103 | Hybrid Working: Is it Really the Best of Both Worlds? | Andrew Bartlow

Welcome to the Building Better Cultures podcast, where I talk to leaders about how internal communications, engagement, and leadership all play a key role in creating amazing and successful cultures.

So that's why hybrid is probably the worst of both worlds, because other companies are getting there faster. And frankly, you've gotta keep up with the Joneses or you're going to be behind on a very important decision-making criteria for a lot of workers.

Hello there and welcome to this episode of the Building Better Cultures podcast with me, Scott McInnes. As usual, before we kick off with our chat with today's guest, my usual thank you to our friend and supporter and sponsor Workvivo. If you're looking for ways to connect with your people in a much more human way, basing that on values and start to think about how you can really, really drive connection between your people, particularly as we travel further and further down this hybrid path. Then the guys at Workvivo are well worth a look. You'll find more about them at workvivo.com, and you will hear a little more about them later on. So we had a great chat with Darren Murph from GitLab in the last episode where we focused a lot on hybrid working and the benefits of remote and all that good stuff. So I'm really excited to continue that conversation in part today with my guest Andrew Bartlow, who is the founder and faculty member of the People People Leader Accelerator. Andrew's got a wealth of experience from an HR perspective, and I'm really looking forward to delving into some of perhaps the HR and leadership and culture issues that organizations are facing today, because I know he'll have some really, really great advice. No pressure there, Andrew.

None at all. Really glad to be with you, Scott McInnes.

Great stuff. Thanks a lot for being here. Listen, very quickly, we always start this way. Why don't you just maybe give us the 60 seconds about Andrew Bartlow, where you've come from, and what you do now?

Sure. Well, deep and brief, I'm a human resources professional, 25-ish years in the profession at companies from Fortune 50 to less than 50 employees, and really everything in between. And today, I work with human resources leaders at other companies. I call myself HR for HR in a lot of ways. And I mentor and support and educate other HR leaders through a variety of different offerings, namely People Leader Accelerator.

Brilliant. Well, what I'm, what I'm loving about the potential for today's podcast is the fact that you're going to be bringing not only your insight, but of course, a whole load of insight from all the other HR leaders that you're speaking about all around the world as part of the programs that you run. So that's going to be something that I'm really looking forward to. Let's kick off. With a little thought perhaps about remote hybrid working. As I said in the intro, we spoke to Darren Murph in the last episode. I'm really interested to know just from your perspective, 'cause of course I'm seeing things happening and working and not working. I'm really interested to see and hear from your perspective, what are you seeing? Is the hybrid remote thing working for organizations? What's your perspective?

I think short answer is yes, it's working, but it's still uncomfortable. It's still a new pair of shoes for a lot of organizations that leaders are still getting used to it.

Yeah. I think it's going to be that way for a long time to come. We've spoken a lot with leaders and organizations. I think probably the ones that aren't doing quite so well are the ones that have almost set instone their plans for hybrid. This is how it's going to be. It's going to be a 60/40 split. We're going to do 3 days in the office and 2 days at home and all that stuff. And actually, probably for me, and I'd love to hear your perspective on this, for me, the whole idea of experimentation, of try it, see does it work, and if it doesn't work, go back, start again and go back. That's something that I think organizations should be doing. But actually, they're not very keen to, because I think often leaders seem to think that people like to know that they know the right answer from the off.

I may have a controversial professional opinion about that. In the world of digital marketing, test and iterate. If it doesn't work, try something else. A/B test, and you're constantly experimenting. I think in the world of people and management, You know, people have memories, and you can breed cynicism very quickly if you're constantly testing and iterating with management approaches and philosophies. So I, I'd strongly suggest leaders to put some forethought into it and don't overly iterate your management practices, which includes remote and hybrid work. People like dependability. I think we can all agree people tend to dislike change and disruption. So bringing some sort of dependability to the work world will help most workers.

