A people-first approach to hybrid remote work (3/3)
Part three: Building employee experiences with empathy
This three-part series explores the challenges and opportunities organizations will face as they transition into hybrid remote models, and how they can build empathetic hybrid remote employee experiences after the COVID-19 pandemic subsides. In case you missed them, here’s part one on “Embracing the complexity” and part two “Finding the right hybrid model for you.”
Employee experience (EX) frameworks developed over the last decade offer a lens for efforts to organize, develop, and source human capital. Like customer experience (CX) frameworks, employee experience frameworks encourage those building internal employee-facing products and services to shape them by considering the thoughts, feelings, stories, and journeys of those that the products and services are for. The advantage of these approaches is that they can usually surface a much richer picture of who the target audience is and what they want than those approaches which simply consider what the target audience will trade their time or money for. Companies that invest in employee experience consistently outperform those that under-invest in these ways of building engagement.
Taking an EX approach to hybrid remote program design means putting people at the center. Rather than thinking about the design of a hybrid remote program in terms of where and how certain work should be done, an EX approach focuses the design on where and how people can best do their work. It’s a subtle shift, but it’s the kind of thing that can cast light on the nuances that might make or break a successful hybrid program.
By using tools like empathy and journey mapping, persona development, and qualitative research from interviews or focus groups, hybrid program owners can maintain laser focus on the ways their new models will affect how people feel, what they think, what they say, and what they do as we prepare to enter hybrid environments. This can enable program owners to craft hybrid inclusion training which should be rolled out before employees return to offices at scale so that employers don’t find themselves playing catch-up after employees revert to old office habits which may negatively affect their hybrid colleagues.
Just as broader inclusion and diversity programs aim to train people to spot the little things that can exclude, hybrid inclusion trainings might aim to equip people with the knowledge to spot the moments that create opportunity inequities for remote versus on-site employees. For example, a manager might ping one of their directs to ask if they’re in the office to help host a workshop that just came up, but hesitate when they learn that the employee is working remotely that day. Or when considering who to tap for help on a side project, managers may revert to old behaviors like taking a walk around the office floor without raising the opportunity in a place where everyone can access it.
It’s easy to imagine other examples like this: just think of a scenario where some spontaneous, potentially career-advancing work came up in the office pre-pandemic. Then, imagine that a quarter of the people in that scenario weren’t physically present, but were online and available to pitch it were they called upon. In the imagined scenario, do those same people get called upon to pitch in, or do the physically absent get passed over? Remote-friendly organizations will have to carefully consider where information and opportunities are shared; even when it may be easier to walk to someone’s desk or speak across a table, managers in these organizations will have to watch how they share information. Some remote-friendly organizations may find physical reminders of distributed colleagues do the trick. For example, some teams at a mid-sized technology company use cardboard cutouts of distributed team members to keep them top-of-mind for their co-located colleagues.
A remote-fine model may accept asymmetries in opportunity as tolerable or attempt to reduce their likelihood by striving to co-locate employees who are likely to work together on the same days of the week. But for any organization that wants to give employees the choice about which days to work remotely, or to work permanently remotely — as most remote-friendly organization arguably will — these asymmetries represent risks to an equitable and inclusive hybrid remote experience. Hiring more managers with experience leading within a remote-first organizations could be an effective step to mitigate these risks and accelerate the development of an inclusive, effective hybrid culture.
On the other hand, consider the remote experience which newer employees have before they’ve had opportunity to build the social capital upon which they could usefully rely for informal or spontaneous collaboration in a hybrid environment. Attention to key points in the employee journey map like onboarding, the beginning or end of a project, or role changes could help identify times in the rhythm of work when hybrid or fully-remote employees might benefit from spending time together in co-located environments. For remote-first organizations especially, this intentional co-located time can enable employees to build bonds and establish the familiarity that will help them effectively collaborate when work goes back online. It can also help to develop an emotional connection to an organization so that remote employees are less likely to bounce and so employers can win on cultural elements beyond remote inclusivity.
Remote-friendly organizations may also find themselves asking whether maintaining a physical headquarters is compatible with a remote-friendly philosophy. A case could be made — and some research supports the idea — that having an HQ signals that a particular place where particular work happens is more important than others simply because certain people (typically an executive team and certain corporate functions) tend to work there. When work doesn’t have to happen in a particular place (as the pandemic has revealed for many), the decision to say it will happen in a particular place could be viewed by employees as arbitrary. Concentrated office space in those metros that educated young people find desirable may be essential to future location strategies, but it’s not obvious that anything in the execution of these talent strategies turns on designating some of those locations as a headquarters. Look no further than the so-called “Bay Area Exodus” for evidence that the “HQ question” will remain lively in the near future and be a resonant EX issue.
