How do you engage and lead your team in a post-pandemic hybrid workplace? AND win talent.

I still remember a week before New York City shut down for the pandemic, I sat on top of metal file cabinets at work, casually chatting with a few HR colleagues about how we had to prepare for a portion of the workforce to work 100% remote (still a novel idea at the time). Little did we know that a week later the whole company would be working remotely for the next 2 years. The world dove into a giant remote working experiment that has turned out to prove that remote working works. In fact, it worked so well that for many companies productivity has increased. As employees today trickle back into the office, leaders are faced with a new problem – how do they lead a post-pandemic hybrid team?

It is no surprise that the great resignation is also called the great realization. As employees are realizing they want more from their jobs, they are finding new ways to fulfill their dreams, and it may or may not be with their current employer. We all got a tase of what life could be without commuting – working while wearing sweatpants, the ability to pick up our kids from the bus stop mid-day…we just can’t go back anymore. A friend of mine recently shared with me, “I went back to work today for the first time after 2 years. It was surreal. I thought I would feel reinvigorated, but I didn’t. I’m not the same person I was when I walked out of the office on March 15, 2020.” How employers engage with their employees at this point in time will be crucial.

Not only are employees changed from the pandemic, but many employees have also changed jobs and as old team members leave, new ones have joined. People are meeting for the first time in-person after having multiple hours of Zoom conversations with one another. The familiar voices and 2-D faces are replaced with three-dimensional human interactions. For some, they couldn’t be more excited to be in the office; for others, it is just pure dread. Similarly, not every manager believes in remote work or hybrid work, causing conflict within organizations on how to manage the path forward. As some employees remain remote and others go into the office, how can you continue to lead your hybrid team without creating overnight a culture of “haves” and “have-nots”?

Here are some tips on how to engage and lead your hybrid team:

1. Empower work/life flexibility and balance – remote work has blurred the lines between work and life, allowing us the kind of flexibility we had never experienced before the pandemic. Ironically, it took us working remotely to see for the first time across the video screen each other as real people with full lives. We unapologetically had our kids join our Zoom calls; had a glimpse of their favorite room in the house; and wear our hair up or down without make-up. We should continue to respect, if not celebrate, that behind every employee, is a full life being juggled behind the scenes. Protecting the well-being and work/life flexibility of employees will be a key motivator to retaining employees in the long-term.
2. Be deliberate for in-office work – you don’t want to ask employees to come into the office only to sit at their desk and do what they could be doing at home. When they come in, the value for them to be in the office that day needs to be clear. If not, you can quickly disengage employees and cause resentment. Forcing employees to go into the office because it is a “Tuesday” or because they need to be in “2-3x a week” signals that you don’t trust them. Be deliberate for in-office work and encourage employees to optimize creative interactions and social bonding opportunities for when they are in the office.
3. Listen more, be authentic and lead with empathy – as the workplace continually evolves, we need to stay close to our employees even more to truly understand how it’s going. What is working and not working? What motivates them? How does it feel to walk in their shoes? All of these key leadership skills become even more important when leading a geographically dispersed team in a hybrid environment in order to build and maintain connections.
4. Be inclusive – after the pandemic hit, I kept hearing my co-workers say that zoom has “evened the playing field”. I didn’t really understand what that meant, until I had experienced for myself that I didn’t have to work as hard to mitigate the biases I experienced at work for being a small 5-foot-tall Asian woman working in corporate America. Research has shown that remote work has decreased the micro-aggressions on minorities. It has also democratized people’s contributions regardless of physical location. As we transition to the hybrid environment, I encourage you to continue to use zoom regardless of whether people are in-the-office or remote. Continue to even the playing field, rotate responsibilities across team members regardless of location so that everyone gets a chance. Proactively call on everyone so that all voices can be heard in meetings.
5. No guilt, no apologies needed – Leaders need to be inclusive of people’s personal choices around their decisions to work remotely or go into the office. As employees return to the office, they will be worried about the perception of their choices. Their choice should not have any negative consequence on their career. I had been working from home 2-3 days a week for years before the pandemic and I was told many times that working remotely a few days a week will “hold me back in my career”. The pandemic truly evened the playing field for me, opening new opportunities in my career that I could only dream of. There is no need to apologize for your chosen work location or make someone feel guilty for not coming into work that day. Most importantly, let’s not limit career opportunities based on location. Let’s not create a culture of “have’s” and “have-nots” in a new hybrid world.
6. Make work meaningful – in the midst of the great realization, employees are realizing they want more from their jobs. To attract and retain talent, we need to recruit for a higher calling, a mission, a purpose. Employees are looking for more meaningful work and are asking themselves the tough question: how do the company’s values and purpose align to my personal values and purpose? Let employees see that their work truly has an impact and that their ideas are valued and implemented.
7. Think outside the box as one size may no longer fit all – we may need to rethink how work gets done and how jobs are designed. Cookie-cutter roles may not be cutting it anymore. Can we creatively design roles based on each individual’s strengths to better engage employees? We also need to think outside the box when it comes to how we leverage technology and avoid tech exhaustion. Let’s be mindful of matching the technology to the task and when to collaborate synchronously vs. asynchronously.
8. Focus on outcomes and use data to measure performance– I don’t believe this is new or groundbreaking as it has existed pre-pandemic. In a well-designed performance management system, there are clear goals with outcomes and metrics to measure performance. Whether someone is in the office or not, the same performance management system should still apply and regular 1:1 check-ins should still occur. If you have not had this set up in your company, it is even more important to do so and to do it well in a hybrid environment.

At this moment in time, we have the power to shape the future of work. I challenge you to think past the work schedule of “come in 2-3 days a week” and instead reimagine a way of working that can let us live our best lives for ourselves and future generations to come.