As organizations start to design post-pandemic workplaces, many are offering flexible remote working arrangements. This is creating to a hybrid environment, with some employees in the office and others working from home. A distributed workforce is bound to impact day-to-day operations, and leaders and their teams may need new habits and systems.
“In March, we all boarded a coronavirus time machine to the future,” says Jeff Schwartz, founding partner of Deloitte Consulting’s Future of Work practice and author of Work Disrupted: Opportunity, Resilience, and Growth in the Accelerated Future of Work. “The tools that would have taken five to 10 years to develop and launch took five weeks or even five days. Now as we think about what it means to go back to the office, we can’t use an old map to explore a new world. COVID has not been detour. It was an onramp to a new way of working.”
Maximizing success in a hybrid setting requires embracing practices that were accelerated during the pandemic, as well as developing new skills going forward.
Flexible working hours
Remote working merged our professional and personal life into one, and flexible hours became the way employees could adjust.
“We used to think we could have work life on one hand and our personal life on other,” says Schwartz. “During the COVID era, we saw the end of work/life balance as our personal and work lives became integrated.”
Employees will most likely want to keep the integration as we move into the future, which offers a better way of scheduling work, says Schwartz. Having the flexibility to move tasks around in order to deal with personal responsibilities will remain important.
Virtual management skills
“Last summer we were asking, ‘Who are the people that need to be in the office to do their jobs and how do we get them safely back?’” says Schwartz. “The question now given a year of working remotely is, ‘What are ways employees like to work and how do we understand their preferences?’”
Schwartz says workers will fit into new personas, such as a homesteader, office dweller, and coffee shop traveler, and managers will need to properly manage distributed teams.
“Find out from employee what works for them at this time in their life,” says Schwartz. “Some may value the social interaction of the office, while others may have kids learning from home and an ability to work remotely is important to them. But once kids are back in school, their preference may change. Managers need to know what workers want and be able to support them.”
Time management
Learning how to manage your time is an important skill when you’re working from home. In a hybrid environment, employees and managers need to set priorities hour by hour, day by day, and week by week, and structure their time to address the most important tasks.
“Worker productivity data rose during the third quarter of 2020 and one reason was that workers were taking advantage of flexible ways of working,” says Schwartz. “The challenge now is for managers to be clear on what it means to be productively engaged. Technology fatigue can happen in a virtual office, and an employee’s ability to set aside time for self care is more important in a hybrid environment. Not everyone may have created a home working environment that supports that.”
A redefined workplace
As more employees return to the workplace, employers need to determine what they need in the office and what they need to work in virtual ways. For example, if an employee is sitting in an office or cubicle to complete their work, they could have easily done the task at home.
“Many office tasks can be easily done at home,” says Schwartz. “When employees go back to office, campus or lab, leaders need to ask, ‘What should we do differently?’”
Since humans are social beings, the office will be a place to build relationships and engage, which requires more common spaces. “We need to be deliberate and look at how we move back and forth between virtual remote and physical environments,” says Schwartz.
Adaptability
During the pandemic, what became important was not what an employee was hired to do, but what they capable of doing, says Schwartz. For example, an engineer whose job was making complex automobiles was suddenly challenged with creating ventilators.
“There was a new need in the marketplace, and organizations needed people who had potential,” he says. “A job used to be your job description. And training gave you a way to follow a career ladder. COVID flipped that model on its head. COVID recovery will focus on the importance of creating work environments where potential is a valuable skill.”
Hybrid arrangements require that organizations reinvent their workplaces and employees expand their skills. “It’s like trying to work through a Rubik’s cube,” says Schwartz. “It’s not about going back to what we did before. It’s not a return; it’s a departure. It’s a back-to-the-future kind of story as we all figure out what’s next.”
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When you’re in a situation where you feel like you don’t have control, it can be easy to become paralyzed by fear and unable to move forward. This often leads to bad decision-making. But understanding how your brain works can provide you with a path for getting back on track and sticking to your goals, says Dr. Mark McLaughlin, author of Cognitive Dominance: A Brain Surgeon’s Quest to Out-Think Fear.
“It’s possible to train your brain to think differently when events make you feel stymied and you don’t know what to do,” he says.
As a practicing neurosurgeon, McLaughlin is no stranger to intense situations. To deal with the stress of his job and enhance his performance, he created a quadrant system to harness the strengths of the brain’s hemispheres. While most of us don’t make life-or-death decisions in an operating room, McLaughlin says the methodology can be applied to any situation that induces fear.
