We must create space for productive conversations about changes to working conditions, writes Amy Edmondson, professor of leadership at Harvard Business School.
The blurring of personal and working lives during COVID-19 has had some positive effects.
The pandemic gave more of us permission to talk about things we tended not to talk about at work before, such as wellbeing, or burnout or family members who need extra help – crucially, without fear of being seen as less serious or operating outside the norm.
We’ve seen a greater recognition that we’re all human and that we don’t simply turn that off when we start work, an openness I hope will continue.
But that doesn’t mean that conversations around work set-ups are easy; they need to be conducted with skill and compassion. Unless we’re very careful, they have the potential to be something of a minefield.
I’m not a fan of the term “hybrid,” which risks implying an “us vs them,” “employee vs company,” all-or-nothing mindset. Working out how we classify and structure work arrangements calls for thoughtful, ongoing discussions. There’s no road map here; it needs to be a dynamic design process, characterised by experimenting and learning.
Involving employees and marshalling proper data about what people want is crucial, but that’s not the whole story. When we’re looking to update working arrangements, we need to approach the challenge by looking not just at our work set-up, but at the work itself. We all need to see the bigger picture, to keep the whole in mind.
What we want are new arrangements that lead to great results: employees who are engaged and contributing and customers who are delighted. That may be an ideal, but we need to get as close as possible to it and not privilege one part of the equation over the other.
That means “both-and” (rather than “either-or”) conversations about what the work needs and how best to create value: what does that look like? What do our customers need? How do we make it happen efficiently and to the highest standard and quality?
When location flexibility works on this basis, then we should go for it, but that won’t always be the case. We need to be realistic about how these questions are framed.
It’s in the interests of everyone that hybrid working conversations and dialogues are open and honest, that people take part in these discussions as a discovery process, anticipating and avoiding divides that don’t need to be there.
That’s why simplistic or one-size-fits-all solutions are unlikely to work. Hybrid means so many things to so many people: while some of us might be quite happy working indefinitely from home, that’s not the case for employees suffering from loneliness or those without a quiet space to work from at home.
Going forward, we’ll need effective dialogue and a healthy dose of iteration if we are to succeed. This process needs everyone to contribute in reasonable, realistic ways and to understand that there’s unlikely to be an opportunity or capacity to please everyone.
Psychological safety will be an essential enabler for those contributions, but it’ll also be a crucial factor when it comes to creating work arrangements that balance personal and organisational needs.
* Source: Edited extract from What Psychological Safety Looks Like in a Hybrid Workplace, by Amy C. Edmondson and Mark Mortensen, hbr.org