The future of work will be remote and hybrid. More than half of employees with remote-capable jobs have a hybrid work arrangement, meaning they work remotely at least some of the time each week. That means the majority of employers have at least some employees working remotely some of the time (i.e., a hybrid workforce).
Hybrid work allows employees to chase down that elusive healthy work-life balance, spend more time with family, and get more flexibility on where and how they work. Employers get some benefits as well, such as lower costs for smaller offices and fewer amenities. But hybrid work has its drawbacks, like its impact on employee engagement.
Employee engagement—how driven and enthusiastic employees are at work—can be tough to maintain when most of your connection with coworkers and managers comes through a screen.
That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, however. In fact, with a robust employee engagement strategy that uses the right tools, keeps communication channels open, and reinforces alignment on goals, you can keep hybrid employees just as engaged as their on-site counterparts.
Key takeaways:
- Hybrid workforces require intentional strategies to sustain and improve employee engagement.
- Transparency, trust, and communication are the foundation of hybrid employee engagement.
- Technology and employee feedback tools play a critical role in managing a hybrid workforce effectively.
- Creating inclusive experiences for both remote and in-office employees helps maintain equity and motivation.
- A well-designed employee engagement strategy ensures productivity and connection across all hybrid work environments.
The challenges of employee engagement in a hybrid workforce
Managing a hybrid workforce isn’t just a possibility; it’s unavoidable. Most employees prefer a hybrid work arrangement over being fully on-site. While hybrid work can feel like the best of both worlds when it comes to work-life balance and flexibility, it creates challenges that the alternatives don’t. Fully remote workforces usually adapt to this workstyle quickly, investing in tools and processes that keep employees engaged and productive. Fully on-site workforces can rely on the strategies they’ve always used, making small adjustments instead of completely reimagining the way they work.
Hybrid work can create communication silos that make collaboration more difficult. Work sometimes happens asynchronously, sometimes in the office with whoever happens to be there. Being remote the one day when the rest of the team happens to be in the office can lead to some serious collaboration gaps. Not every company that offers hybrid work has the foundations for successfully supporting it.
Employees who spend more time remote also have more difficulty maintaining strong bonds with their team and managers. They’re less aligned with the company’s broader goals. Worse, proximity bias can hinder their attempts at connection or promotion, since leaders often tend to give preferential treatment to employees they see in the office every day.
Having the right strategy in place can help you mitigate these issues, but like everything else, it starts with a strong foundation.
Building a strong foundation for hybrid employee engagement
The foundation of hybrid employee engagement is built on three things:
- Trust: The remote work boom during the pandemic saw all sorts of trends that signaled low trust between leaders and employees, like screen surveillance and activity tracking. If you want strong employee engagement in your hybrid workforce, leaders need to show they trust employees. Leaders also need to show they’re trustworthy.
- Psychological safety: This term means employees can be themselves, which includes speaking their mind, without fear of negative consequences. Because hybrid work makes communication more difficult than other work styles, honesty becomes much more important. That can’t happen without psychological safety.
- Feedback loops: Hybrid work involves constant experimentation, iteration, and improvement. That improvement is much more difficult if employees can’t give honest feedback to leaders and, conversely, if leaders struggle to give the right feedback to employees.
This foundation will create a receptive environment and a strong culture of continuous improvement. This is essential for deploying strategies aimed at improving employee engagement. Strategies like:
- Reinforcing goal alignment: Company goals shouldn’t just be mentioned at the beginning of the quarter then forgotten about. With a hybrid workforce, you can make these goals more visible in project management tools, chat apps, and other places where people work. Encourage them to link individual tasks back to these goals to cultivate alignment.
- Increasing visibility: When important updates are shared exclusively in meetings and in person, you accidentally create communication gaps that make staying productive more challenging. Help employees make their work more visible in everything they do, which won’t just improve their relationships with managers but also surface the important work that can lead to their own development.
- Training managers for hybrid-first leadership: Many managers and leaders have a strong bias towards on-site teams, since it facilitates many aspects of their job. If they’re to become effective hybrid leaders, they need the right training, consistent support, and regular performance reviews.
