How to successfully manage the mix of remote, hybrid, and in-person workers

It could well be that the most important development at work in the last 50 years will not be AI, despite the hype.

It will be the acceptance of alternative locations where employees can do their work.

Remote work was happening before the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, but its influence was overstated partly because of how it was measured.

Surveys asking whether people were working from home were counting work taken home in addition to what they were doing in the office as ‘remote work’ but the interest is work being done at home instead of usual office hours. That is harder to pin down.

But with the pandemic, when offices were closed, that instead of was the change.

We started to learn a lot more about how to manage it, but it is creating a big problem now.

The challenge of managing remote workers

We know that managers who were there before the pandemic remember how to manage in-person employees.

Unfortunately, we are worse at it now simply because supervisors aren’t given the resources to do it.

Increased spans of control mean more direct reports to supervise, less training means more for supervisors to teach, and supervisors have been given individual contributor tasks in addition to managing their direct reports.

Studies from before the pandemic also told us a lot about how to manage permanently remote workers, and we learned from the pandemic as well.

The lessons are not dissimilar from what we know about managing independent contractors.

It requires a lot more work from supervisors as they have to pass along all the information that a regular employee in the office would otherwise know just by watching and listening.

They also have to fashion tasks that can be done by the remote employee without much contact with others – individual contributor tasks.

Supervisors have to provide the contacts and connections remote workers need to finish their tasks. They also have to monitor performance more explicitly and formally with regular check-ins to find out how things are going.

How about hybrid workers?

With hybrid workers, the idea is that they are in the office enough with required ‘anchor days’ to learn all that informal stuff and for their supervisors to observe and check in on their performance informally.

That’s the goal, and the assumption is that we can just manage them as if they are in the office.

The problem is that large numbers of organizations with ‘hybrid’ policies operate more like permanently remote organizations.

Employees aren’t getting the information they had picked up in-person, and new hires are lost with few people in the office to help them and answer their questions.

More generally, it is much harder for supervisors to see how things are going with projects and work and also with individual employees. It is hard to tell who needs employee assistant programs, who is thinking about quitting, whose engagement has collapsed, and so forth.

What happens to managers if they have a hybrid organization with some permanently remote people on their team, some hybrid workers who are regularly there, and some who almost never come in? God help them.

It’s easy to say: ‘Just individualize your approach to give everyone what they need.’ But HR people know that treating people differently leads to a host of problems.

Why is it, for example, that Sasha, who works from home, gets a meeting with the boss every week and gets help negotiating with finance, while I’m in the office full time, and I get none of that?

Why is it that Ramon, who is in the office, seems to learn about opportunities that I never hear about because I’m remote?

Let’s not forget that many organizations also have contractors working onsite who have to be managed by supervisors as well, even though supervisors under common law standards cannot ‘supervise’ them and must be careful to treat them differently from employees.

What if the supervisor themself is remote? That is a self-inflicted wound.

It is almost impossible to do that job well, especially if the team members are in the office. Then they are likely to know more about what is going on than the supervisor does, and they will end up playing manager to their supervisor.

HR’s roles and responsibilities around remote vs in-person workers

HR teams have to recognize that managers are really struggling just to keep their heads above water with workloads and the ever increasing stress to do more with less.

Having to deal with employees who have a mix of different arrangements for work complicates supervision enormously.

When we have policies saying that local managers should make the decisions about applying remote policies, that just creates a race to the bottom and makes their life harder.

Do I want to be the only team leader who makes everyone show up on anchor days?

Do I want to listen to my employees complain that other teams don’t require “cameras on” for video calls?  No, so I give into everything.

We need simple policies that come from the top, and we need them enforced from the top down.

Here’s a list for HR to follow: 

1. Giving supervisors a workforce with a mix of work arrangements – some permanent remote, some in office a lot, some rarely in – will exhaust them and create fairness problems so try very hard for consistency.

2. If we want to be hybrid, we need to have everyone come in on anchor days.

It cannot be a team leader decision to create exemptions, which is what is happening now. We also need to state and enforce from the top down obvious rules like ‘cameras on’ for meetings.

3. We should limit as much as possible having ‘permanent remote’ employees who we do not expect will come into the office.

If organizations or teams need these remote employees, their work should be focused on individual contributor roles where others have to interact with them.

4. We should not have team leaders who cannot be in the office on anchor days.

If we have ‘distributed teams’ where employees are spread across locations and cannot get together, we should try to limit those to temporary, project work.

5. Supervisors need more help, and that starts with clear expectations from the top down about how all employees should behave when we have remote working arrangements.

Leaving everything to local managers, as we often have done, is a recipe for inequities and, in the end, no standards at all.