I’ve already presented my ideas on how smart working may or may not be suitable for every company, still a lot of potential mistakes are round the corner for businesses that could be able to adopt it in theory, but cannot fully embrace it in practice, even more now that full smart is turning hybrid.
Before Covid’s pandemic, some companies already started “testing” smart working to raise employees’ work-life balance, and during pandemic these same companies thought they were totally in control while in fact they were walking on a tightrope . This hinge wire act has worked fine while offices were completely closed, but now that the pandemic is (hopefully) releasing its grip and hybrid working started to raise, a lot of problem began to emerge. Hybrid working is by far more complicated than full smart, because a lot of dynamics are now less clear and the companies need to make decisions immediatly to avoid potential failures from the smart working “spaghetti” adoption.
Smart working is not remote working
The first rule to avoid failure is to fully understand that smart working is not remote working: while the second has the same behaviour of in-office work but remotely, the first is a totally different way of working where goals are more important than presence. Oddly, going back to work create a great degree on confusion between employees working 9-18 and the ones in smart, willing to continue with their routine: the first ones usually pretend the ones at home start back working as if they were in office, reserving the right not to do it while themselves are in smart and the other ones in office. Executives and team leaders should intercept these behaviour and try both to fix employees’ mindset to avoid frictions and provide the proper tools to balance in-office and smart working productivity.
Use proper tools
Proper tools (and adeguate training to correctly use them) play a very important role here, because they could be the difference between a productive working day and a Mad Max-like convoy robbery:
- Choose a standard coporate communication tool, and stick with it, even if it’s not easy at all: I myself tried to do it, but I still receive instant messages using a wide variety of tools, even Whatsapp and Telegram. But not enforcing a single communication channel it’s risky: this way, when in-office workers try to reach smart workers the latters pretend they didn’t read, and usually they really didn’t. Choose one tool and stick with it on both laptops and mobile phones.
- Spend some time teaching employees how to properly use shared calendar, especially using placeholders or similar to mark times when they surely will not be able to properly attend a meeting. Remember that smart working is all about work-life balance: it’s totally legit to get 15 minutes to run an errand, if you let other people know about it.
- Implement a continuous voice channel tool: I use Discord in my current company, and I’m planning on moving back to Slack now that it released Huddles. Voice channels are a great resource to let teams feels like they are in the same room.
Keep rolling
No, I’m not trying to Rickroll you: it’s imperative not to stop, ever. Tools, mindset, problems and wrong/weird behaviours constantly evolve as more as this new hybrid working mindset takes place. Remember that adapt to hybrid working is not a sprint, it’s a marathon: this new working paradigma is something we need to train to because it’ll probably going to stay. So don’t rush (I mean, well, rush, but not too much, don’t overload, ok?) but constantly try to check if everything is going right and if there’s something that needs to be improved, speaking with your colleagues and with other executives.
Remember, there is time to right the wrongs of the first, unregulated smart working adoption flow, but actions need to be taken. Doing nothing because during full smart working everything seems nice, its like putting a lot of hungry birds on the thightrope (and no, it’s not a misspelling, I really meant “hungry”: just imagine those little feathery friends picking your toes while searching for food… you got the picture).
Oh and while rolling, don’t forget to pay close attention to employee engagement: one of the prime suspect of the Great Resgnation we’re into is the lack of engagement, that continuously need to be tuned by the management. This is indeed a very complex argument, though, so I hope to be back on this one in a future article.
Photo by Hiroshi Kimura on Unsplash
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