An executive, HR leader, and employee walk into an office...or do they?
Building trust and navigating the executive-employee divide on hybrid work
Over the past 3 months, I’ve met with nearly 100 HR leaders across the country. The conversations cover a wide range of topics related to returning to the office and evolving into a hybrid workforce. I’ve spent time with large companies and small ones, across all U.S. geographies and industries. I’ll be sharing my learnings from these conversations in a variety of posts.
Deep sigh. Well, that really depends on our CEO [or Exec team].
It’s happened in more than half of my conversations with HR leaders over the past few months. We reach the part of the conversation where we’re talking about hybrid work policies and requirements/expectations for how often employees will come to the office. It plays out a little something like this:
Me: Do you have a perspective on how often you think you’ll expect or even require employees to come into the office?
HR leader: It’s something we’re still talking about. We know people want to use the office to connect and collaborate, but they don’t want to go back to the way it was before.
Me: So if you had to guess, what do you think the guidelines will be for attendance?
HR leader: I think we’re still going to want people to come in regularly, but we’re not sure what that will mean.
Me: How do you think you’ll get to a decision on that?
HR leader: Deep sigh. Well, that really depends on our CEO [or Exec team].
The statement comes off almost like a confession. In just a few words - and some body language or an exhale - the company’s internal tension is revealed. That tension is two-sided with the HR leader stuck in the middle.
On one side, the tension is with the Exec Team or CEO. The HR leader starts to reveal the sizable concern, apprehension, and/or doubt that the still remains with the CEO / Exec team about going hybrid. Even in [the majority of] cases where the company feels they’ve succeeded at going remote during COVID, they are still skeptical about not going back to a full-time in-office culture. The HR leaders will explain to me that the CEO has concerns about culture and connectivity, but eventually they acknowledge the elephant in the virtual room: productivity concerns.
Research data reinforces the extent of this Executive perspective. The ranking below is from a PWC Survey from January asking employers to identify the primary purposes of an office. Ranked number one? Increasing productivity.
Meanwhile, on the other side, the tension is between the HR leader and their employees, who are pulling hard in the other direction. At this point in the conversation, we typically get to a discussion around results from employee surveys the company has conducted over the past year. Generalizing a bit, those surveys tend to reveal that employees:
Feel just as productive at home, if not more-so than in the office
Do still want to go to an office sometimes (ranging from 1-2 days per week to 3-4 days on average), but very rarely full-time
Want to use the office for priorities like collaboration team or social connection
Again, the data from PWC reinforces this perspective. Employees believe the chief purpose of an office is about collaborating, being with others, and getting access to things that are only available in-person. Noticeably absent? Any mention of productivity.
Naturally, it’s the HR leader that gets squeezed most by this divergence. From what I’ve observed, their instinct is to align closer with the employees — both in a “this is my job” sense but also from their own personal perspective. They have experienced the productivity levels from they themselves, their teams, and the managers at the company. They’ve observed first-hand how effective their teams have been while remote, and believe the optimal outcome is to preserve that flexibility while also enabling the in-person dynamics that people crave.
The challenge they face now is to advocate on behalf of their employees for a seismic shift in work habits that are uncomfortable for CEOs and Exec teams. In most organizations this transformation is a “CEO-level” decision, which means the HR leader is resigned to ping-ponging between individuals and their leadership.
There are two main reasons I share all this:
First, it’s really important for other HR leaders to know they’re not alone! As if it wasn’t enough to have spent the last year pulling off an unimaginable shift to remote, their reward is to now have to manage a complex transition to an even more dynamic, challenging frontier: hybrid work. Having to do all that while managing the tensions and alignment gaps between executives and employees is extremely hard on them.
Second, these dual tensions actually reveal the most important requirements of any successful hybrid workforce: employee trust. The undercurrent of this shift to hybrid work is a complete overhaul of the amount of flexibility, autonomy, and trust being placed in employees. For most organizations in the country, this represents the most significant shift in working style in decades. When we were forced into remote by an exogenous factor, COVID, there was no decision to make. But now, as companies are opting-into this change to hybrid post-COVID, it creates a new type of strategic pressure. After all, going back to the old ways in the office is theoretically still an option.
This means the stakes around employees trust are even higher. There’s a “door number 2” that didn’t exist for CEOs and Executives last year. And that door is quite tempting! They orient heavily on control and visibility to do their jobs effectively. After all, their obligation is to run a successful, highly productive organization. Giving up that control and placing complete trust in the team is a challenge for most organizations. Believing that employees are as productive at home as they say they are goes against years of the opposite default perspective.
The bottom line, though, is this: without an explicit embracement of employee trust, all the policies, tools, and data in the world won’t unlock the hybrid workforce.
Giving, building, and reinforcing trust within an organization requires effort, investment, and operational diligence. And that’s true in all contexts, not just with respect to the hybrid workforce.
If you’re an HR leader building out a company and people strategy around hybrid work, it’s imperative that you tackle the challenging topic of employee trust with your CEO and Exec Team first. Here are some guidelines for how to do that effectively:
Address the real issue head-on. Don’t be afraid to force a discussion around whether or not the level of trust required for hybrid to succeed is in place.
Stay objective when evaluating the level of trust in the organization. Trust is a very instinctual and often assumption-driven concept. Do your best to employ objective evaluations of why the CEO/Executives believe trust has been earned. Is there a quantifiable or specific reason why we shouldn’t trust our employees to be just as productive at home? Or does it just make us uncomfortable?
Utilize your standard People Operations practices to address gaps. Employee trust often gets generalized into an organization-wide problem, instead of localized to specific teams or individuals. Use existing performance management programs to evaluate productivity like you always would. If trust problems are coming from legitimate gaps created by remote work or flexibility, first look to address those through the same mechanisms you’d use for any other performance concern.
Use available resources to learn more! Building trust takes focus, time, and investment from you and your organization. There are many great resources on how to foster employee and company trust, including this article from SMARP, and this guide from the Association for Talent Development
Have you experienced similar tension in your company’s transition to a hybrid workforce? We’d love to learn more.
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