Persona-based mapping exercises can be a powerful EX tool to help organizations design and refine their hybrid work models. Empathy maps, experience maps, and journey maps can be used to identify patterns and “hot spots” across the many different types of experiences that will need to be managed in a hybrid future. What kinds of questions, concerns, and hopes will managers have? What about employees? Talent acquisition? Executives? Candidates? Clients? Partners? Each set of needs, concerns, and questions will be different — but by paying attention to the areas of overlap and tension, managers can identify where their teams’ ways of working are succeeding or need to evolve.
When engaging in these empathetic exercises, it’s important to not limit the considerations to just those that show up in the employee experience at work. Considerations about cost of living, quality of life, commutes, times with family, access to affordable childcare, and access to affordable housing will be tightly bound up with people’s desires about where they live and work. Those who can’t afford to buy a house within commuting distance of their office may be eyeing markets elsewhere, while those who already have homes in an area may not mind coming in a few days a week — and indeed might worry what broader shifts to remote work might mean for their local real estate market. Honest and open acknowledgement of these realities must be part of an empathetic assessment of stakeholder attitudes towards hybrid remote ways of working. After all, perhaps the highest impact EX decision employers can make when designing people-first hybrid models is whether or not to let people live where they want to live while continuing to do the work they want to do. Many value this kind of flexibility so highly that they are willing to accept pay cuts in exchange. Few other employee perks come remotely(!) close.
Without these EX considerations, an otherwise apparently nuanced hybrid model — even ones which may accurately predict the kinds of work that can be best done where — will miss those factors that make the model resonate with the people who make the work happen. Fundamentally, it is employee experience that will make hybrids challenging. As the CEO of one fully remote company put it in a cautionary opinion piece:
“Those who do hybrid, if not intentional about making systemic changes and treating every employee as if they are remote (whether in-office or not), will see their most effective remote people leave. The hybrid companies will then blame the lack of productivity on remote instead of the actual cause: Managing two distinct employee experiences is a very arduous task.”
Commit to principles while embracing iteration
Make sure people understand the logic that will shape your v1 hybrid model so that when you commit to improving it over time, they can trust the underlying values that will shape those future changes. An employer’s policies about where people are expected to work have massive consequences for their future lives and lifestyles, so enable people to plan confidently while acknowledging that things will continue to evolve.
Perhaps nowhere else is this need for transparency around principles going to be felt more urgently than when it comes to decisions about compensation philosophies. Localized compensation practices — long considered standard — are coming into question as employers in the technology industry especially seek to retain top performers who are in many cases eager to move away from high-cost urban areas. Indeed, the very idea of localized compensation practices may not make sense for roles sourced from national or global labor markets. If full-time remote job openings increase as much as they are forecast to, the correlation between costs of labor (at least for knowledge work) and local costs of living may begin to loosen as geography will play less of a role in constraining employees’ immediate job prospects.
But localized compensation is so deeply ingrained in people’s attitudes towards pay fairness that some employers may worry about whether abandoning those practices could open up space for resentment: with employees coming to resent their peers who command the same salary but live in lower cost areas, or coming to resent their employer for what might be perceived as effectively a tax on their choice to live in higher cost areas. Expect this to be a lightning rod topic over the next few years as survey data from compensation analysts has revealed that, in 2021, over half of employers plan to pay their remote employees the same as in-office peers no matter where they work while others are sticking to localized models, while others still plan to move to national pay structures.
Finally, rather than trying to implement broad-based, top-down changes, some organizations may opt for a more grass-roots approach to designing hybrid ways of working where individual functions or managers collectively define the norms that will work for their teams. While we expect that approaches like this will supply remote program owners with ample and diverse data about what works and what doesn’t so they can iterate and improve their programs, they may also introduce employee experience risks. In allowing for different models for different teams, this approach opens up the possibility of perceived inequities between teams. It also introduces risks when teams with different hybrid models have to collaborate (see our cautionary note about “hybrid of hybrids” in part 2). Therefore, employers adopting for this approach should clearly communicate tops-down expectations about the boundaries within which these grassroots programs should operate and guiding principles to which they should adhere. They should also consider providing managers with playbooks, templates, and best practices that can be adapted to fit their teams’ needs.
In the end, none of this should be certain. If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that. But even if we don’t know what this new hybrid world will look like, there are a few things we can probably count on: people will want to be together, and learn from one another; they will want to get out of the house, and they’ll want to be able to afford a house; they’ll want time for focused work, and time to just relax and build bonds together; they’ll want to spend less time in a commute and more time with friends and family; they’ll want to feel like they’re part of a team that’s doing amazing things, and they’ll want to be able to do those amazing things while working from amazing places. And most of all, they’ll want to feel like they’re treated fairly while doing all of this: they’ll want to feel heard, elevated, recognized, and empowered to do their best work. Hard as it may seem to hold these goals together, the stakes are too high not to try.
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