Understand the hemispheres
First, you need to understand how the brain processes information in order to leverage its capabilities. While the idea of “left-brain or right-brain dominance” is a myth, certain tasks are localized in specific areas of the brain. The left hemisphere is where some aspects of logical thinking occur, so it’s often considered to be the objective, goal-oriented part of the brain. And the right hemisphere is more subjective, looking at the big picture and providing our gut reactions. “This is where stories land that teach us how to act and behave in the world,” says McLaughlin.
Each hemisphere has strengths and weaknesses. For example, if someone delivers bad news, your left brain can get carried away focusing on all of the things that could go wrong, while the right brain takes in clues in facial expressions or gestures that could provide context or additional information. Understanding how the hemispheres work together, you can better know how to move forward.
Use a quadrant system
Instead of letting fear control your actions, be mathematical about your reaction and decision-making process by graphing out an unexpected event on an X and Y axis, says McLaughlin.
“X is your left hemisphere. It’s logical, objective, and scientific. It’s what we can all agree on in materialistic way,” he explains. “Y is your right hemisphere. It’s big picture and subjective, where things have meaning.”
When you experience an unexpected, stressful event, ask yourself, what are the objective unmistakable facts, and what does the event subjectively mean to you? And do you perceive the facts and thoughts to be positive or negative?
If the subjective thoughts and objective facts are both negative, you are in the lower left-hand quadrant. This is quadrant you’d be in if you lose a loved one or are forced to close your business. “This is the all-is-lost quadrant,” says McLaughlin. “You’ve done everything right and something goes wrong. That’s when you’re throwing your arms in air.”
If the objective facts are positive but your subjective thoughts are negative, you are in the bottom-right quadrant. This could be the feeling you get when you get a great job, but your boss is toxic. “It’s a calm-before-the-storm feeling when you experience a sense of anxiety about the future,” says McLaughlin.
When your subjective thoughts are positive, but the objective facts are negative, you are in the upper-left quadrant, which is what McLaughlin calls the resilience quadrant. For example, you may have lost your job, but found time to complete the book you always wanted to write.
“You hear people say, ‘That was an unpleasant experience, but it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me because I grew and became better,’” says McLaughlin. “You are birthing new skills in this quadrant.”
And when the subjective and objective are both positive, you are in the upper right-hand quadrant. “People often call this quadrant ‘flow,’” says McLaughlin. “It’s when we experience a level of clicking and everything is working in concert with what we believe and is of meaning in our lives. It’s a wonderful feeling.”
Unfortunately, you can’t live in flow. The other three quadrants are necessary and make life interesting and fun, says McLaughlin. “It’s a heroic journey you go through to get back up to flow,” he says.
Moving through the quadrants
To create change, realize that you’re always going to be in one of quadrants. If you’re dealing with negative facts or feelings, you are working from a place of cognitive dissonance, which is the mental discomfort you get when events are at odds with your values or actions. However, you can train your brain to use cognitive dominance, overcoming the situation to get into new quadrant.
“It’s looking at the situation, and saying, ‘Okay, I know I’m in this quadrant. How do I get to where I want to go?’” says McLaughlin.
In order to move to a new quadrant, you first have to have a clear definition of who you are. “Are you a leader? Helper? Server? What is the best version of you?” McLaughlin asks.
Next, identify one micro-goal that you can take to move the needle one notch over. Make decisions that move in a positive direction on the Y-axis. “Even one step will give you a jolt of dopamine that can create a new network in the brain,” says McLaughlin.
For example, McLaughlin recently had a young patient who died on the operating table. In order to handle the heart-breaking experience, he tapped into the quadrants.
“I was in the all-is-lost quadrant, but I had to speak to his family,” he says. “I thought about what I can do that is consistent with who I believe I am, which is a caring doctor. I talked to his family in most caring, compassionate way possible, telling them that every chance to save him was explored. I made sure I talked to them in the right setting with support people around. And I made myself available for them if they have questions in the future. Taking those steps helped me move up the Y-axis.”
Knowing where you are is comforting and is the starting point for adapting to change, says McLaughlin. “You can see the big picture and know that something will pass,” he says. “You can also see what you need to do to climb up that Y-axis.”
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