Not retiring: Make hybrid and remote working better

Hybrid working has been a boon for many workers, as research study after research study has shown. It combines the benefits of the office with the benefits of working from home. But, like anything, it can be difficult to get it right if you haven’t thought it through properly. It requires employers and specifically teams, to be more conscious about how they work, about the different tasks they carry out and where they carry them out better and it requires managers to feel confident in dealing with any problems that arise as well as knowing how best to support their team members.

Too often, in the past, employers have left it all down to individual employees to make flexible working work and employees have felt worried about bringing up any challenges or making any demands in case that flexible working got taken away from them. Yet they are a good source of how to make hybrid working better. And hybrid working needs to improve rather than be cancelled because the benefits of getting it right are huge, particularly for those employees for whom it makes such a difference to their wellbeing and ability to stay in work or work longer hours.

Returning to a pre-pandemic status quo that hasn’t been working for many for quite a while is not the answer. Instead of polarising the argument about flexible working, we need to do the serious work needed to make hybrid work better. The results of a two-month pilot programme led by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) and Timewise shows that bosses lack confidence in motivating their teams, running meetings, and managing conflict remotely, but that confidence can be taught through ongoing specific training and support around effective management, building a hybrid team and communicating with and motivating teams. Areas that the training covered ranged from resolving conflict and having difficult conversations online to building connection and cohesion and understanding the biases that can emerge in hybrid working and how to mitigate them.

The move to hybrid and remote working that we saw in Covid was implemented suddenly with little planning. Although some employers had used hybrid and remote working before the pandemic, this tended to be limited to individuals or small teams. Covid changed that, but often there wasn’t time to prepare teams and their managers. There are a myriad of reasons why hybrid and remote working are here to stay, from making work easier or possible for those with caring responsibilities to helping those with long-term sickness to stay in work if they want and are able to. Now is the time to invest in making hybrid and remote working better and to look at other forms of flexible working for those who can’t work from remote locations and that requires a conscious effort to engage rather than to stick our heads in the sand and pretend the world is not changing.

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