Creating a work environment that fosters a high level of trust between employer and employee has never been easy. It’s especially difficult with hybrid teams, as you have to balance office space utilization with remote work enablement, team meetings with distributed workforce schedules, and employee independence with leadership accountability.
It's not as simple as knowing how to set up video-conference games and whiteboards. No two workforces are the same—nor are their business needs—so there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, these dynamic environments require optimization based on unique company goals, culture, and technology. Getting it wrong could have a significant business impact.
Why Trust is Important in the Workplace
So, how do you get it right? Effectively building trust requires a holistic workplace strategy that meets the needs of both the employer and the employees.
Employers, on the one hand, often prioritize:
- Productivity:For businesses to operate and succeed, teams need to deliver. So, employers understandably focus on achieving results and maximizing employee output and ROI.
- Efficiency: Employers are also responsible for managing budgets and resources, which are increasingly constrained. Ideally, they want the best results that require the fewest resources.
- Accountability: If finding efficiencies increases productivity, then you need to know where to look. This is why many employers want as much visibility as possible into the daily activities of their workforces.
With these priorities in mind, it should come as no surprise that a third of managers feel more comfortable when employees are monitored. Fixed costs like real estate and technology further sway them toward preferring in-person work arrangements.
But a straightforward in-office policy no longer works for many employees, who now prioritize:
- Fulfillment: People want jobs that satisfy them financially, mentally, and emotionally. So, employees naturally seek work arrangements that fit those needs – and there is more emphasis on work-life balance than ever before.
- Flexibility: Employees also focus more on their relationships and interests outside of work, so they now look for jobs that do not require them to completely readjust their lives.
- Independence: If flexibility can help achieve personal fulfillment at work, then a level of autonomy is necessary to enable it. This is why many employees are adamant about having work-from-home options and the flexibility to choose from.
How strongly do they feel about these preferences? One in five employees would not return to the office for any incentive, and two in five would quit if forced to return.
Yes, managing hybrid teams and their disparate needs is a tall order. But the ramifications of doing so cannot be overstated. Within the Fortune 500 alone, 25 billion hours are lost each year to poor collaboration. Meanwhile, 79% of employees who trust their employer are more motivated to work and are less likely to leave.
In short, you cannot buy trust, but you will pay for it if you do not have it. Fortunately, there are a few simple steps you can take to begin building trust and collaboration in hybrid teams.
Steps to Build Trust in Hybrid Teams
Redefine Employee Performance Goals
A key indicator of the level of trust in a company is performance management.
The traditional workplace measured performance based on attendance because a supervisor could monitor an employee’s productivity. However, as the colloquialism “running out the clock” bears witness, employees can always find creative ways to look busy.
A hybrid environment affords even less visibility, leading employers to question whether their staff are working or doing household chores. Thus, to manage hybrid teams, many organizations have maintained attendance metrics and implemented electronic monitoring solutions for remote employees. Apart from demonstrating a lack of trust, this kind of employee surveillance can be detrimental to mental health without offering any accurate insight into team performance.
Why? At the core of traditional performance management metrics is the notion of output, a holdover from the Industry 1.0 era when the primary goal of factory workers was to produce products. But for much of today’s corporate world, hours logged or emails sent are inadequate measures of performance.
Rather than output, a better measure of human performance is outcome. Outcome-based performance metrics might include goals for:
- Deliverables: Several teams in a corporate setting have hard goals to meet. The Sales team has quotas, IT has support tickets and Creative has design projects. These are still valuable goals to track, so long as they are not considered in a vacuum.
- Professional development: Instead of touting your L&D budget, build that spending into your performance review process. For example, if an employee wants to learn a new skill, make attending a class one of their goals. This will also help grow their career more than attending the same conference every year.
- Team building: Interpersonal skills are essential in a hybrid setting filled with easily misinterpreted emails and chat messages. Team retreats that bring everyone together should be a department goal, but actively participating in them can also be an individual goal. If you have an employee award program, you could also create personal goals for submitting nominations. This encourages people to take a moment to consider and describe the importance of their colleagues to them.
- Wellness: Every company expects team members to recharge on their days off, but how many set goals for this? Hybrid settings can blur the lines between work and home, so make healthy boundaries part of the job instead of taking advantage of that. Whether it’s not checking emails on the weekend or taking mental health days, customize these goals to each person’s needs.
Though they may seem frivolous at face value, they all contribute to employee engagement and productivity. Best of all, they effectively balance the employer’s desire for accountability with the employee’s desire for flexibility, ultimately improving all-around performance.
Adjust Leadership Styles and Culture
Some organizations may struggle to build trust in the workplace because their company culture is simply not conducive to it.
For example, if you manage hybrid teams with an authoritarian leadership style, redefining performance goals will have little effect. Your culture assumes that you know best, so your employees will set the goals they think you want, not the ones they really aspire to achieve or hope will make an impact. And those with unrealistic goals are 59% less likely to say they have a healthy work/life balance. A trusting relationship with your teams cannot happen until you rethink how you lead them.
Under traditional leadership styles, the manager’s priority is serving the company, and the team’s priority is serving the manager. As logical as this hierarchy may seem, it lends itself to abuse. Managers often lack accountability for how they choose to “serve the company,” and employees are often left both doing their jobs and proving their value.
In contrast, a coaching leadership style makes serving the team the manager’s top priority. People are valued as the company’s greatest asset; thus, serving the company means serving the people. Further, people are empowered to be the experts in their respective fields by managers who are experts in them. This kind of investment means properly-coached employees are 40% more engaged and 20% more likely to stay in their organizations.
With coaching leaders, all employees of all work styles have an advocate in their manager, freeing them up to do their best work.
Embrace Hybrid Workplace Technology
Building trust through better leadership and performance management practices lays the foundation for better collaboration. However, managing hybrid teams means more than merely providing that opportunity. The most successful companies actively enable collaboration.
Most office layouts, from open concepts to dedicated spaces, are designed with collaboration in mind. In other words, team members are actively encouraged to collaborate through the office culture and the office itself. Leveraging collaboration tools follows the same principle.
However, tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams cannot passively bring employees together as they would be in the office setting. To counteract this, review your most successful office strategies and simulate them with virtual channels and teams. For example, if your most forward-thinking conversations happen in the break room, create a virtual one and encourage your brainstorm evangelists to post thought starters there.
Besides optimizing virtual spaces, you can also use analytics solutions for your office spaces. Tools like Accruent Space Intelligence track hourly occupancy and utilization trends, so you can benchmark company averages and use predictive analytics to identify consolidation opportunities. You can even restack offices and departments to simulate efficiencies and redraw office layouts.
Build Trust with a Trusted Partner
A hybrid workforce deserves office and virtual spaces optimized to their collaboration needs and a company culture and leadership that fosters trust. But those things require change and investment in new practices and better technologies.
Investing in the right technology partner can make these changes easier. Accruent Space Intelligence (ASI) software gives you a holistic picture of your lease, maintenance, workplace, utilization, badge, and sensor data—all in one place. Learn more about ASI here.
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