The Ontario Broker - Volume 22, Issue 2 - 25

leadership
BE STRATEGIC
There's a lot of work that needs to happen before you
can create a hybrid work strategy. You'll need to consider
the requirements of each job (roles, projects, tasks,
customer needs) and the requirements of each employee
(flexibility, fairness, inclusion, work-life balance). It's
a good idea to survey everyone to learn what their
individual needs might look like.
To make an equitable hybrid work plan, you'll need
to go beyond a one-size fits all solution and consider all
the various exceptions that inevitably come up, since
everyone's situation is different. Osman's book only takes
about an hour to read, but a large portion is devoted to
this analysis and it goes very far in-depth into various
considerations you'll want to keep in mind.
OPTIMIZING YOUR PLANS
You may need to rethink some tasks and workflows,
but it can also be a great time to reassess how things are
currently working. You don't want to adapt an inefficient
process to a hybrid work environment or you'll just end
up replicating its flaws.
You'll need to plan for both in-person and remote
aspects of work. What work can your team best do in
the office versus remotely? It's a good idea to try to
maximize the benefits of the team being together in the
office-prioritizing in-person meetings and collaborative
activities.
Remote work is best utilized to accomplish
focused individual work. You may even want
to consider a meeting-free remote day once
a week. Similarly, it's a good idea to batch
all your meetings that require face-to-face
interaction in the same day or two. If you're
not optimizing your schedule in this way,
you're missing out on one of the biggest
benefits of a hybrid model and might as well
be 100% remote.
MANAGING A HYBRID TEAM
One of the biggest concerns for a hybrid
team, is inadvertently creating a two-tier
system between employees who are more
in-person and those who are more often
remote. Ideally, you the want the employee
experience to be as similar as possible
among all employees.
Osman's suggestion is creating a remotefirst
culture. This means, when developing
new processes, defaulting to remote as
the norm and building out from there. This
requires all meetings to be held online, with
everyone on camera.
An easy way to make remote workers feel
more included in in-person meetings is to implement a
buddy system, where an in-person worker and a remote
worker instant message, to ensure the remote employee
isn't missing anything important that's happening in
the room and to help advocate for the remote worker if
they're having trouble contributing to the conversation.
Something managers should keep in mind is the
propinquity effect-the tendency to have an increased
fondness for people you spend more time with. It's
good to be aware of this, so that it isn't biasing your
assessments between employees. Similarly, managers
who are on-site tend to have more information about
what the other in-person workers are doing. To
compensate for this, Osman recommends frequent
check-ins to both stay on top of what remote employees
are doing and to make sure that they feel as supported
as their colleagues.
Building an effective hybrid work model for your team
is a huge undertaking that'll entail constant revision and
improvement. There are many other aspects deserving
careful thought and attention-Osman's book and his
appearance on the Coaching for Leaders podcast points
to many other areas you can focus on. Some of this may
feel a little like reinventing the wheel, but a successful
hybrid team needs the same thing as any team using any
model-a good leader. And if you've read this far, they've
got that and that's a great start.
VOLUME 22 | ISSUE 2
25
The Ontario Broker - Volume 22, Issue 2

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Ontario Broker - Volume 22, Issue 2