What do you think then about some kind of hybrid approach to hybrid then, which is somewhere in the middle of those two, perhaps where we might go out to the organization and say, Look, we've never done this before. So rather than setting something in stone on day one, why don't we try this for 6 months and see, does that work? And if that doesn't work, let's try something different for 6 months. Let's see how that goes. I get, I totally take your point about not iterating for iteration's sake, but actually there probably still does need to be, admit perhaps a little bit of flex in there, a little bit of agility.

Yeah, I agreed that, you know, change management approach can involve some baby steps to your final destination. It absolutely can. That said, every one of those baby steps is disruptive to your organization. So there are also benefits to ripping the Band-Aid off and making a sea change decision that can get you to the end state faster with less disruption. And so the answer will certainly be different for different organizations in different contexts. But, but I would push back on the idea of constant iteration around the, the hybrid and remote working world, and, and that it That affects people, their families, their commute, their living situations, their other commitments, and other organizations will get more flexible faster that you're competing for talent against. You don't want to be the last one to figure it out.

Yeah. I love the idea of ripping off the bandaid. That was something that actually Darren Murph said as well, was, "Look, one of the best ways to do this is just actually go for it. Do something that's really, really, really fundamentally different." and just go for it and see what happens. And I thought that was a great, a great, a great thought. Um, when we think about internal comms and, you know, we think about the channels and we think about, you know, you and I have probably heard the term, um, water cooler moments about a million times over the past 2 and a half years and how much organizations are missing them. What, what challenges, challenges do you think that hybrid are remote is having for organizations and leaders when it comes to still being really effective with their communications.

Yeah, I love this topic. Internal communications has so much to do with building trust, building a culture, enhancing productivity, creating a sense of belonging and purpose in a group. So internal comms is the core of so much that happens in an organization. The water cooler moments won't happen around a water cooler anymore. That's clear. The 1950s, '60s, '70s style of management by walking around, that's no longer possible. Frankly, it wasn't possible at companies of any size where people were in different locations, even though they were in offices before. And so I think many, many leaders, and heck, I fall into this, are a little later in their career and are maybe a little set in their ways and are used to operating a certain way, you know, grew up operating a certain way, that management by walking around, regular staff meetings, stand-ups, water cooler moments, you know, gatherings. And the world has moved on. And so it's up to us as leaders to show that dexterity and agility in adapting our approaches. And that means rather than dropping by someone's desk, drop in on chat or Slack or other methods to check in on people. So it's just different vehicles and venues, but the physical venue is different in today's world.

Yeah, so when you think about that agile approach and having to now do things differently, what have you seen or heard that's working really well when it comes to internal comms in the hybrid or remote world? And have you seen any car crashes where organizations have tried something and it's just been an abject failure?

Yes. Yeah, I sure have. I've seen organizations overdo the social aspect, trying to recreate the happy hour, lunchtime water cooler atmosphere with gatherings on video, with let's have a series of trivia events. Let's have a series of—

A Zoom quiz. I swear to God, another Zoom quiz, I might have to do something drastic.

Yeah, Zoom trivia, Zoom happy hours, Zoom socializing. That doesn't work. That doesn't work. And it'll meet the needs of a certain small slice of your population, sure. But generally, it elicits eye rolls and lower engagement over time. If you've actually tried it, chances are you've seen a lot of drop-off in attendance. So yeah, that's not working.

So what is working?

Yeah, what is working is deciding on a clear cadence of internal comms, multiple vehicles, multiple venues, Planning it out and sticking to it. So I can be more specific. Let's say starting at the top of the house for your organization, whether it's 10,000 people or 10, how are you communicating to the entire audience? Is that a monthly all hands? Is that a weekly email? Figure out what your top of the house communication is. And it could be either, it could be somewhere in between. Then what's your group or department? Level communication? Are you doing an all-hands with your department? Is it weekly? Is it monthly? What is it? Is that live? Is that written? Figure out your vehicles and your venues and the frequency of touch, and so on and so forth. There may be, you know, 5 or 6 different touches in that meeting cadence, in that communication cadence, you know, really wrapping up with, you know, team-level or manager-direct report one-on-ones. And so how often are you doing that? It's scheduled, you have a regular frequency. And the companies that are successful at this are mapping it out and clearly articulating what they expect their leaders to do at each stage of the organization. Yeah, it's not rocket science, but you need to map it out and stick to it.

