a Hybrid and Remote Work Culture
• The book Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage is available here.
• You are welcome to register for the free Wise Decision Maker Course 

Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the wise decision maker show where we help you make the wisest and most profitable decisions. And today, we’ll talk about how to have an effective hybrid and remote work culture. It’s not the same as in office culture. Unfortunately, too many leaders who are trying for a hybrid and remote model are adopting strategies that are good fit for an in office culture, but a bad fit for a hybrid culture, remote culture. Now the pandemic challenges traditional office work cultures and forces companies to adapt to the future of work, which is obviously hybrid and remote. That’s why we’re seeing that the people who can work remotely are definitely spending a bunch of their time working remotely. Overall, people are quite a bit more productive working at home than in the office, especially on their individual tasks. On average, they’re five to 15% more productive, depending on industry and style of work and collaboration. And of that 55 to 15%. The individual tasks are where they’re especially more productive, because they’re not distracted by their office mates, they can focus on things, they can be comfortable, that’s a great environment, especially when companies are funding their home offices, which is really important. So that is what you want to be thinking about for hybrid employees for fully remote employees. How do you have an effective culture of work? The challenge comes when you have different people coming in at different times. So if you have a hybrid model, with some people being fully remote, some people coming in one day a week, some people to some people three days a week, that is challenging, especially when you have essential employees coming in full time. That was a fortune 500, high tech manufacturing company that I was helping where some people could just stay home all the time. Some people had to come in, because of their collaborative activities or their teammates, which were better down the office for one or two days a week. But some people who are in the shop floor of this high tech manufacturing company had to come in full time. And that’s a serious challenge. So this is a big, big challenge for people who are coming in at different times because of the potential to create tension stresses, negative emotions, a sense of haves and have nots, this danger of resentment over flexibility, or some people having more flexibility, other people having less flexibility. So that’s a serious issue. But leaders aren’t really thinking about these challenges and they aren’t prepared to address these challenges around the future of work because of dangerous cognitive biases, dangerous judgment errors. So these cognitive biases are the dangerous judgment errors, the mental blind spots that come from how our minds are wired. They lead us to making bad decisions, strategic decisions, financial decisions, people decisions, when comparing various options, and sticking to what we know rather than choosing the best option. So leaders tend to go with their gut, you might have heard of this, go with your gut, follow your heart, trust your intuitions, that’s bad. You want to instead go with what are the best practices, instead of what your gut tells you to do. One of the biggest challenges with leadership decision making around the future of work around hybrid and remote schedules. And what to do about that is called functional fixedness. functional fixedness. You might have heard of this as the hammer nail syndrome. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well, when you have one way of functioning, when you perceive that there’s only one correct way of functioning, then you tend to adopt that technique, the way of let’s say collaborating, you’ve learned how to collaborate in the office, you’ve learned how to lead in the office. And then you apply that to all other settings, hybrid settings, remote settings, and rejecting best practices, choosing not to adopt best practices for hybrid and remote work, even when that’s a really bad idea. So this traditional in office collaboration, that people who are in leadership roles tend to impose is not a good fit for hybrid and remote work. That’s one issue. A related issue is called the not invented here syndrome. It’s related to the functional fixedness issue. It has to do with rejecting practices that aren’t invented within the organization. These best practices that are external to the organization and external to the team, external to the department, even when they’re within the same organization tend to be rejected, even if those practices work better. So this is something new that you really want to be thinking about from a leadership perspective, that you want to not fall into functional fixedness and not fallen to the not invented here syndrome and then sent you want to defeat these cognitive biases and there are over 100 of these dangerous judgment errors, but these two are the most relevant for the future. of work in different hybrid and remote schedules. To defeat these cognitive biases, you want to adopt a hybrid first model. Most male employees are going to come in one day a week, maybe two days at most, well, three days if they really have to. And of course, some essential employees are going to be on the shop floor, or something like that. But most people are going to come in and day, some people will be fully remote, and create a new work culture around focusing on hybrid and remote work that’s really suited for this type of work. To address the potential friction over flexibility that tensions, the challenges with different people coming in different times, you want to think about, okay, this is an issue, how do I dress it in advance rather than dressing it once it blows up in your face. So to address these potential