Exhibiting Leadership within a Hybrid Workplace

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Over the past year, one big question has been on everyone’s mind. What does the future of work look like? If the answer is slowly starting to take shape for many organizations, one thing is clear: the future of work will involve a mix of in-person and remote working arrangements. Managers exhibiting exceptional leadership skills will be the most successful at manoeuvring within a hybrid workplace.

A New Reality Requiring Adaptation

The winning formula may look different for every business but a recent McKinsey survey showed that 9 out of 10 organizations intend on combining remote and on-site work in the near future. Motivations include staff well-being, safety and security, real estate costs, increased productivity and greater access to talent.

This may come as good news but management can expect a whole set of new challenges to arise.

Let’s not forget that aside from freelancers, remote work has only gained traction over the past few years and that to this day, most people have acquired professional experience in physical work environments in which people meet face-to-face and work hand-in-hand.

We may be used to technology but managing a team partially or entirely made up of remote workers is a different story and requires time, effort, adaptability and commitment from leadership.

Showing Up as a Strong Leader

In a virtual world, a lot of the usual cues are gone, making leadership skills even more important.

Zoom meetings don’t provide the same level of information as physical interactions, nor do they significantly contribute to create culture – unless handled with that goal in mind.

Surprisingly, a hybrid model combining entirely remote workers and others working from the office at least part-time can prove to be as or even more challenging than a 100% remote team, the risk being of generating two separate cultures.

As a leader, you act as the captain that steers the boat in the right direction. It is imperative that you communicate with confidence and ensure your people have the tools and resources to perform to the best of their ability and feel comfortable in doing so. Don’t pretend to have all the answers. Be open to change and suggestions while realizing that how you show up will impact how they react.

The devil is in the detail and it is by observing people’s reactions, witnessing their behaviors, and testing different approaches that you will know how best to handle the situation and exhibit leadership in doing so.

However, a leader can do so much in brushing up on its leadership skills. Training and coaching therefore becomes an interesting avenue to gain more perspective on oneself and access tools and techniques to elevate interpersonal capabilities.

Getting Started in Leading a Hybrid Workforce

1. Assess your own personal readiness as a leader

  • How do you feel about the changes you are faced with?
  • What biases or concerns do you have?
  • What can you do about them?
  • How might they impact your team?

Make sure to look at the big picture. Identifying how hybrid work can positively impact yourself, staff and the organization may help put things into perspective. As a leader, you are required to do what is best for the organization while taking into consideration the people you are responsible for.

In any case, finding this out will allow you to explore your solutions and make intentional decisions for all moving forward.

2. Assess your team’s readiness

Two-thirds of American workers have reported feeling anxious about returning to work.

Gauge where your employees stand.

  • Are they happy about the situation?
  • If not, what is preventing them from committing?
  • Are there simple measures or accommodations that can be put in place to help?

Taking note of this and addressing it early on will help overall productivity and performance.

3. Seek feedback

When making decisions about organizational policies and processes to facilitate a hybrid workplace, don’t let chance be your guide.

Ask other members of the leadership team for input and advice. What are their strategies to help them lead their teams with more confidence in this evolving workplace?

A leader is also a good listener so don’t be afraid to ask staff for their input as well. Without promising anything, ask them what they think would be useful tools, processes and practices to make their work easier and improve team dynamics. Present it so that everyone understands they have a role to play.

After seeking input, create a clear, consistent policy and process to clearly outline your working expectations.

The next step will be to communicate your plan – clearly and confidently.

In our next post, we’ll discuss how critical efficient communication is in workplace, and how taking into account different types of personalities and communication styles can help bring your team together.

Through workplace training, coaching and human resource solutions, Intuity Performance applies a Whole Person Performance approach to cultivate an environment for growth within organizations.

Contact us to find out how we can elevate your leadership skills.

Creating a Culture of Communication in the Workplace

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Critical to ensure employee performance and positive team dynamics, efficient communications don’t come easily to all, which explains why it can be such a sensitive topic for leaders. Establishing a clear communication strategy is the first step but managers have a role to play to create a true culture of communication in the workplace.

On our Elevate Business podcast, Michael Jansen put it this way: you’re the boss but your job is to enable your staff’ success.

Effective workplace communications can bring people together and get them to stand behind a shared goal and vision. It’s the glue that makes a team stick.

On the other hand, underperforming workplace communications can bring teams to fall apart.

As a leader, it is your responsibility to set the example, whether when dealing with a single individual or an entire team. It is also your responsibility to ensure your team has the resources and the know-how to operate in a concerted way.

Now More Than Ever

In a context where staff are working remotely, proper communication is even more important.

