What about my hybrid workplace culture?

Ahoy legend. Welcome to today's episode of the Team Buffalo podcast. I'm your host, Travis Thomas. And I'm looking forward to getting stuck into a another leadership question with you today. Today's question is a really interesting one and I know I say that quite often because leadership is pretty interesting. But today's question is really interesting and quite topical. And it's around hybrid working and working in the office or working remotely. And I'm not going to spend a great deal of time or really any time on the idea of should we have people work flexible or not work flexible and hybrid and hybrid and what that even all means. We've spent kind of two plus years in the pandemic, figuring out what that looks like for most corporate offices. Obviously, if you're in retail, hospitality, any of those face to face customer facing ones, you clearly can't just say, Oh, we're going to work remotely. But for the rest of us. The question that still continues to come up is what should our policy be? And the answer to that question today is what should our policy around hybrid working be? And more specifically, how do we deal with the culture impacts of those problems is, it depends contexts means it depends. Now, you go great, thanks, Travis. That's an awesome answer to a really complex question. Of course, as always, we're going to break that question down today and get to better understand what what do we mean when we say it depends. So let's get started on that. First, I want to just quickly highlight the difference between flexible and hybrid. Now flexible working kind of implies what most people's mind implies that you are more open to me needing to change things around my lifestyle, it doesn't mean I'm am or am not in the office for a set period of time, it means that where I work, and the time I work may change depending on what's happened. It's flexible to fit my lifestyle and my needs. So the issue there, I think, and in my experience has been that people for years have just been forced into a corporate regime of you show up at this time you leave by this time, what you produce during that time, maybe we don't care as much about we're looking at outputs and outcomes, a topic for another episode, but what we are watching is, are you here? And if you're not here, have you used time off or time off in lieu or paid time off? So that's the flexible side, the kind of hybrid side comes more down to where do I work when I'm working? And I think that's a really interesting question. And a real big problem for leaders. Because, you know, if you spend any great deal of time on social media, you may have noticed there's a trend and the actual trend, which is a little bit disappointing. What's the reality, it's disappointing that it is the reality is that people are filming their office and the caption on there and says, you know, let's get back to the office to build the culture. And then dot, dot, dot, this is the culture we're building. And it's people filming themselves alone in the corporate office, or with two other co workers in an office that houses 40 or 50 people. And that that is quite sad, right? And that signals to me that there's one lack of clear leadership on what we actually mean when we say, let's get back to the office, or let's get people in the office and to the structure to tell people well, how do we do that. So one of the clients I'm working with on their culture piece, and have been working with them for a couple of years on different bits and pieces. And they've been really happy with the results. And one of the things that they've done that I think has been quite successful as they rolled out a hybrid approach, where there are fixed days that most people will be in the office, obviously, they're flexible. And if some people can't make it in there, we'll review that on a case by case and and accommodate that. But on the whole, most people will be in the office between Monday and Wednesday. Now, on Thursday, and Friday, something interesting happens. You can choose to work from home, or wherever it doesn't have to be your home, there's no requirement for that you can work from a cafe or whatever. But you are not required to be in the office. Why would you do that? Why would that be interesting. And I think the reason that's been quite successful, and in my experience, it takes a lot of cultural boxes, is it says to people as a whole department, because the rest of the organization is kind of flexible. This is a department I'm working with. It says to us, well, that department has really been clear on when people should ideally be in and when they shouldn't. And all those days, let's also encourage people to have more meetings, but do them face to face. Let's try and do more of the collaboration stuff when we can during that time. Let's really make it about Well, hey, if we're in the office, let's do the things that enhance the culture by collaborating cross sharing spending time in meetings together where we have to face to face rather than a log. Super interesting right. Now, the Thursday and Friday what you'll see if that's managed correctly, is that the amount of meetings required and the requirements for people to spend time on menial or non value adding tasks will decrease, they might have an admin type day where they pull back on some of that stuff and clear the backlog. But ideally, they're doing more of their creative work, they're getting more of their solo stuff done on the Thursdays and Fridays. And if it's even if it's not solo, it's done via messaging, or really quick huddles through like Slack or teams to make that happen. So you can see there how that answer to the question is, what should we do about hybrid has been quite effective in overall their team in terms of engagement scores, retention, everything have responded incredibly well to that. On the other side, I've worked with others or seen others who have not done that. And the reason or their policy has not worked effectively. And some of the reasons that you might look at as a leader to answer the question, well, what approach should I have? will also need to include well, how does my team or department collaborate? How do they work together? How do they share information? If I need something from someone? Are there effective channels for doing that? Or do I have people who gatekeeper? And if I have people that gatekeeper How do I remove those gates? And get people working more effectively together? And there's a number of approaches you can take to that? Then once I've dealt with gatekeeping how do I encourage the right form of communication? So how do I get people to transfer knowledge or transfer information without defaulting to going to meetings or defaulting to emails? How do I create a comms guide or comms guidelines or that kind of pillars of communication that help people understand? Well, if you need things, this is how you go about it. This is how you find things on your own without having to bother people. If I can get the comms clear, you can get the barriers and gatekeepers out of the way, then we've solved a lot of the problem around well, where does someone actually need to be located? And then what we need to look at his word do people actually need to be intentional in interacting with each other. You know, DreamWorks a number of years ago was quite famous for creating the spaces where designers and animators and people did voice acting, and all that would bump into each other. And the reason they did that was they wanted to create collaboration. So they had shared spaces like the cafeteria, but also meeting rooms and collaboration areas. What they found is the quality of their productions increased and a lot of the blockers or slowing down anchors that would get in the way were removed or reduced. If you're really intentional about engineering, the way your team or your department or your organization, depending on your level of leadership work together by addressing those things like how do we communicate? How do we remove the blockers? And how do we ensure that we foster collaboration through intentional design and intentionality around objectives, then we can really start to do some cool stuff without forcing people to fully be in the office or never be in the office and you don't end up with sad employees on TikTok or Instagram, using this trend to show their office. So that's the summary of today's answer to well, what do I do about my hybrid slash flexible slash remote working policy? And how do I ensure that my people feel like it's the right thing for them? As always, thank you for tuning in today's episode, have been your host, Travis Thomas. And if you want to find out more about us or subscribe to our kick a$$ newsletter, where I feature weekly leadership, tools, tips and tactics, you can check that out at teambuffalo.co/newsletter. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode chat tomorrow.