Agile and flexible working is non-negotiable. Employees are likely to quit if they don’t get it. We’re also in a massive skills shortage, with CEOs rating it as one of the top five risks to their business.
As the war for talent continues, the C-suite is relying on strained human resource leaders to deliver learning and development strategies to fill their skill gaps.
With this kind of pressure, it’s easy for L&D and HR managers to fall into the trap of investing in “trendy” new tools or policies that look like a quick fix, but produce weak results. It’s easy to overlook the underlying factors that are critical to successful hybrid learning — trust and accountability.
To achieve hybrid learning success, employers must understand hybrid working
Hybrid working is disrupting myths that working from the office every day is essential for employees to perform well. A study of 21 remote teams and 22 office-based teams found the performance differences — including innovation, efficiency, and quality of work — are minimal.
However, human costs are high. Teams spread across different locations experience higher levels of task conflict — disagreements about what work they are doing. They also experience greater interpersonal conflicts; disputes about how the team works together to achieve their goals.
To solve these conflicts, employees are having 13 percent more meetings, extending their working day by 8 percent. If you’re working a 9-5 job, that’s an extra 40 minutes a day.
Employees and employers are still divided on hybrid
When individuals and their employers were asked how much time staff should be spending in the office, there was a 20 percent difference in the answers.
Companies want more in-person collaboration because it sparks faster decisions, enables teams to adapt to change better and learn from each other.
But many professionals say they work better from home due to the increased flexibility, ability to focus and better work-home balance.
This divide can’t be ignored. Employers that fail to rectify this gap with their workforce will see:
- Key employees resign: 46 percent are already planning to make a major career pivot.
- Increased cynicism to business change: Remote employee tracking systems has made employees nearly two times more likely to pretend to be working.
- Reduced employee trust and job satisfaction: One in five global survey respondents say their employer doesn’t care about their work-life balance.
To close the hybrid divide, build a culture of trust and accountability
Together, trust and accountability create psychological safety for hybrid workers and is vital for maximizing their learning.
Without fear of condemnation, people want to share their ideas, opinions or questions.They need the room to make mistakes, and the guidance and accountability to assess where they went wrong and take the steps to resolve it.
Getting the balance right between trust and accountability is critical. When one is higher than the other, you get either micromanagement — which ruins employee morale — or social loafing, where people stop contributing. And people tend to do the bare minimum to get by when there is an absence of both.
Therefore, leaders should ensure their hybrid strategy includes:
- Setting a clear hybrid narrative: Tell the story of the value of hybrid working and learning and how it will empower every person.
- Prioritizing knowledge sharing: Create spaces and tools for people to share ideas, questions, successes and failures.
- Holding every person accountable: From casual one-to-one discussions between managers and employees to weekly checklists, make everyone feel a part of making hybrid learning successful.
In hybrid learning, bite-size is the right size
Hybrid working has changed the way employees think about learning. Formal learning needs to easily fit into an individual’s day, making it easier for learners to engage with their learning, and they will feel more motivated, trusted and accountable.
Research suggests that short, sharp training sessions delivered in spaced out chunks giving people the information when they’re most engaged is the most effective approach to creating a sustained change to behavior.
A distributed bite size approach results in 17 percent greater transfer than traditional learning methods without blowing HR’s budget.
The key is to integrate three phases into your learning experience that gets, on average, 87 percent of people to apply what they learn in the classroom back at work:
- Engage: Get people to care about the problem that the learning solves. This includes making learning relevant, timely and applicable.
- Participate: Connect people with others who can help them to learn and solve problems. Provide tips, techniques and practices that they can experiment with and are instantly applicable.
- Activate: Make it easy for people to apply their learning to the real world.
Use the office to expand social interactions and relationships
Whether it’s having a quick chat with a colleague by the coffee machine or popping over to your manager’s desk and asking a few questions, informal learning is fantastic for developing skills, generating new ideas and building great relationships with others.
It’s one of the key advantages of employees being in the office, and employers must ensure they are accelerating informal learning by breaking down the barriers to individual and team communication.
Since the start of the pandemic, remote working has led many people to work in silos and the amount of time people spend interacting with different people outside of their team or department has diminished. This dampens innovation, creativity, communication and productivity.
Therefore, leaders need to create an environment that encourages employees to expand their social interactions with people across the company, not just in their usual work circle.
To achieve this, employers can use mentoring, reverse mentoring and online learning communities to build unity and share knowledge, as well as web platforms like SharePoint, Slack or Confluence.
By using these behavioral science-backed practices, leaders will build a hybrid learning approach that maximizes impact for everyone thrust into a world of remote working and hybrid learning.