Yeah, well, is it like— it's like anything, you know, I, I don't think that common sense is very often all that common. It's a very straightforward, say what you're going to do and then do it. And I don't think organizations often are great at that because we try it. We've all been down the let's have an online newsletter and it lasts for 2 weeks or 3, a couple of months, and then suddenly people go, where are we getting the content from this month? And it just dies a death very quickly. So I do think people have to be, organizations and individuals and leaders have to be much, much more deliberate. You're right, set the expectation and deliver upon the expectation.

You know, it's like exercise and eating right. You do it regularly and you see strong results versus buying into a fad diet of starving yourself or, you know, buying the latest, you know, high-priced exercise equipment that you end up hanging clothes off of. Yeah, that— so too is the world of internal communications, building a culture, and managing a workforce, whether it's local or broadly dispersed, you know, find your approach that works for you and stick to it. Make it a habit.

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The one, the one thing that's always struck me, and again, this might be a reflection of my age about hybrid, is perhaps the newer joiners to the workforce coming in, the graduates, the trainees joining organizations now missing. Like you and I, I suspect, are of a similar vintage. And we'll have been in our first jobs just overhearing things that were going on in the background, somebody on the phone, somebody having a meeting in the corner. We're just learning nearly by osmosis. We get dragged into a meeting, come and sit in the corner and take notes. It's a learning experience. All that's gone really, isn't it, in many ways? So how do we recreate that?

Yeah. Well, first I'd say it's not entirely gone. It's just moved to a different venue. The listening is now occurring on Twitter and Slack, the observing of the conversations, the observing of interdepartmental communications. That's still happening, but it's moved from the hallway, the bathroom, the cafeteria to electronic mediums. And the people earlier in their careers, earlier in their lives, social media didn't exist for those of us of a different generation. And that's really taken over. So that's one, it's still happening, but it's happening in different venues. Two is we don't have to totally write off the physical, interaction, the connection that comes with a planful gathering. There are a number of organizations, you know, Salesforce is, is a good example. They basically abandoned their multi-billion dollar tower in downtown San Francisco, the tallest building, you know, here, maybe on the West Coast, giant, giant expense to build this enormous commercial office building. Now they've announced they're going to be permanently remote. Um, with that, they've sunk some money— they have plenty of it— into a leadership retreat in the Redwoods south of San Francisco. And so rather than renting out, um, you know, hotel ballrooms, uh, the Marriott, you know, some, some Vegas resort to have meetings, go to this place. It's ours. We get to hang the stuff on the walls. You get to have random collisions with people in other groups. And that, that sort of corporate retreat rather than corporate office where there's a reason to have a planned gathering can be really powerful. That makes me think of my days at General Electric where we had Crotonville. Washington Mutual had Cedarbrook up by the Seattle airport. So, you don't need to be an enormous organization to do something like that. Heck, that could be a WeWork that you all gather at in Chicago, but you have some reliable location with a sense of place where you're coming together to have meaningful interactions rather than your regular day-to-day interactions.

And I think that is a really, really important point to make. I was only chatting to a client about that this morning about how we have to be much more deliberate about why we're meeting up. So if you're asking me to drive 2 hours in my car or a train ride for an hour to come to a WeWork or Cedarbrook or wherever, the office, then there's got to be a good reason for doing that. And I think almost one of the things that organizations have to do is nearly retrain people in the art of work because going to the office has always been a force of habit. We've always gone to the office. So if you're asking me to come in on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, my core days, actually don't plan loads of FaceTime calls and Zooms and quiet time. Actually use those days for the interaction stuff. So be very, very definite, be very planful, to use your word, about what you're gonna be doing on those days. But I don't think that comes naturally to people. I don't know what you're seeing.

