How hybrid transformation impacted employee experience in 2022

With many businesses moving to a remote or hybrid model in the last year, it was inevitable there would be an impact on employee experience. But what impact has this change had for our clients, and how are we helping them to navigate it?

Many organisations have responded brilliantly post-pandemic. They have quickly established new remote working models driven by business goals and strategy. However, a remote working model has different connotations from an employee perspective. As communications and change experts, we have been helping our clients identify and understand what those differences are, then work together to design new strategies and solutions to overcome them and improve employee experience across the organisation.

We have identified three key challenges emerging for global matrix organisations adapting to a new remote or hybrid model:

Challenge 1: Making leadership communication ‘stand out’ in a virtual world

In a virtual world, when it comes to top-down leadership messaging, less is more. We have seen an employee's capacity to consume information decreasing in direct correlation with the increase in virtual meetings. Working virtually creates less connection between teams, and the natural temptation for a leader is to produce more digital communication, to ensure they are being heard. Based on our findings, we would encourage senior leadership teams to help their management teams understand that employees have band-width limitations and the impact of receiving multiple updates from matrix functions. A simple starting point is to simply ask how many updates a cross-section of your employee population receives in a week. Armed with this knowledge you can streamline what communication is delivered to protect your employee's ability to digest and retain important information.

Challenge 2: Creating more learning and collaboration for dispersed teams and employees working from home

Dispersed team and employees who are no longer office-based are missing regular, in-person development conversations and collaboration opportunities and there is also less scope for employees to learn from those around them. We worked through this challenge with our client to design an organisation wide virtual conversation around development and leadership. It was an informal drop-in session that anyone could join from anywhere in the world. The interest and attendance at these sessions was completely overwhelming and exceeded our client’s expectations. A clear sign that employees are struggling with the lack of development they are receiving in a virtual world and need more opportunities created to discuss and progress their career. They also relish activities that give them an opportunity to collaborate as a team on meaningful topics. Person to person contact still matters in a virtual world.

Challenge 3: Designing meaningful employee inductions for a virtual world

The natural attrition cycle due to career progression or parental or sabbatical leave creates organic employee reset points in a virtual or hybrid business model, just as it does in an office-based model. Therefore, we need a new induction and people development strategy, designed specifically for employees navigating business in a virtual or hybrid setting. Nothing beats face to face interaction, but with this not being a consistent option anymore, our team have created a new virtual induction experience for a global client. The new model puts employee experience at the heart of the induction, recognising they now have different time challenges, time-zones and personal constraints as a home-based employee. As an additional part of the usual team introductions, we designed optional ‘drop-in’ and ‘on-demand’ pre-recorded sessions, giving employees a choice in how and when they attend their induction sessions, as well as offering a mix of formats to create better engagement. ‘On-demand’ sessions included timecoding for easier content navigation, to be respectful of the employee’s schedule as well as the individuals learning style. This offers a further option to break up sessions into bite-size chunks if that works best for the employee.

To improve employee experience through hybrid transformation, organisations need to rethink and redesign their ways of working, so they are creating fresh solutions designed for virtual or hybrid business models. As well as the impact on business, a new hybrid model creates substantial changes, for employees and it’s important to create an environment and a framework that makes it easy for them to engage and embrace these new ways of working.