Building the foundation is just the beginning. You also need the right tools to measure engagement and alignment throughout your organization. That’s where 15Five’s Engage comes in. See what it can do here.
Leveraging technology and tools for connection
Hybrid work would be impossible without the right technology. The same is true of keeping hybrid employees engaged. Using the right combination of tools is essential, which includes:
- Collaboration tools: Project management apps and collaborative workspaces make it easier for everyone on your team to work together, no matter where that work happens. Sure, getting together around a whiteboard might feel productive, but when some of the people in the room are trapped in a screen, you’re sacrificing more productivity than you’re gaining.
- Performance management platforms: Tools like 15Five allow managers to run regular check-ins, pulse surveys, and recognition programs, which improve employee engagement and unlock new initiatives for transforming the way you work.
- Artificial intelligence and automation tools: Losing time to necessary but tedious administrative work can hamper opportunities for connection between hybrid employees. Investing in platforms that can automate this work away allows employees to spend more time on what matters. Being human together.
Data is an essential part of your employee engagement efforts, and this is absolutely the case with hybrid work. Performance management platforms like 15Five, for example, centralize data from performance reviews, pulse surveys, and engagement surveys, giving managers and leaders everything they need to act on any employee engagement issues. They also give you measurable metrics that ensure your initiatives get buy-ins from department heads and the C-Suite, since you can demonstrate their impact over time.
Creating inclusive hybrid work experiences
There’s a clear risk of inequality between remote and on-site employees. Remote and hybrid employees can enjoy some benefits that on-site employees don’t, while on-site employees may have more direct access to leaders, which has its own advantages. Leaders need to go out of their way to even the playing field between the two groups, or risk conflicts and misunderstandings that decrease engagement. Best practices for this include:
- Equalizing access to information: On-site employees often have access to more information than their remote or hybrid counterparts, simply by being physically present for conversations that might not be transferred
- Keep growth opportunities fair: Proximity bias and other factors can arbitrarily disadvantage employees who spend more time working remotely. Make sure your people development strategy accounts for this.
- Design hybrid meetings to engage all participants: Meetings are one of the most challenging aspects of hybrid work, which is why many managers default to holding important meetings when the majority of their team is in the office. But putting the effort into running effective hybrid meetings can improve cohesion and fairness in your team.
- Recognize employees equally: It can feel a lot easier to recognize employees in the office, but with just a bit of forethought (and the right tools), you can make that recognition accessible to everyone.
Inclusivity is an essential part of building employee engagement in a hybrid workforce and, along with the foundation described earlier, it can help make sustained engagement much easier.
Strategies for sustained engagement and productivity
Building and maintaining employee engagement should be a priority for your organization. Not only can it improve employee retention and save on expensive recruitment efforts, but it can also lead to improved productivity and a healthier bottom line. Making quick, easy changes can give you a noticeable boost in employee engagement across the board, but sustained effort is necessary to keep that going long-term. That effort can involve:
- Setting measurable engagement goals: Engagement surveys are just one way you can measure engagement over time, and they should be used to set, track, and improve on clearly-defined goals.
- Encourage autonomy and accountability: Hybrid work relies on trust and openness, but that should come with an emphasis on accountability. Hybrid employees have more freedoms than on-site employees do, and they should understand that this comes with increased accountability. You also need to create a safe culture where they can be accountable when needed.
- Align engagement initiatives with business objectives: Since employee engagement has wide-reaching impacts on your company’s performance, it’s easy to tie the two together. But you have to establish that link and use it to create alignment in order to make employee engagement a priority.
Companies that make employee engagement a core component of their culture perform better than their counterparts, and leaders who use 15Five Engage have an easier time doing that. Here’s why.
Hybrid engagement changes the game
Hybrid work can make building and maintaining employee engagement more challenging, but it also highlights its increased importance. With trust and psychological safety being essential for hybrid work to succeed, you need to cultivate high engagement so you can get the openness and accountability you need from hybrid employees.
Keeping your hybrid employees engaged depends on a healthy mix of flexibility, inclusivity of all work styles, and strong leadership. But with the right tools, the right practices, and an obsession with continuous improvement, you can keep your workforce engaged. No matter where they work from.
