By Jennifer Piette, Sustainable Brands
Companies have a line-item budget for technology and other critical business expenses. What is your line-item budget for supporting, nurturing and growing your employees?
Are craft cocktails, a high-end golf simulator, outdoor mingling spaces and other resort-style amenities enough to lure knowledge workers back to the office?
Maybe not, judging by the comments on a recent New York Times article heralding the “hotelification” of offices. A representative sample: “Sounds great, but my commute to the office is like something from a Mad Max movie. No thanks. I’m old enough, and valuable enough, to get away with remote work. I’m not going back to an office.”
That lines up with an earlier data dive proclaiming, “workplaces have reached a new hybrid-work status quo” and what human resource teams are saying: The push by many companies to get everyone back to the office is leading to a talent drain. Some companies are trying to lure people back to work; others are commanding a return to the office. But many employees are just not having it.
Looking to understand how the shift to permanent hybrid work is affecting workplace culture — especially at purpose-driven companies, which tend to prize employee engagement — I asked a pair of B Corp-certified corporate culture and wellness consultants about what they’re seeing inside companies and what works to maintain esprit de corps. They identified approaches to forging a hybrid work culture that can enhance both productivity and the ability to attract, nurture and retain talent.
Purpose-driven companies face a higher bar
“The challenge with hybrid or remote work is that culture elements are reduced to a two-dimensional experience or appearance,” said Flip Brown, principal of Business Culture Consultants — and support networks, mentoring and other informal relationships that form the glue of team cohesion are particularly affected. “Hybrid work requires a different approach to group and team dynamics.”
Figuring this out is particularly high-stakes for purpose-driven companies, which sometimes face outsized expectations.
“One of the unique challenges of mission-driven companies is mission intoxication: The work we’re doing is so important that if you question anything I’m doing you just don’t understand,” Brown said. “People sometimes are attached to B Corps because they don’t want to work for ‘the man.’ They have expectations about unmet emotional needs that no employer can meet or should be responsible for meeting. A purpose-driven company needs a compassionate, caring, nurturing environment; but hopefully there’s creative conflict, rather than negative conflict or everyone focusing on being nice all the time.”
Striking that balance may be impossible without some chance to connect with people in real life.
“If you have a fully remote or hybrid team, you should budget for getting everyone together four times a year,” Brown added. “Otherwise, you hear, ‘I’ve been talking to this person for months and never really felt like I knew who they were.’”
Fresh thinking about work practices and benefits
Making hybrid work work often means reimagining everyday practices, as well — for example, meeting norms: The pandemic-driven mass shift to videoconferencing compressed what would normally have been a much longer period of adaptation, and Brown sees a need to thoughtfully reset.
“With any meeting, particularly those that are regular or ongoing, what are your assumptions and agreements? There’s the plus and minus of having simultaneous chats; you can share valuable information, but it also can be an incredible distraction. Then there’s the challenge of, ‘Do I need to look like I’m applying full attention to everything all the time in online meetings?’ That brings its own kind of stress. There are times that phone meetings can work better because you don’t have the pressure. We need to look at all these factors.”
Food is often overlooked, too, Brown adds: “Good food has emotion attached to it. Even bad food does. Food that brings its own values into the equation and is thoughtful in both its procurement and stories can create a positive emotional experience for employees.”
He’s speaking Narrative Food’s language here. We designed our new coffee-break-in-a-box subscription service to increase wellbeing and connection for remote and hybrid teams — sourcing a selection of small-batch, organic, and earth-friendly beverages and snacks that is customized for individual preferences.
“What my clients are struggling with the most right now is that employees feel very separate in terms of the care or the attention that they’re given,” said Maryam Sharifzadeh, founder of corporate wellness service ZaaS. Food, again, can be a connector: She’s organized cooking demos where everyone on a hybrid team was following along, at home or in the office, and felt like they were all having the same experience.
It boils down to paying attention to the day-to-day, Brown said.
“Companies waste a lot of money on research and retreats in hopes that information will change human behavior. It doesn’t. If it did, no one would smoke cigarettes. Understand which patterns aid your values and objectives and which don’t aid them, and practice new patterns.”
Building a healthy hybrid culture is work — and it needs to be supported
Sharifzadeh sees hybrid work as a chance to rethink all aspects of corporate culture-building.
“Because it’s so new, we just have to go through this process of trial and error. Everyone wants a quick solution,” she said, but noted that 9-to-5 on-site was a contested concept for years before becoming the established standard in the World War II era — and now, it’s an unquestioned reality. “That’s just what people did. And even when it wasn’t working, we were still doing it. So, now we’re going through the growing pains of — hybrid is what people want, but how do we do it in a way that works?”
Figuring that out requires effort and resources. With wellness programs, for example, “inclusivity is a primary value, and achieving it is double the work in a hybrid culture,” Sharifzadeh said. “We need to design a program where everyone feels like they’re cared for and no one is left out. You’re not just creating one program; you’re creating two — and you’re trying to blend them together.”
Brown sets the table for hybrid culture building this way: “My hunch is, you have a line-item budget for technology. What is your line-item budget for supporting, nurturing and growing your employees? Would you rather have a really crack team that can identify and solve any problem, or the most advanced technology and a dysfunctional team?”