Teams need to know what to expect. What communication channels are being used? How often can they expect to hear from supervisors and management? When, how and where can they access the information they need?

In highly collaborative virtual or hybrid environments, leaders should reflect expectations and obligations through programs and informational tools that allow staff to perform tasks with ease, even when located outside of the physical workplace or collaborating with other staff based elsewhere.

According to a McKinsey survey on the future of hybrid work, the companies supporting small connections between colleagues were the ones enjoying higher productivity levels during the pandemic.

Virtually onboarding new hires are good opportunities to test out an internal communication strategy. If new staff can easily find answers to their questions and start developing relationships with their teammates, chances are that you’re on the right track.

Strong Leader, Strong Communicator

Strong leaders know to communicate regularly with their teams, sharing relevant if not short and simple information. They make a point to maintain communication, even when there is not a lot to say.

Strong leaders know to communicate with integrity. Being honest doesn’t mean sharing everything. It means being able to say that a given information is too sensitive to be shared. It means being able to explain the facts as they are. Everyone may not agree but they will understand and will respect you for it.

Strong leaders know to communicate clearly. A clear message is one that is presented in such a way that it is impactful and easy to understand, and that cannot lead to interpretation.

With this being said, a good communicator is nothing if no one is listening.

Instilling A Culture of Communication

Strong teams seek to understand and rely on transparent and open communications. Employees feeling misinformed will tend to question and disagree with decisions, leaving them dubious and disengaged and resulting in a divide amongst team members.

Ultimately, this will affect employee satisfaction and retention, recruitment, and overall organizational performance.

A good communicator knows to listen and to create a space where people feel comfortable sharing, expressing their ideas, and even questioning other viewpoints.

Working with our clients, we’ve observed the challenges they face in fostering an environment that is conducive to regular, productive, meaningful and sometimes difficult conversations and communications.

These typically emerge as a result of a deficient communication strategy, a lack of awareness on the part of management or a need to develop leadership skills further. Even when personality conflicts arise between individual team members, managers should be able to quickly spot the situation and take action.

Setting Your Organization Up for Success

If establishing yourself as a credible communicator is the first step, understanding team dynamics and personalities will make your interpersonal communication skills that much more efficient. Everyone is different and reacts to information differently. Knowing how to address each one of your staff based on their own style will allow them to better understand where you want to go and persuade them to join you on your journey.

Staff also need to take ownership of their own workplace relationships, developing strategies to find their place and to address communication issues as they arise.

At Intuity, we use the DISC evidence-based model to help individuals better understand their colleagues’ behaviours as well as their own. We have also developed a multi-day workplace communication training based on the model.

In the workplace, DISC is useful in many ways:

  • It helps individuals understand how they show up and how to adapt themselves based on the situation or the person they are interacting with
  • It provides for more honest interpersonal communications based on mutual respect
  • It gives staff the knowledge and training to address miscommunications or to avoid potential conflicts
  • It generates better productivity and problem-solving within teams

Whether it’s in a physical, hybrid or entirely virtual workplace, adopting a proactive communication model and adapting communications not only to the environment but to people can make a big difference in your organizational success.

Contact Intuity today to find out about our workplace communication training and coaching, and our DISC assessments.

The Future of Work – Towards a More Human-Centric Model

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Throughout history, the face of work has gone through several iterations, from an agrarian economy relying heavily on manual labour in which the wealthiest didn’t take part, to the mainstream knowledge economy as we know it today, relying on computerization, automation and intellectual capital rather than production.

The future of work is now

While the pandemic has accentuated this trend and made certain skills appear irrelevant moving forward, it has also demonstrated the flaws associated with a technology-driven economy and therefore highlighted the need and accelerated the implementation of a human-based economy and of a human-centric workplace.

Welcome to the future of work – a world where know-how takes a step back and human skills are no longer an asset but a definite must for workers and organizations, acting as a counterbalance to the overpowering technology.

In this bizarre era, human skills can no longer be ignored by organizations when it comes to positioning themselves as trustful and successful employers, partners, brands and leaders.

In the future of work, human skills allow organizations to:

  • Show their true colors and express their individuality
  • Retain and attract talent
  • Build a culture that people want to be a part of
  • Get management to lead more intentionally and more efficiently
  • Engage workers and make them feel listened to
  • Benefit from enhanced individual and team performance
  • Model diversity and inclusion authentically
  • Make their technology more impactful and relatable
  • Make a hybrid or remote work environment more efficient

Human skills are what make us adaptable, well-rounded individuals leading adaptable, well-rounded organizations ready to face this ever-evolving workplace and economy.

In short, human skills are the catalyst of a successful organization. Even business schools are trying to incorporate them in their curriculum.