cultural divides, think about introducing a strategy that I would call excellence from anywhere. So that’s what I’ve been talking to with my 17 organizations, including the fortune 500 company that adopted a hybrid first model, an excellence from anywhere strategy. So you want to prevent that sense of haves and have nots from developing. Now, what does excellence from anywhere involve? It’s a shared and flexible culture for everyone focusing on accomplishing your tasks regardless of where you are. So allow remote work whenever possible, when you can do your task remotely, go ahead and do it remotely, you don’t have to come to the office if it’s not something that you have to do in order to accomplish a certain task. But if you do have to accomplish a certain task that requires coming to the office, you come to the office is all about your tasks. It’s all about what you’re doing. So you want to focus on deliverables and achievements, rather than the methodology and the location of your work. And then there are best practices for treating hybrid and remote teams as part of this, so collaborating innovatively in hybrid remote settings, now, you want to focus on best practices that help integrate employees into the culture of the future of work. And you want to also integrate employees, but also at the same time, ensure that they have good relationships with their managers, which has been shown to be the top top thing that you need to have in order to retain employees and have them integrated. So for employee morale, for employee attention, reengagement that is really going to be critical, that good relationship with the manager. So the leaders, as a leader, you want to train employees to focus on deliverables, and you want to evaluate their performance based on deliverables rather than presence, or work done. You want to focus on accomplishments, their tasks, achievements, and that’s what the excellence from anywhere strategy helps you do. Value deliverables, collaboration and innovation as part of deliverables, not simply your individual tasks, but how do you collaborate with others? How do you innovate, focusing on this shared work culture of excellence from anywhere, the core of the strategy of excellence from when you were is that everyone pulls together to meet common goals. And then certain people have certain tasks within those goals, and they can do them from wherever it is the best, most appropriate place to do those tasks. And the location doesn’t matter for the accomplishment of those tasks. So you want to reframe the discussion, not how much time somebody spends in the office or out of the office, that doesn’t matter. What matters is shared goals, people having certain roles within achieving those shared goals, and then focusing on achieving those goals, their own goals within the context of the broader shared goals. So that is the team goal. And that’s the division goal. That’s the company goal, rather than the method and the location of work, because after all, no one wants that to their colleagues to commute out of spite, right, just because you’re commuting. And you have to do it doesn’t mean that your colleagues should have to do it. It just depends on their role and your role. So you don’t want your colleagues to commute out of spite. So this excellence from anywhere strategy is highly effective for hybrid unremarked work culture. And I would strongly encourage you to try adopting it within your team within your organization for your own work culture. I hope you found this episode of the wise decision maker show valuable and beneficial. Please subscribe to the wire decision maker show wherever you hear this podcast on iTunes, Amazon, and many other venues. And of course, if you checked it out and videocast form, check that you subscribe to us on YouTube. And you’ll have a lot of more information in the show notes. So check those out. And please share this podcast with your friends and neighbors and your colleagues on social media by email. If you think that they might benefit From it, send me your thoughts. I’d love to hear what you have to say. Email me at Gleb My name is Gleb Tsipursky as the leader of disaster avoidance experts email me at Gleb GL EB at disaster avoidance experts.com again Gleb at disaster avoidance experts.com And I hope to see you on the next episode of the wise decision maker show. And in the meantime, the wisest most profitable decisions to my friends 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai 

Originally Published at Disaster Avoidance Experts on February 1, 2022.

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is a world-renowned thought leader in future-proofing, decision making, and cognitive bias risk management in the future of work. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. A best-selling author, he wrote Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019), The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020), and Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage (Intentional Insights, 2021). His writing was translated into Chinese, Korean, German, Russian, Polish, French, and other languages. He was featured in over 550 articles and 450 interviews in prominent venues. These include Fortune, USA Today, Inc. Magazine, CBS News, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Time, Fast Company, and elsewhere. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for mid-size and large organizations ranging from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, including 7 as a professor at Ohio State University. You can contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, LinkedIn, Twitter @gleb_tsipursky, Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky, Medium @dr_gleb_tsipursky, and gain free access to his “Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace” and his “Wise Decision Maker Course” with 8 video-based modules at https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/subscribe/.