Everyone is so distracted by whether the future of work is a return to the office, everyone remote or a mix of both, they are missing the bigger picture.

Whilst employees are demanding flexibility and autonomy about where they work and are voting with their feet if they don’t get it, it must not be the only aspect of work you focus on if you want a healthy and high-performing team.

It cannot be the only thing you focus on if you want to retain and attract talent.

It is time to stop procrastinating about where your employees are going to work and make a decision that meets the needs of your employees and the business. Then move on and focus on what really matters.

A recent study by Atlassian called The State of Teams declared that it is not where you work but how you work that makes teams thrive.

What your employees want from you, for them to stay with you, should inform your Employee Value Proposition (EVP). Not only does this help in retaining your talent it should also help attract the talent you need to be a leading organisation.

Your EVP is how you position your organisation in the employee marketplace. It tells prospective employees what you will offer them in return for their skills, capabilities, and experiences. It tells existing employees what you will continue to offer them to demonstrate you value them and want to keep them.

Your EVP is also a marketing message to customers and consumers. They want to know how you treat your employees and it will affect their loyalty to your brand.

Organisations are struggling to address what is being termed The Great Attrition or The Great Resignation for one reason - they don’t understand why employees are leaving in the first place.

When asked why employees were leaving, employers cited:

· Compensation

· Work-life balance

· Poor physical and emotional health

When employees were asked why they were leaving, they cited:

· Not feeling valued by the organisation

· Not feeling valued by their manager

· No sense of belonging at work

Whilst those factors cited by employers are still important to employees, they are not as important as employers think. They are out of touch. Employers are focused on transactional factors whereas employees are focused on relational ones.

Despite extensive research informing us of the benefits of empathetic leaders such as increased engagement, performance, productivity, and organisational growth, it is a leadership characteristic that is woefully missing in many organisations.

This month an EY Consulting survey confirmed that 90% of workers believe empathetic leadership leads to higher job satisfaction and 79% agree it decreases employee turnover.

The majority (88%) felt that empathic leadership creates loyalty amongst employees towards their leaders.

This could be the panacea for The Great Resignation that is causing so much angst at the current time. Empathy in the workplace not only retains your valuable talent but also attracts it, giving you competitive advantage.

The shift is that before remote working and hybrid teams, we approached discussions about “work” and “non-work” as separate and we could keep clear of the latter. During the pandemic, leaders have found they have had to discuss topics such as childcare arrangements, home-working environments, health-risk concerns and challenges faced by other members of the household.

Even after the pandemic ends, this will not stop. As a leader, you can’t manage a distributed team without access to the data that allows you to effectively schedule and coordinate the team activities. The challenge is that seeking access to often personal data can carry risks and legal implications and invade employee privacy.

The solution is to create an environment of psychological safety in which your employees feel safe to share information about their personal situation relevant to their work that allows for effective management.

I stumbled across an interesting article on MIT Sloan Management Review about leaders resisting empowering their virtual teams.

Employee empowerment has many benefits including increased motivation, creativity, innovation, productivity, talent retention and attraction. Yet many leaders resist it.

Leaders are stressed and fatigued and plagued with virtual meetings. Their work time has encroached into their personal time. Yet rather than delegate they cling on to every task believing it is better if they do it themselves.

The authors drew on research to identify the reasons behind the resistance.

The reasons fell into three areas. A lack of motivation to lead others, a dislike of leading or a lack of buy-in. A fear of loss of control – by giving their teams control they had less. Concerns about the risk of employees making costly mistakes that could reflect badly on them as the leader.

Based on my experience working with leaders in many different industries and organisations, I would like to suggest five ways to effectively enable leaders to empower.

The last 20 months has brought about unprecedented change. The business landscape is continuing to change and rapidly evolve without us being able to foresee what the future will look like.

When we don’t know what change is coming, how much, how fast, and when, how can we ensure we are ready and have the capacity for change?

The answer is to be a F.O.R.C.E. for change. There are actions every organisation and every leader within it, can take now to be always change ready.

Every organisation needs a focus (a sense of purpose); orientation (leadership positioning); resilience (personal resolve in the face of constant change); coaches (a competent and enabled change network); and empathy (understanding and compassion for each other). Let’s look at each of those aspects of an organisation that is a force for change.

Trust is the foundation on which successful high-performing hybrid teams are built. Managers and bosses no longer have insight into their employees’ day-to-day approach to work. It is only leaders who trust their employees to make the right decisions about work and its priorities and provide the necessary support, that will build high-performing teams.

This week on LinkedIn, I was asked this question:

What are your recommendations to convert a low trusting dept into a high trust one? 🤔

So, if there is currently a low-trust base, how do you establish a solid foundation of trust in your team? What does it mean for the hybrid team?

My latest article for Remote Report.

Setting clear expectations is part of the bedrock of a successful hybrid team. You can empower and provide autonomy, but without clarity your efforts will be wasted.