Well, does planning come naturally to, to humans?

Not to this podcast host.

No, we're messy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it goes back to the conversation about, you know, diet and exercise and commit to a routine and, you know, commit to commitments. Um, and so you can have a massively more productive organization if you're more intentional about, um, how you gather what requires a meeting, what's actually more efficient to have via an asynchronous email communication. And, and in today's world where we have the technology to do this, and organizations are waking up, and they don't have to spend the money on a commercial office lease, they don't have to restrict their talent pool to 30 miles from their physical office, you can be massively more financially competitive and compete for talent more effectively if you adopt a dispersed work environment. Here's something quotable. I think hybrid is the worst of both worlds in that by requiring people to come into the office 2, 3 days a week, your talent pool is still within commuting distance of your office. You can't recruit from elsewhere. How many of us have been on those terrible video calls where some people are in person and some people are remote? Doesn't work. It's the worst of both worlds to be hybrid. If you commit to being dispersed, you open up the earth in terms of finding talent. You get labor arbitrage and being able to pay different rates. You don't have to pay— I'm based in the San Francisco Bay Area, It's pretty high priced out here to attract talent. I'm working with a software development team in Eastern Europe. They do great work at a fraction of the price, and other businesses are waking up to that.

Yeah. So let's think about for a second the impact that all of that has on culture, because I do actually, I completely agree with you that the hybrid is really hard to manage. It's super gray and it's not black or white, like fully remote or fully in the office. And I think people are finding it hard to get their heads and their arms around that. I wonder from a culture perspective, what impact is all of this having on organizational culture? Because of course, some leaders are still saying, well, this hybrid stuff is having a dreadful impact on our culture, is destroying our company culture. What do you say to that?

I'd say it doesn't have to, but it sure does make it harder. It just increases the stress on your organization because you're not committing to the practices and processes that, that would support your dispersed workforce. Again, it's the, it's the worst of both worlds. Everybody has a somewhat negative experience with it, whether you're in person or, or dispersed. So is it destroying your culture? Well, let's Let's define culture. I've done a number of talks on, on this specifically. I think culture is how an organization operates. It's not your parties, it's not your succulent plants, it's, it's who gets hired, fired, rewarded, recognized, promoted, etc. It's how decisions are made. Generally, culture flows down from the decision-makers who have the power. Those organizations that try to crowdsource it by talking to frontline employees and asking them what they want, that ends up usually being a giant exercise of data gathering and zero outcome, really. It leads to more parties and programs rather than a clear articulation of here's how the decision makers make decisions. Here's what's important to them. So the decision makers aren't changing in a hybrid or remote world, and how they're making decisions generally aren't changing. It's really how it's all put into practice and how it's executed. So how are decisions made if you are in different locations? You can absolutely articulate that and make it clear and continue to move forward. Yeah, but if you have to look people in the eye, if you have to get a large group that might be in different time zones and different locations together to make a decision, if you're mostly consensus-driven, that can be pretty hard.

Yeah, for sure. And if we think about that change, that way of doing things differently, what do you believe some of the key practical things are that leaders can and should be doing to make sure they either maintain that high-performance culture that they had before, Or if they'd never had it, or maybe it's dipped off, how do they rebuild it? What are some of the things that leaders can and should be doing?

Foremost among those things to help your organization be more successful is clarity. Clarity in terms of goals for the organization, goals and priorities, what's most important for us right now. Clarity in terms of Who's doing what? Patrick Lencioni, author of Five Dysfunctions of a Team and a bunch of other very popular business books, he talks about the 6 questions for clarity, like why do we exist and what business are we in and who will do what? I don't want to quiz myself on those 6 questions, but just being really clear what's important to your organization, the roles and responsibilities. That doesn't mean a 6-page job description, But that might mean an old, you know, MBA tool like a RACI— who's responsible, who's accountable, who's consulted or informed. That can be really, really powerful. Internal communications play such a huge role in all of that. What's important to the organization? How are we doing against those things? What are the status updates? And then, you know, take that down to the manager and team member interaction. What managers can do to help their organization be effective is have meaningful check-ins with their team members. Organizations that aren't inspecting what they expect are probably experiencing a big gap in execution there.

