The Secret Behind Great Hybrid Cultures- Harvard Business Review

Understanding What Great Hybrid Cultures Do Differently

6 min readAug 5, 2023

In this week’s reading list for Tech, Business, and AI (which I published on LinkedIn here) we touched upon remote work a few times. Remote work is amazing for many reasons, including (but not limited to): better employee retention; lesser strain on the environment; better flexibility; lower costs, etc.

Fully remote workers report greater satisfaction with their pay, recognition from colleagues, opportunities for advancement, and — especially — a greater degree of autonomy that they have over their work.
Source

However, for many organizations, it might be scary to go from operating in-person to switching to completely remote. Hybrid work provides a great bridge between the two- allowing teams to experiment and evaluate how well operating remotely works for them. Hybrid work can also provide a best-of-both-worlds situation for many employees. In this article, I will be going over a very interesting article by Harvard Business Review, titled What Great Hybrid Cultures Do Differently to answer that question and add some thoughts of my own in the matter. If you’re a manager/business leader (or you want to be) then understanding this can help you unlock your team’s productivity gains.

Sixty-five percent of workers desire to work remotely all the time, highlighting the popularity of this work model [6]. At the same time, 32% prefer a hybrid schedule, which combines the best of both worlds — flexibility from remote work and collaboration opportunities from in-office work.
-Source

Hybrid cultures, instead, only thrive by treating everyone as remote. This means giving everyone access to the same information, people, tools, and opportunity to succeed, regardless of whether they are sitting in an office in Berlin or whether they are doing their work from a coffee shop in Jakarta or a bedroom in Tokyo. This is simple, but not straightforward. It requires consistent action from leadership on the following five fronts.

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How to build a great hybrid work culture

Embrace asynchronous communication-

We can’t solve today’s challenges using yesterday’s techniques. To operate online in an effective manner, it is critical that companies fully embrace asynchronous communication and the unique benefits it brings. This is accomplished by doing two things-

Deliberately changing synchronous exchanges to asynchronous ones- It is important to move to build a culture where asynchronous updates are the defacto form of communication, and synchronous exchanges are only used when absolutely required. “This could mean replacing your daily stand-up meeting with short written updates to a chat channel, or with written documents that facilitate discussion in the comments. At a wider scale, a CEO could solicit written questions ahead of time for the company town hall, and then record and broadcast it instead of doing it live.” Why We Moved to Async Stand-ups ☀️ is a great read on the topic, to those that might be skeptical on async stand-ups. To those of you that want to stand out during standup meetings, we have a guide right here.

Using technology to produce artifacts that can be shared after a synchronous exchange- When synchronous methods are needed, it helps a lot to use tech to ensure that we leave artifacts that can be accessed later. This could involve using Text-Speech to get meeting transcriptions, storing meeting videos, or sharing minutes of the meeting.

Making communication boundaries clear- If I’m working remotely, should I be expected to be on call during work hours? Is it okay for me to drop updates after work hours? How can we schedule time for deep work (which requires no interruptions) while also letting there be time for spontaneous conversation? This is a big challenge for organizations to navigate.

Set rules of engagement per platform. It is important to clearly define how employees are expected to treat communications on different channels so that there is clarity wrt to communication protocols- “Is it reasonable to not answer a direct message on chat until the next day? What about emails? Is everyone expected to watch every meeting recording if they didn’t make it, or are they optional? These rules of engagement can greatly reduce anxiety and employees’ fear of missing out.”
Make availabilities clear- Just because someone isn’t in a meeting doesn’t mean they’re free (they might be involved in very deep work etc). In order to balance multiple requirements a good approach is to set aside a day for meetings, allow staff to schedule times for deep work, and have them mark out their calendars for times when they are available to meet. This way, no one gets disrupted when they’re doing deep work. A step further could even be having them mark out vacation days so that everyone can plan according to availabilities.

Championing documentation and artifacts-

“By forming a culture of creating company-wide archivable, searchable documentation for important information, we are creating effective historical decision-making for individuals, teams, and departments. … Additionally, encouraging a culture of writing proposals and designs in the open where others can collaborate and comment greatly increases the ability for others to read, understand, and contribute to the overall direction of the company, increasing employee morale and ownership.” In case any of you are looking for a comprehensive guide to writing documentation- I got you covered right here.

Broadcasting communication- With remote/hybrid work, teams need to be more deliberate with sharing important information and updates. Creating a regularly updated newsletter (lmk if you need help with that), communication channels, and posts can help people stay updated on what’s going on. Remember, if your company has an amazing tool, patch, or new offering- it’s as good as useless if people don’t know about it. It is important to create high-quality, spam-free and relevant communication channels where updates are shared regularly.

Provide Tooling- Don’t skimp out on helping your employees set up home offices/get access to the goods they need. No real elaboration is needed here.

Once this is setup, it is about constant experimentation and refinement. Things always take some time to setup, but by constantly readjusting and orienting your teams processes, you will reap the benefits of a hybrid/remote environment.

That is it for this piece. I appreciate your time. As always, if you’re interested in working with me or checking out my other work, my links will be at the end of this email/post. If you like my writing, I would really appreciate an anonymous testimonial. You can drop it here. And if you found value in this write-up, I would appreciate you sharing it with more people. It is word-of-mouth referrals like yours that help me grow.

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