Ok. But what are human skills exactly?

Human skills, soft skills, interpersonal skills. These are all synonymous.

Human skills and soft skills are HR concepts that refer to personality and behavioral traits and a certain set of transferable skills that focus on people and their capacity to interact with one another, solve problems and manage situations. To the contrary of ‘hard’ skills or technical skills, soft skills are inherent to a person. This is not to say that you are necessarily born with them. Such skills can be learned through experience and can be improved over time when cultivated.

Amongst them, we find communication, trust, empathy, adaptation, curiosity, resilience, leadership and flexibility.

Communication

Being a good communicator and creating a culture of communication is not an easy task and involves different things: concision, clarity, intention, honesty, collaboration, active listening, enthusiasm and leadership. When done well, it can achieve miracles for organizations.

Empathy

Empathy is what makes us relatable. It’s about being able to see the world through someone’s eyes, to authentically put ourselves in other people’s shoes and to say ‘I know how you’re feeling’. It’s showing that we are human after all, no matter our role or our position.

Trust

Entrusting others and demonstrating that sense of trust through delegation, collaboration and empowerment is a requirement to avoid frustration and conflict and generate cohesion and adherence.

Flexibility and adaptation

Being able to remain flexible and adapt is one of the most precious qualities one can have in this ever-changing landscape. It sends a positive message to those around while making things easier for ourselves.

Curiosity

Keeping an open-mind and facing challenges as they arise is much easier to achieve when training and stimulating our brain regularly. Forcing ourselves to ask questions, to learn and to read is a good way to generate a fresh perspective on things and to deal with uncertainty.

Resilience

Our resilience is best tested when faced with adversity. It is our capacity to deal with situations, to confront challenges, to look for solutions and to start all over the next time an issue arises. Failing to do this can result in being perceived as inadequate.

Leadership

Leadership is not reserved to management. Everyone has the capacity to demonstrate leadership. It’s about taking one’s place, sharing ideas, collaborating, being able to respectfully state a position and allowing others to take their place.

Not to say that ‘hard’ skills are no longer relevant. But as workers are being replaced by computers, it is clear that learning to be is becoming more important than learning to do. Machines may have an edge over us in terms of savoir-faire. But our very nature as humans still gives us a competitive advantage.

As Manish Bahl of the Center for the Future of Work puts it: “your skills + social and cultural context = hard-to-automate skill”.

More so, Forbes contributor Charles Tower-Clark tells us that “while automation and digitization may displace around 85 million jobs by 2025, around 97 million new roles may emerge that are better adapted to the new division of labor between humans, machines, and algorithms”.

Indeed, there are a lot of synergies for machines and humans to work together. When we look at it that way, it becomes obvious why working on improving those complementary soft skills is so important.

Ultimately, this is what will lead to more compassionate and better performing workplaces.

Through workplace training, coaching and human resource solutions, Intuity Performance applies a Whole Person Performance approach to cultivate an environment for growth within organizations.

Contact us to find out how we can help you take on the future of work.

Addressing Employee Scarcity as an Employer

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These days, we can’t go anywhere or browse the news without hearing about employee scarcity. Job vacancies are peaking across Canada, the United States and elsewhere, in all industries, and employers are deploying immense effort to attract new talents. At Intuity, our take is that retaining your existing resources is at least as important if not more than addressing employee scarcity by hiring new talents.

Trying times for organizations

Let’s face it. Organizations are facing trying times.

If skilled resources and labour were already hard to come by before the pandemic, the situation in which they find themselves right now is far from easy. The future remains blurry, immigration is at a standstill, competition for candidates has increased thanks to remote work and abolished geographical restrictions and employees want more safety and flexibility and are ready to leave their employer to find what they’re looking for elsewhere.

With staff turnover and increased consumer demand requiring additional staff, focusing on measures to attract talent can seem to be a valid solution. But hiring is not an end-all-be-all. In fact, staff retention is the key that will then allow for attracting and hiring to take place more naturally and easily.

Instead of spending time developing new coop partnerships with educational programs that are struggling themselves, spending time screening candidates who have already found jobs elsewhere, establishing virtual hiring protocols and so on, why not devote your time and effort to those who are already on your team?

Remember how Arnold said he was ready to take on a new challenge? Now is the time to give him the opportunity! Help your team find meaning in their work, challenge them, equip them for the future and ensure their wellbeing, and you’ll have addressed at least a portion of your employee scarcity problem by preventing more departures.

After all, employee recognition is something many organizations lack at, and what better way to do it than providing advancement opportunities to the faithful individuals who have helped your business thrive all this time?

