Going Hybrid? 5 Considerations to Preserve (or Build) the Culture You Want

Building a strong company culture has never been easy. Remote work made it harder by eliminating many of the things we once thought essential to building culture, from sharing birthday cake to maintaining an energizing office space to encouraging impromptu brainstorm sessions.

Now, it’s likely that hybrid work will be the new normal: we’re in a historic talent crunch and just three percent of knowledge workers want to return to the office five days per week. The challenge for business leaders, then, is to find ways to build the culture they want – a culture that enables employees to do their best work and inspires them to stick around – in a hybrid environment.

While that will look different for every organization, these five considerations can help any organization take the first steps.

Related: How to Manage a Hybrid Team

1. Adopt the Right Tools

It’s easy to think of culture as an esoteric thing that’s separate from the more mundane day-to-day work you and your employees do. In reality, though, culture arises from and is affected by every element of your business operations.

For example, I talked with someone not long ago who described a (pre-pandemic) workplace where only executives were given laptops. Everyone else had desktop computers with heavy CPUs. In meetings, they had to take notes by hand and transcribe them after – and they couldn’t do anything in meeting rooms that required computers. 

The experience was incredibly frustrating for employees and sent a very clear message that their time and energy weren’t as valuable as the executives’. As you can imagine, turnover was sky high.

Finding the right tools for a hybrid environment matters a lot: employees should be able to easily connect and collaborate from anywhere. At a minimum, a hybrid company’s tools should include cloud-based document storage, a standard platform for audio and video calls, and virtual whiteboard tools.

As you embrace a long-term hybrid office, be sure to go a step further so your equipment and policies are not just workable in a hybrid environment but designed for that environment. On the equipment side, for example: anyone who regularly works with background noise should have noise-canceling headphones. On the policy side, be sure to define how to handle group calls when some – but not all – team members are in the same location.

2. Store Essential Information Equitably

To make hybrid work work, both remote and in-person employees must have equitable access to the information they need to do their jobs, whether that’s meeting minutes or contracts or past work examples. In many cases, that means storing everything securely in the cloud.

To illustrate how important this is, let’s look at an example of how it might come into play: you shift from remote to hybrid work. Most people come in two to three days per week, or as needed for client meetings. You do most of your work in the cloud, but a lot of past work still lives in filing cabinets. That’s fine, you reason, because when people need those documents, they can choose to work in person that day.

That’s all well and good until a person who was planning to come in has a COVID exposure and has to work remotely for a few days. Or their mom breaks her hip and they have to work from her house to help her recover. Or a big storm knocks the power out at your office.

A truly hybrid workplace makes it possible – and easy – to access essential information from anywhere. After all, you want your employees to use their time and talent to actually do their work, not to figure out how they can get the information necessary to get it done.

3. Have a Clear Policy around Remote vs. In-Person Work – and Enforce It

Uncertainty is a huge source of stress. A work environment with a high level of uncertainty, then, is one with a high-stress culture. While some uncertainty is unavoidable (will you sign the client? Will you win the case?), policies that create unnecessary uncertainty add unnecessary stress – and hurt workplace culture.

Consider this example: an office transitions from all-remote to hybrid. Employees are expected to be in the office three days per week. Exemptions are available for those with certain conditions that make them more vulnerable to COVID, but not to those who are caretakers for the immunocompromised and vulnerable.

Some employees comply, but others don’t – including many parents of young children, who say they can do their work fine from home and aren’t willing to risk their families’ health to come in. And the office leaders decide to let it go.

This is terrible for culture. Why? Because it creates uncertainty – and possibly resentment. If the leaders aren’t enforcing the policy now, is that because they never plan to? Or will they start at some unnamed date? And if they’re not enforcing the policy, why did they create it? If people can work from home, why is anyone being required to come in? And so on.

The point is not to be overly strict about requiring people to work from one location versus another. The point is to set clear, reasonable expectations and then hold employees to them.

This applies as much to where people work from as it does to anything else – what hours people are expected to be available, how quickly everyone is expected to respond to messages sent outside of those hours, what happens if they don’t respond, etc. Removing unnecessary uncertainty is a simple way to create a more positive hybrid work culture.

4. Provide Adequate Resources to Complete Work, Regardless of Location

If your industry requires that your employees do deep work, they need private office spaces that minimize interruptions, whether they’re at home or in the office.

Ensuring your office offers quiet, private spaces is fairly easy; ensuring employees’ homes do is trickier. One policy many employers have implemented is providing home-office stipends employees can use to create an at-home setup that fosters productivity.

If you have team members in different geographical locations, you may provide them a monthly supply of day passes to shared office spaces so they can enjoy a hybrid work setup even if they can’t commute to your primary office location.

And if you don’t already have a policy for regularly testing the speed and functionality of office equipment (including laptops, scanners, printers, and whatever else your team needs to do its work), set up a calendar reminder every six months to do that so your team is never losing time to lagging technology.

(Another option to maintain efficient tech: partner with a device-as-a-service provider that can track performance and provide you with regular equipment updates.)

5. Ask Employees What They Want and Need

Positive workplace cultures develop when employees feel empowered to do their best work. But empowerment looks different in every organization. If you have extroverts on your team, empowerment might mean having an office that makes it easy to gather and socialize. If you have a lot of caregivers, it might look like establishing “core” online hours and allowing people to work flexibly outside of those hours. 

Your team’s needs may also change over time, as their lives change. To ensure your structures and policies continue to empower everyone to do their best work, check in regularly and ask explicitly about what people need. Bonus: the act of proactively and explicitly prioritizing employees’ needs in itself contributes to a positive culture.

Positive Hybrid Cultures Take Proactive Effort

Workplace culture is a bit like brand in that your organization will develop one whether or not you pay attention to it.

To ensure that the culture that develops is one that empowers employees to do their best work and inspires them to stay around, leaders can and should take a proactive approach, crafting and adjusting policies to accommodate the changing circumstances of the team and the world.

Photo by Olena Sergienko on Unsplash