Leadership & Management, Remote & Hybrid Culture
Increased flexibility requires a different leadership strategy. Here’s how great workplaces are helping their managers change with the times.
Increasing flexibility can make things complicated for leaders.
When you don’t see employees in the office, you have less information about what might be going on with their work or in their lives. You can’t rely on hints and nonverbal cues to know if someone is struggling, or if a project is in trouble.
And when your team is a mix of in-person and remote teams, there are immediate questions about fairness and access to consider. Are remote employees penalized when they aren’t physically in the room where decisions are being made?
That can easily happen if leaders don’t set clear guardrails, says Lisa Monaco, head of Employee Experience at Moody’s Corporation. The global risk assessment firm has embraced a hybrid policy where teams all over the world set their own rules on how often they will go to the office.
“We’re in more than 40 countries all over the world and most of our teams are situated everywhere,” Monaco says. “It was essential for us to strike the right balance so that our employees remained connected.”
At Anthem Engineering, a small company with only 35 U.S. employees, offering remote or hybrid options is crucial for competing with bigger tech firms for top talent. That requires working with clients, some of whom are government agencies with strict policies and security clearance requirements, to understand how to create an experience that meets employees’ needs.
“The real key for us is to create a culture in which we can retain people, even though they may not be able to work from home a hundred percent of the time, because there are so many more options,” says Rick Rowe, chief operating officer at Anthem.
“About 56% of the company is able to work from home, no restrictions whatsoever,” Rowe says. “And when we enter into contracts with our customers, we’re constantly pushing for more flexibility. About 22% of our people have to work in a government facility, but they still have telework or remote work flexibility up to 160 hours per month.”
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Leaving it up to managers
Great Place To Work® research shows that remote work isn’t necessarily better than in-person work. Every individual has their own preferences and needs for their work to be successful. Instead, the best workplaces allow individuals or their teams to choose where they work.
In a market survey of 4,400 employees, when employees were able to pick where they worked, they were:
- Three times more likely to want to stay with their organization
- 14 times less likely to “quit and stay”
- More likely to report giving extra effort on the job
- More likely to have a good relationship with their manager
What does that look like in practice?
Moody’s tries to let team leaders set guardrails for their work groups that fit their work and the needs of their people. To make this successful, Moody’s learned that people leaders wanted lots of guidance.
“Managers really crave that detail,” says Monaco. To help them craft rules for their teams, HR leaders did 20 live sessions with people across the business and built connection playbooks that offered strategies to help managers work through their policy with their teams.
The process starts by categorizing tasks into “heads down” or “heads up” work, says Monaco.
“What we didn’t want was people to come into the office to sit on Zoom calls all day,” she explains. “That defeats the purpose of coming into the office.” Things that might classify as heads-up work are collaboration sessions, companywide town halls, or onboarding new employees, all activities with important social elements.
The big shift was to get managers to think carefully about connection, and how they could support relationships between colleagues at the company. From there, leaders were empowered to set their own guardrails for their team, with junior managers taking their cues from senior leaders in their department or function.
“Each of the executive leadership teams created a set of guardrails for their business, and then their leaders took those guardrails and considered how they apply to their line of business, their people and their geographical dispersion,” says Monaco. “They needed to be consistent with the original guardrails, but they had some flexibility.”
Getting out of the silos
One challenge of increased remote work is the lack of connection across a company as individual employees only meet with their respective teams.
“When you have as much virtualization as we have, you can become five small companies within just one, because a lot of the communication will happen within the team,” says Rowe. “We want you to be part of the Anthem family, not just a member of a single team.”
To build stronger ties, Anthem relies on Slack channels to replace “watercooler conversations” about kids, pets, or the latest big TV show. They also host virtual game nights, as well as throwing in-person parties for employees to come together and connect.
There are monthly lunches, a holiday party, and a summer barbecue.
“We’ve got people in Virginia and Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, so not everyone can attend all the time,” says Lisa Rowe, human resources coordinator at Anthem. “We try to find a radius of convenient locations for people.”
Measuring success
How do you know if your remote work policy is helping your business meet its goals? Surveys are a great place to start.
“We heavily rely on the data we get from our Great Place To Work survey, which has a number of questions in there that give us an indication of what’s working well and what’s not,” Monaco says. Data from the survey is further explored in focus groups.
“We always ask people in our focus groups why they stay and why they would leave,” says Monaco. “Flexibility is the No. 1 answer for why they stay, and it is the No. 1 answer for why they would leave: if the flexibility went away.”
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