Yeah, yeah. It's very interesting. And that whole idea of clarity is something, again, something that we spoke about with Darren in the previous episode that he said the dark horse of the next 10 years when we talked about skills for leaders He said, it's going to be writing. How well can your leaders write? Because we're not going to have the opportunity to have the gravitas that perhaps we once had as individuals in front of people anymore. So we've got to be able to get that gravitas, that clarity, that followership, that engagement with people through the written word. And we're not often very good at thinking about the recipient when we're doing the writing, because we're thinking about trying to get our message across and not thinking about, well, I wonder how they're going to hear this. So that piece around clarity, I think, is so, so important and just getting it right.

Yeah. Well, thank you. I think we agree on that. It's interesting that Darren called out writing and that I'm seeing more mediums of communication start to pop their heads up like Groundhog Day. There are a number of audio-based communication methods like podcasts. You can record short audio bursts as an organization and push that out to your team. There are a number of video messaging services like Loom is one example. There are a bunch of others where you can record a brief video and it's easy and you can circulate it nicely where it's small enough to be attached to an email. So yes, writing. I think we read faster than we listen. I think we read faster than we view. But I think there's still a place for in-person communication. I think there's still a place for verbal. So it's not just writing.

At Inspiring Change, we help our clients to implement sustainable change and drive business performance by putting their people first. We do that through a focus on strategic internal communications, employee engagement, and leadership consultancy. If you're struggling with change or getting your people aligned behind your purpose, vision, or strategy, then get in touch. Simply visit our website at www.inspiringchange.ie for more. I love the idea of organizations experimenting with new channels and just trying new things because look, ultimately we've got a high-definition recording device in every single one of our Samsung or iPhones to be able to do audio, to be able to do really high-quality video. And I think what organizations and leaders particularly need to do is just get over the fact that it doesn't need to be perfect. It doesn't need to be perfect. We need to get ourselves out of the space of, okay, when I did my videos before COVID I was brought into a studio or a crew arrived in with a sound man and a camera person. And that was all great. And I was given an autocue. You don't need that anymore. Just get online. People just want to see you.

Yeah. There's a spectrum in terms of what quality is appropriate for what types of communications, right? If you're doing a public company quarterly earnings report, with your key investors in the public markets, yep, that's probably fairly heavily produced. And it's probably heavily scripted. And boy, I've been a part of, you know, some of those preps. If you're a team leader trying to give a simple update to their team, it might be powerful to record something on your iPhone for 30 seconds, you know, unproduced, unscripted, and just do a check-in or a, you know, a happy birthday song for somebody. Or a quick audio clip. So, you know, there's, I think, a range of production value, there's a range of accessibility, and there's a range of ease of creation for the creator. And there will be different mediums, different vehicles that are appropriate for different, you know, purposes.

Yeah, for sure. I still always say to clients, do not dismiss posters. Just because they've been around for 100 years. They're still very, very powerful when on the back of a toilet door or a bathroom door in a factory or somewhere else where people don't have access to computers or phones or anything like that. It's a powerful medium. So yes, think about the new age tech stuff. But don't forget about the old stuff, because that can still be exceptionally powerful as well. I'm going to talk a little bit about employee value proposition, because of course, everything we've spoken about for the last little while Plays really nicely into that space. And organizations are struggling so much at the moment to find and hire and then retain really, really good people. There's a huge amount of flux and whether you want to refer to it as the Great Resignation or perhaps the Great Reawakening or the Great Realignment, whatever you want to call it, lots of people it seems are on the move. I think I read a stat somewhere once that recently that 60% of workers in the US were planning to move jobs in the next 12 months. So they're just a big merry-go-around from organization to organization. So I wonder from your perspective, how does all of what we've spoken about, culture, communications, hybrids, how does all that come together when you're thinking about EVP?

