We are finding that many companies are still having trouble defining their hybrid culture in a way that works for both individuals, for the team, and for the company. Many people haven’t gotten used to working a certain way over the pandemic. Unfortunately, what works 100% well for the individual does not necessarily meet business needs for culture and productivity.
And let’s face it – there is no one size fits all – we would love to be able to hand you a one pager that outlines the perfect high performance hybrid culture for all companies. Unfortunately that is just not a thing.
However we certainly work with companies and teams to help them to come up with their own “culture on a page” that works for them.
And no not everyone will work the way that they want to 100% of the time, but it is important to find a line of best fit for the individual, team and company needs.
Neuroscience is needed
The reason many are finding it hard to define their hybrid culture is because there is a lot of neuroscience at play, which many don’t understand, let alone what to do with it.
Once you incorporate some neuroscience into your thinking you’ll be a long way toward your culture on a page for your team.
And note that the culture for each team might vary slightly, as often what works for one team might be different to what works for other teams.
The neuroscience
We have a whole workshop which focuses just on the neuroscience of hybrid working so I certainly won’t do it justice in this piece. However here are a few things to get you started…
The overarching high performance principle is to optimise collective cognitive energy so that people get to do their best work in a way that gets great outcomes while avoiding burnout.
To do this we need to build trust and psychological safety within the team and how we do this in hybrid is different for when everyone is working side by side.
We also need to have clear outcomes and clear accountability for these outcomes. And then we need to optimise workflow so that those outcomes are actually being achieved.
How to build trust and psychological safety in hybrid
We have a system in the brain called the mirror neuron system. This allows us to understand others and feel compassion toward them, and therefore build a connection very quickly when we are in the same room.
This impact of this system is significantly diluted when we are in a virtual room. And coupled with the issue of more ambiguity on a screen (which the brains hates and drains a lot of cognitive energy trying to make sense of, while often coming to a more negative and incorrect conclusion), meeting via video makes it far harder to build trust and psychological safety, while also making it way easier and quicker to reduce trust and psychological safety.
So it’s important we take actions which help us to build this trust and psychological safety such as:
- No blurred backgrounds – seriously – enough! Nothing erodes trust by showing up to a meeting subconsciously screaming “I’m hiding something from you, and I’m going to hurt your eyes and your brain for the next 30 minutes, while you try to subconsciously figure that out”. Aargh!
- Cameras on
- Spending a few minutes just checking in on everyone before the meeting officially starts and giving people the space to say any disruptions that might come up during the meeting – even meeting pets in advance of them jumping up during a meeting can be fun. (Yep talking from personal experience here! My little Louis does love a Zoom call).
- Clarifying the basics – What’s the acceptable dress code? And can you go to the door if Amazon comes with a package?
- Be ruthless on meetings – we have a whole workshop on how to cut your time in meetings by 50% and increase overall effectiveness.
It is important to optimise time in the office together when doing collaborative work to optimise the mirror neuron system. So it makes sense to have anchor days where you agree on what days to be in the office, and the type of work to be done on those days.
As I say in many of our workshops, if you want to optimise collective cognitive energy and accountability you need to remove ambiguity, remove ambiguity and when you’ve done that, go back and remove more ambiguity. It’s important to get super clear on outcomes required and who is doing what by when to make those outcomes happen. And holding people to account to literally do their job isn’t bullying when a high performance culture is already in place.
You can “kind of” get away with what we call “sloppy leadership” when everyone sits side by side 5 days a week, but you can’t get away with that in any form of remote or hybrid working situation.
The workplace has changed significantly in the last 5 years, and will continue to change a rapid pace. People’s expectations about the workplace have changed, as well as legalities such as psychosocial hazards now forcing change.
Leaders can choose to live in denial making it harder to find and keep staff, and get required business outcomes, or choose to understand the neuroscience of the changing landscape of the workplace, and how to lead for effective outcomes in this ever-changing environment.
Leadership is hard – neuroscience and psychology help – a lot!
Of course, if you’d like to find out more about how to improve performance with less effort why not either book a Performance Call or sign up for our next 20/20 session or one of our open workshops here