This in turn will help you attract more people, inspired by the culture you’ve created and the feedback of existing staff, therefore making your recruitment processes that much easier.

The ideal employee

Start by reflecting on the fabric of your existing team. What are the characteristics of the people you’ve employed so far? What makes them assets to the organization?

Now, how does your ideal candidates differ from this profile? What additional qualities or skills do they bring to the table?

Can you work with your team in place and help it get to where you’d like it to be? What tools and resources can you offer to better support them? Are there trainings, courses or coaching opportunities that would help them get them closer to your ideal employee?

And what about you? What can YOU do to improve as a manager and leader?

Retaining and attracting talent beyond compensation

Let’s not kid ourselves: if employees appreciate feeling they can grow and contribute meaningfully to the organization, it’s not to say that pay and benefits aren’t important.

If you haven’t done a comparative analysis in a while, now is the time to do it. Evaluate how you are compared to other organizations in your industry. Also, evaluate each position in the more global context. How are you faring in terms of salary, vacation, pension and other standard benefits? Do you find your business to be at par, below or above?

Although being above is a definite asset, it’s not the only thing that matters. What are other perks that make you stand out or that could help you stand out?

If you listen carefully, your staff will tell you what they want. You might be surprised to find out that a higher pay is not always at the top of the list of priorities.

Perhaps they’d like you to contribute to their RRSP. To develop partnerships to allow them to take care of their physical health at a discount or to receive an ergonomics specialist in their home office. Maybe they’d appreciate PD days, like those enjoyed by staff at numbercrunch. Or an opportunity to unwind in a dedicated, quiet space of the office.

Our solutions to employee scarcity

In alignment with organization goals, Intuity Performance offers a variety of services to help you address employee scarcity and increase team engagement and collaboration – from strategic human resources planning to HR infrastructures, policies and performance systems, to culture alignment programs.

The sky’s the limit. Find what it is that makes your people tick, respond to that need, provide them with a positive atmosphere and the proper resources and opportunities, and you will increase your likelihood of keeping them – while also attracting the right people to fill those vacancies.

Can Workplace Culture Evolve Through Leadership?

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I’ve interviewed over 80 CEOs in the past 12 months, and often we get on the topic of company culture. I get excited each time. When we ask CEOs to define culture, the range of responses varies with every company, AND many leaders are not aware of what culture means to them specifically.

Some responses include:

  • Teams create culture as a company grows.
  • Culture changes based on values, beliefs and assumptions of the organization’s values, ideas, and assumptions.
  • Culture is built around the goals and objectives of the organization.

The odd time, we get a candid answer – “I don’t know- but we need to figure it out!”

Culture Defined

So what is culture, and why does it matter in the workplace?

Workplace culture is not tangible. The term is thrown around all the time, but it’s not something that you can point to and say, “That’s culture.” Yet, it holds immense value because it is essential to tie together every aspect of your business.

Workplace culture is the beliefs, behaviors, and values shared by employees within an organization. Whether good or bad, working in an organizational culture can significantly affect how people grow professionally and personally.

Based on my experience, I have learned three essential things that contribute to culture shaping which companies can apply to get desired results.

  • Self-awareness allows you to see others more clearly by understanding how beliefs, behaviors, and values shape performance.
  • Curiosity – what drives and motivates the human side of teams
  • Judgment – Ensuring there is enough information to see people without bias.

Here’s what we know about culture:

  • We go after what’s easy – changing company artifacts, behaviors, and metrics is more straightforward.
  • Writing can easily change company artifacts, behaviors, and metrics.
  • Influencing changes in behaviors and metrics can be easily agreed upon by teams.
  • Beliefs, values (our real ones, not those on an internal billboard), and assumptions are much harder to change.

Blind Spots

Organizations can write down and discuss their intentions, but here’s where the realism comes into play. If our beliefs, values, and assumptions aren’t aligned, we do not have an effective organizational culture – despite the matched RRSP and monthly gift cards.

Culture touches on everything – mountains of data tell us that organizational culture hits on performance, decision-making, atmosphere, team approach, structures and even how we communicate.

Regardless of the debate, culture is from the top-down and the bottom up. The profound thing that screams out to me is that culture isn’t as intentional as it should be. I haven’t done the research, but it certainly leans into self-awareness and EI-Q.

It’s something that is moving and growing daily. That demands our attention, especially now in this hybrid working world with new and undiscovered pressures.

We are human first – To answer the questions around “Can culture change with leadership?”. In short, YES! By becoming self-aware and tapping into the human side of organizations, leaders can capitalize on the human (soft) skills that drive performance, decision-making, atmosphere, team approach, and communication in order to drive performance and foster an intentional and effective workplace culture.