Boy, this is an incredibly important question for organizations to figure out. What are we doing that is compelling enough result in a worker leaving where they're at. We're still at historically low rates of unemployment. What's compelling enough to cause a worker to leave where they're at, join us, and what's compelling enough about us that someone would choose to stay here versus other alternatives. And we know that with this expanding, uh, you know, reach of dispersed workforces that companies are recruiting more broadly. So your, your team members, especially the good ones, are getting approached regularly. So why would somebody join you? Why would somebody stay? That's an employment value proposition. And, um, you know, frankly, the dis— the dispersed workplace, that may become a one of the most critical elements in people's decisions. Like, what— why would somebody leave where they're at or stay where they're at? You know, chances are it's not due to the gym membership you're paying for. Chances are it's not because of the great anniversary gift that you make them available. Um, you, you want to have, you know, a team that you respect and value, do work that you think is useful. You want to have a manager that's not a jerk. Um, you want to feel like you're paid fairly. And location of your work. If you're, if you're being asked to commute however far it is multiple times a week, that is very likely to be a decision factor. That's likely to be important enough to cause someone to leave your company. So that's why hybrid is probably the worst of both worlds, because other companies are getting there faster And frankly, you've got to keep up with the Joneses or you're going to be behind on a very important decision-making criteria for a lot of workers. If they don't have to go into somebody else's office and they have to go into yours, you're, you're significantly behind at that point. So yeah, that— I'll put a bow on it on this topic around the EVP. You can figure out what the rational compelling elements of that are for your organization. But boy, you want to make sure that you've at least got the table stakes in place, that you don't want to have something that is repellent to a large group of workers. And that's what in-office work is today.

Yeah, repellent. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think organizations that are making, literally making their people go into a workplace I think are going to be big losers. I may have to eat my words in a couple of years' time now that this is on podcast and on the internet, but I do think— I believe that, and I think you probably do too.

Yeah. Yeah, there'll be some organizations that succeed in spite of themselves. Will Goldman Sachs go out of business if they require their Manhattan-based workers to keep going into the office? They'll probably be fine. Will there be some wildly successful companies that have the killer app or the great product that make it work for them? Sure. I think this message is more general. By and large, those organizations that are choosing to remain in-person or partially in-person are, in most cases, putting themselves at a disadvantage as an employer. And they'll have a smaller talent pool, probably have to pay more. You'll still find workers, but you're just fishing in a much smaller pond. And so why make it harder on yourselves as an organization?

Yeah. Okay. Last question, just around if somebody's listening to this and they're thinking, oh my God, that is so much stuff to have to try and think about and do when it comes to my organizational culture. What's the one thing, if there was one single thing that you could say, "Try this because this will make a difference to your organizational culture," or the start of that journey, what would it be?

Oh, boy. In terms of supporting and reinforcing a healthy culture, I think I'd go back to clarity. And even specifically within clarity, it would be, "What are the most important things to my organization right now?" and it should be a shortlist. Make sure that everybody in your organization, whether it's 10 people or 10,000, know what that is. If you can do that, then people can naturally start to draw connections towards those most important things. They can make priority and resource decisions deeper in the organization, and they can align around delivering that. Clarity is kindness. Providing that level of clarity helps your organization be much more functional and successful. And that breeds a healthy culture.

Yeah, for sure. Andrew, it's been great talking to you. Where can people find out more about you and about People Leader Accelerator if that's something they're interested in finding out more about?

Yeah, well, thank you. Thanks so much, Scott. I'm on LinkedIn, Andrew Bartlow. You can find me there. And People Leader Accelerator, our executive development programs for HR professionals, that has its own website. People Leader Accelerator. Check us out.

Great stuff. Andrew, thanks a million for your time. You have a great day.

Thank you, Scott.

Thanks for listening. To hear from other leaders on our podcasts, to read our blogs, or to find out more about the work that we do at Inspiring Change, please visit inspiringchange.ie.