How to establish a resilient hybrid culture in your organization

resilient hybrid culture in your organization

resilient hybrid culture in your organization

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Who thought that there will be a time when employees worldwide would prefer to work in a hybrid work culture than get a pay rise? Surprising? Yes. Shocking? No. It is no hidden fact that the way organizations and their employees work has undergone tremendous change due to the global pandemic. Employees are no longer restricted to cabins and desks and the organizations that were swift to adapt to these changes continued to thrive despite the challenges the global pandemic brought with it. 

The hybrid work culture has now become more of a necessity than just a perk. A survey done by People Management reports that almost 50% of the employees would consider quitting their jobs if they’re not provided with a flexible working framework. This just goes on to prove that the work-from-anywhere option is no longer a prerequisite. For organizations that are hoping to attract as well as retain the top talent in the foreseeable future, it has become extremely paramount to establish a strong hybrid culture in the organization. Well, leaders and organizations should not get discouraged even a bit by this popular demand of the employees. The past two years have shown that hybrid working is not only just popular but cost-effective and productive as well. However, building and maintaining an effective hybrid culture can be challenging. Even though hybrid working looks to be the future of work, it can lead to the most cohesive and unified organizational culture disintegrating

When organizations become more purposeful about workplace culture, prioritize inclusivity and proactively seek out the right ways, they can easily not only establish but maintain an effective hybrid culture in the organization. Let us first take a quick glance at what hybrid work culture is and what benefits it will bring to your organization. 

What is hybrid culture and what are its advantages?

To be precise, hybrid work culture refers to the spectrum of flexible working structures that have become increasingly renowned in the last two years. It is used to describe a situation where employees have a certain level of control over the choice of their workplace, their schedule, and even the combination of both. As discussed above, the hybrid work culture is no longer a perk but a necessity for your organization if you want to attract and retain the top talents of your industry. It has become quite clear that this working model is here to stay. Why would it not? It offers some very specific benefits:

A flexible schedule can boost retention

As organizations of all sizes and industries have been fighting the tide of the great resignation already. now is at least not the time your organization revokes the hybrid working privileges. Research by Microsoft revealed that more than half of the employees in the UK would quit their organizations if the hybrid framework was removed. 

Upper hand in recruiting top talent

Organizations that aim to the best and brightest employees in today’s highly competitive market will have to offer flexible working structures. The majority of the job-seekers now prioritize organizations that offer hybrid working arrangements.  

Hybrid for empowering the employees

Having control over their workplace, schedule, and time management is known to be extremely empowering for hybrid employees and teams. When you trust your employees to make decisions, they are bound to be more innovative, engaged, and productive. 

How to build a resilient hybrid culture in your organization

With all being said, it is clearly very feasible to establish and maintain a thriving working culture in a hybrid working model. After all, the majority of the high-growth and top-performing organizations have taken the route of a hybrid approach, and a large portion of employees prefer to work in the hybrid working environment as well. Creating an effective hybrid culture is possible in the following ways:

Intentionality 

The biggest enigma to establishing a great hybrid culture is that if you want to do it, you need to take steps as you mean it. Transitioning to a long-term hybrid mode is not just a question of policies and logistics. It also involves a major transition in the mindset. It is crucial that you just do not tweak things a bit and recreate your existing organizational culture. Although it might be tempting to just lift and shift what you were already doing in-person to video calls, what you get is just a worse version of what you and your employees were already doing. All of this effort without reaping any of the benefits of the hybrid work culture. So make sure to take proper actions to establish a hybrid work culture. These can include:

  • Deliberately establish possibilities for cross-functional collaboration and regular check-ups for your organizational teams. 
  • Including the feature of cross-functional feedback as a vital part of your performance management process so your employees get a clear idea of how their contribution affects the organization as a whole. 
  • Invite the opinion of your employees and teams for co-creating communication and operation guidelines for ensuring that you retain the best bits of your organizational culture in the hybrid culture. 

Inclusivity

The second recipe for cooking a strong hybrid culture is inclusivity. Once you through your actions become intentional about the structure you want to see in your hybrid employees, you now have to identify the ways for reinforcing strong organizational values and make sure that each of your employees gets the sense that they are included and valued. You need to get a performance management program that will help both the sets of your employees, the ones that work in the office and the ones that work from their homes. Moreover, make sure that the recognition initiatives of your employees are inclusive and reflect your organizational values. It is significant for you and your managers to find interesting ways to recognize your employees in meaningful ways. 

Information 

The next and the most vital part is that you have to ensure that your messaging around the hybrid policies is comprehensible and consistent. You need to have a somewhat specific definition of what hybrid means for your organization. Then you have to ensure that your managers, employees, and teams have the information needed for fostering a positive work culture. The successful implementation of hybrid culture can be estimated with the help of the employee engagement levels of your organization. The employee engagement tool is a popular platform that is used by organizations widely for enhancing their engagement while working in a hybrid culture. 

Hybrid is here to stay! If you want to establish a thriving organizational career that reflects your values, boosts employee engagement, decreases turnover, and set your hybrid team for long-term success then contact us right away! 

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Gaurav Sabharwal

CEO of JOP

Gaurav is the CEO of JOP (Joy of Performing), an OKR and high-performance enabling platform. With almost two decades of experience in building businesses, he knows what it takes to enable high performance within a team and engage them in the business. He supports organizations globally by becoming their growth partner and helping them build high-performing teams by tackling issues like lack of focus, unclear goals, unaligned teams, lack of funding, no continuous improvement framework, etc. He is a Certified OKR Coach and loves to share helpful resources and address common organizational challenges to help drive team performance. Read More

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