Without clarity, trust will be diminished.

Many leaders assume they have set clear expectations and that their employees know what is required. However, this is often not the case, and the lack of clarity causes harm, damage to relationships and it diminishes trust.

Leaders providing clarity of expectations is even more important when change is volatile, uncertain and complex. Your employees need clarity.

My latest article for REMOTE REPORT.

If you are a boss (note deliberate avoidance of term “leader”) and you continue to believe that productivity means “butt in seats” and that the best way to get results is through micromanagement, you are on the verge of following dinosaurs into extinction.

That’s because you are unable to adapt to the rapid changes in your environment. The catastrophic event that leads to your demise will not be an asteroid strike or a volcanic eruption, but a change in the way we work — a hybrid operating model.

I wanted to share with you my thoughts on a recent article for Forbes from Shep Hyken. In the article Shep shares six ways to create a better employee experience.

Why does employee experience matter? Let me refer to what Shep calls ‘The Employee Golden Rule’, which is do unto employees as you want done unto customers.

In the Forbes article Shep said, ‘what happens on the inside of the organisation is felt on the outside by the customer and he shared six ways to create a better employee experience.’

It follows what Richard Branson is quoted as saying, “If you take care of your employees, they’ll take care of your customers.”

The employee experience drives the customer experience. If you want your customer to love you, then you must love your people.

The pandemic has allowed employees to reflect on what is important to them – not only in their personal life but also their work life.

Indeed commissioned a 2021 Workplace Happiness Study conducted by Forrester Consulting which revealed that nearly 50% of people believe expectations around work happiness has increased over the last five years.

Whilst most people think pay is the most important aspect of work, when asked what actually makes you happy at work, the social elements of work proved to be more important than pay. For example, dimensions like being energised by work (17%), feeling belonging (12%) and having a sense of purpose (11%) all ranked higher than pay (5%).

This is a big wake-up call for employers who will have to make intentional and concerted efforts to not only retain their current talent but attract the talent they need to be leaders into the future. It is going to take more than just a large pay packet.

The introduction of new technology into your organization requires us to pay attention to the people side of change. New technology can impact policies, process and procedures, roles and responsibilities, resources, and ways of working which all impact people. When organizations invest time and money in organizational change management (OCM) they get a return on their investment through rapid adoption, less delays, reduced need for rework, and earlier benefits realization.

A recent report from ADP Research Institute called “Employee Sentiment on Workplace” contained some interesting survey results. ADPRI surveyed 9,000 US employees who either worked remotely or onsite at workplace locations during the pandemic. They also surveyed employees who divided their work week between onsite and remote locations (hybrid workers) who said they experienced better social and manager dynamics that their fully onsite or remote counterparts – combining key upsides of both working arrangements.

My analysis of the result indicates that a hybrid working model is the best of both worlds. Hybrid employees rates stronger connection with teammates and colleagues higher than their remote or onsite counterparts. Both hybrid and remote workers rated team collaboration and support higher than onsite employees. Onsite workers rated the challenge of listening to each other and ensuring active participation of everyone higher than remote workers.

When you are leading a hybrid team, diversity equity and inclusion - takes on a new challenge.

Whilst DEI has focused on identities such as race, gender, colour, sexual orientation, religion and so on, we are now adding two more - those in the office and those who are not.

Leaders must make sure that everyone is on a level playing field and there is no bias or preferential treatment related to where you work.

My latest article for Remote Report.

The recent CEO Leadership Report 2021 from Development Dimensions International analyses responses from 368 CEOs and 2,102 human resource executives around the world to understand if they are positioned to deal with the one of the most challenging times ever experienced by businesses. Do they have the resilience, capability, and agility to drive a successful outcome for their organisation in these unprecedented times?

This article is my analysis and conclusion from the results.

Capability invisibility is a term used to describe a situation in which employees’ skills, capabilities and competencies are not visible or known.

This can result in an employee being given a task for which they are ill equipped, or their skills not fully utilized.

While this incompetent leadership blindness can exist when everyone is colocated, it can be exacerbated when the team is hybrid and working across multiple locations.

Leaders and every member of a team should know what skills, capabilities and competencies exist so that they can be leveraged for the optimum performance of the individual, team and organization.

My latest article for Remote Report.

The researchers, the commentators, the surveys, the advisories, the consultants, and the experts, are all telling us the same thing. Employees do not want to return to the office on a permanent basis – they want flexibility to work when they want, where they want, and how they want.

The writing is on the wall. Try and force, threaten or coerce, your employees back into the office, against their will, and you will suffer the consequences.

We are already seeing the backlash. The question then is why?

The two repeated arguments from the return-to-the-office-brigade are concerns about maintaining the culture and collaboration.

This is absolute BS. These are what I believe to be the top five reasons for the return-to-office demand.