Digital environmental psychology for the hybrid workforce

IN THE last decade, leaders in organisations have spent a lot of time, money and effort optimising the workplace environment for better productivity, creativity, collaboration, efficiency... whatever it was that the organisation wanted to prioritise. It was called environmental psychology - the study of transactions between individuals and their surroundings.

The iconic office cubicles of the 90s were made old and unfashionable at the swift turn of the 2000s, when the influx of scrappy, sexy startups showed the world how collaboration flowed uninhibited across long, uninterrupted desks and open-plan office spaces. Now, these open-plan spaces are said to be terrible for women and introverts, and lower overall productivity.

The office pantry was the unofficial setting of Friday evening drinks, or spontaneous huddles. Water cooler small talk built a sense of community and camaraderie. Tongue-in-cheek meeting room names were supposed to add a touch of personalisation.

But that decade of research and optimisation has been rendered useless in the past 2 years. Before the pandemic, white-collar workers across the globe spent one-third of their lives sitting in an air-conditioned, highly-optimised office space - some even with fully-equipped gyms, sleeping pods and lanky baristas at their disposal.

Today, no one wants to return to these offices. Employees across the world refuse to work in an office full-time, and those who were given an ultimatum, simply quit.

With offices across the world now empty, environmental psychology is no longer as relevant. A new digital environment psychology is being explored. From Zoom fatigue to Slack etiquette to virtual off-sites and team lunches, every aspect of our virtual work life is being studied and optimised. Zoom breakout rooms are the new conference venues. Slack Huddles are the new pantry meetings.

GET BT IN YOUR INBOX DAILY

Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox.

Sign UpVIEW ALL

But how does this translate? How do leaders continue to foster productivity, creativity, collaboration and efficiency?

Employees miss social interactions, but in different ways

Research has shown that the lack of casual social interactions is the greatest challenge to remote working and employee retention.

A study showed that small talk enhanced employees' daily positive social emotions at work, which heightened organisational citizenship behaviours (OCB) and enhanced well-being at the end of the workday. This small talk has ceased considerably, and people miss it.

How do leaders address this? There is no one-size-fits-all solution to this. It is not simply a matter of hosting Friday staff meetings and asking every employee to turn their cameras on for maximum participation. While the extroverts might have no qualms powering through the awkwardness of inevitable lag or running around their house on a virtual treasure hunt, this will likely not be the sort of activity introverts would thrive in.

It is important for leaders to consider both ends of the spectrum - extroverts might prefer ad hoc, activity-filled group activities, where introverts might benefit from regular sessions with a smaller team. For instance, consider encouraging teams to implement daily 15-minute scrums in small groups of 3 to 4 people, where introverts have the space to communicate and form bonds.

Designing for workplace inclusion

It is not just social preferences. Remote work has helped to even the playing field a little more - a study from Future Forum shows that in a hybrid work arrangement, Black knowledge workers reported higher work satisfaction, belonging and work-life balance compared to their white colleagues, in fact, double the sense of belonging at work.

Not everyone has the same 24 hours. When employees are made to work physically in an office full-time, a single parent might have had to wake up at three in the morning to care for their newborn, while another employee might have been able to sleep in till 7 am.

In the hybrid work environment, leaders can intentionally design this away by ensuring that physical presence does not hold more value than digital presence on any given day, and by being clear about hybrid work policies and practices.

We have a long way to go to achieve full inclusion in the workplace, and it is going to take a lot more than a hybrid environment. But leaders should take advantage of this shift to re-imagine and rethink policies that can help move the needle.

Hybrid work is here, but consider the implications

The general consensus is that the work model will be hybrid: a mix of remote and in-person working. However, what leaders need to consider is that it might not be a simple matter of asking employees to come in for a certain number of days a week.

Leaders need to think about how to build a truly hybrid work model. For instance, when holding a meeting in the office, having another team member join the meeting remotely via a video tool does not quite cut it yet. The remote worker tends to miss out on physical cues, exchanges of glances, and sometimes cannot even hear everything since the team members in the office might be walking around, or sat at the far end of the conference table.

There is also a concern that hybrid office cliques might pose a social problem: these hybrid-bred cliques might create groupthink, and give rise to a danger of what Nicola Millard, principal innovation partner at BT, calls a "2-speed organisation": a disjointed workforce which fails to collaborate since one group prefers working from the office, and the other, remotely.

Organisations and experts are still trying to figure this out. Some say that asynchronous work is imperative. No one really knows the answer yet, but it is imperative that leaders know the implications of hybrid work so that when the possible solutions are brought to light, they know why this change is happening, instead of implementing solutions without a deep understanding of the why.

Stay digitally agile, keep your ear to the ground and be ready to move

In order for leaders to keep up with the frenetic pace of these ever-new developments, they need to stay digitally agile and keep their ears to the ground. The rate of change we see today is almost astounding - one day, showing your face on Zoom is good for collaboration, the next day, it is harmful for self-image.

Luckily, optimising your hybrid or remote work environments is not as drastic as tearing down all your fabric-clad cubicles and renovating the entire space. It could be switching digital platforms for smoother communication. It could be setting up different types of virtual and in-person activities to cater to both introverts, extroverts and everyone in between.

But in order to know what to do, leaders need to be in tune with what is happening: how their teams are feeling, what they want, and what they dislike about the hybrid environment. After all, experts will come up with solutions, but ultimately, every organisation has its nuances and leaders need to find one that suits them the best.

Optimising for the new normal

When leaders are empathetic, analytical and adaptive, they will go on to head agile companies that can resist competition and embrace changing technologies, as well as unexpected shifts in the market. Leadership skills for the modern day include creating self-organising, cross-functional teams and obliterating bureaucracy and top-down hierarchy so that their business operates as an interacting network of teams.

The global workforce is living through a shift of a lifetime, and leaders should be excited and opportunistic, not afraid and unready.

• The writer is managing director of Hyper Island Asia-Pacific.