Is it time for your company to create a ‘Head of Hybrid’ position?

According to Microsoft, 66% of leaders are considering redesigning their workplaces to support hybrid work. But, hybrid work is about more than your blueprint —  it’s about how your people use these spaces. How can you create the best hybrid environment for your people to thrive? Most of us don’t know the answer yet —  which is why 2022 may become the year of the Head of Hybrid.

While roles like GitLab’s Head of Remote, Darren Murph, and Facebook’s Director of Remote Work, Annie Dean, strive to help streamline the remote work experience, remote and hybrid are not the same. Designing a formal role focused on your hybrid work ensures you have a leader who can synthesize input from across the organization as different departments think through policies offering flexibility, digital investments, and other implications of this massive shift in how, where, and when we work.

Forging a united hybrid team

The pandemic caught everyone off guard, forcing a seismic shift in how we define work and revealing just how unprepared we are for change in this regard.

Now that the dust has settled, companies have the time and context to create new strategies for the hybrid era.

There is a need for leaders in the workplace that will drive those hybrid-work strategies. These individuals need to be capable of balancing the company’s needs with varying degrees of employee engagement and desire to return to the office. 

Hybrid wasn’t really a challenge when the pandemic first hit. Nearly everyone outside of essential workers was forced to work from home. But now, the workforce dynamic is changing. Some employees work from home. Some work — or plan to work — in the office. Many fall somewhere in between.  

The strategies employed months ago, when your entire workforce was remote, may not be effective any longer. In fact, they may become a cultural detriment that can easily lead to an ‘us vs. them’ mentality, pitting office workers against remote workers and leaving hybrid workers somewhere in between. “Managers of hybrid teams often need to make a concerted effort to ensure they do not associate with certain members of their team more closely merely due to location,” says Nick Deligiannis, Managing Director at Hays. 

This ‘us vs. them’ divide is understandable when you have individuals who predominantly work in the office and those who work predominantly (or exclusively) remotely. Negative and unhelpful attitudes can creep in, like the notion that remote workers do less or have it ‘easy’.

It’s easy for team managers and others higher up in the organizational hierarchy to see people in the office as one team and those working remotely as an offshoot. 

Current leadership roles will only highlight this divide. Appointing someone new to manage remote workers only emphasizes the belief that these individuals are ‘other’. A genuinely hybrid team — split between remote and office workers, with the locations of individuals changing day-to-day demands a new breed of leadership.

This person is someone who can bridge that divide and forge a united hybrid team.

“The worldwide shift to hybrid working models happening now is something most organizations have never had to deal with before,” says Ben Reuveni, CEO and co-founder of Gloat. “We’re seeing a number of new roles emerge within our talent marketplace that are designed to address this, with titles like Head of Hybrid Work, Head of Dynamic Work, and Workplace Environment Architect.” 

Elsewhere we’re seeing companies like Unilever create entirely new roles, like the VP of Future of Work, developed to oversee their evolving model for hybrid work. New roles of this nature seem to be focused on ensuring a technologically connected team while navigating the complexities of HR, cultural, and leadership needs in a hybrid world. 

What would be required of a Head of Hybrid?

This responsibility has naturally fallen on HR departments as a stopgap in the past. But with hybrid-specific needs, like maintaining employee affinity growing increasingly vital, it’s only natural that companies are beginning to evolve new roles to strategically manage their teams. 

So what exactly would be required of a ‘Head of Hybrid’? Speaking of the possibility of a ‘Chief Hybrid Work Officer’ Gartner’s research director, Alexia Cambon argued, “Anyone in that role is essentially asked to shed the assumptions of the past and rethink work altogether. Hybrid work is going to involve a lot of experimentation…it makes sense to have a dedicated source.”

This thought helps form the outline of the skills required for this role — revolving key areas like emphasizing the ability to adapt, evolve, and grow with the emerging needs of the role.

Open communication

With the need to bridge the gap of managing team members in-person and remotely, communication skills will be vital. A flare for both synchronous and asynchronous communication is necessary to accommodate multiple locations, varying working hours, and different time zones. Seminal to this role would be the ability to ensure every employee enjoys equal voice, agency, and recognition — regardless of whether they’re communicating with the team in real-time or not, whether they’re physically present or not.

Tech-savvy

With so many solution-based tech offerings being developed for hybrid work, anyone in a Head of Hybrid role will need to be technologically savvy. It’s important for them to welcome and streamline the tech systems used by their teams, with the latest innovations, for the most efficient workflow. 

They will also need the practical administrative chops to ensure all employees can easily access the required amenities. For example, a fast, quality internet connection and good bandwidth while working remotely are essential. Realizing this and ensuring the installation or payment of quality service for everyone in the most cost-effective way for the company is an essential base skill for such a role.

Confidence to be open-minded

Anyone stepping into a role of this nature needs to be inherently open to its newness. The need for a Head of Hybrid is emerging and will continue to evolve alongside hybrid working environments.

A fixed mindset of how things need to ‘get done’ will no longer be an advantage. Rather, a person comfortable and confident in both embracing and shaping new paradigms is in order. Someone capable of juggling the practical need to meet business objectives with the abstract nature of an evolving hybrid team, all while holding a role that is still being carved out. 

Those currently occupying roles such as Head of Creativity or Innovation Manager have faced similar challenges. Yet they have forged and solidified these roles as vital elements of modern business development.

We no longer challenge prioritizing creative thought and innovative exploration over fixed practices and efficiency. Business evolution has always required us to periodically break the currently accepted status quo to discover a superior way of working. 

Change is uncomfortable, yet evolution is necessary and would likely be a constant driving force behind any Head of Hybrid.

What would a Head of Hybrid role look like?

In a practical sense, it seems likely a Head of Hybrid role for most companies would be an evolution of existing management merged with the new roles – such as Head of Remote – that emerged during the pandemic.

For example, when Facebook was hiring a Director of Remote Work, they specifically sought ‘a strategic thinker who understands distributed and virtual teams, an outstanding relationship builder, and a change agent.’ This speaks to a company looking to the future and anticipating further evolution and change in the way we work and the manner in which teams interact.

Zapier, on the other hand, recently sought a Remote Communications Manager who could ‘design and maintain company-wide norms for our internal communication and collaboration strategy, tools, and processes.’ A natural evolution of such a role would be a Hybrid Communications Manager, who considers communication as a whole, rather than viewing remote as a separate entity to manage.

Such a role would require a person with a reasonable level of autonomy who is comfortable reporting to leadership and higher levels of management while maintaining enough altitude to view the company as a whole. Collaboration with HR and technical departments would undoubtedly be a necessity in order to ensure new policies were adapted and new technologies integrated to support the hybrid working model.

This would also extend to collaboration with workplace teams to ensure the best possible use of space within the physical office. Discussions across the board can help gain insight into what is and isn’t working in the office. Incorporating smart tech stacks into the workplace can be used to analyze and optimize these spaces, showing how our spaces are actually being used.

This would seem to be supported by existing requirements of companies hiring for similar roles. Cloudflare, for example, specified in their job description while seeking a Head of Distributed Work their need for someone capable of ‘working with our leaders and managers in creating a work environment where people can do their best work and teams can thrive, regardless of their work location or work mode’.

Does your company need a Head of Hybrid?

While some companies are opening themselves up to the need for new roles that effectively manage the practical needs of a hybrid team, it doesn’t automatically mean that every business will need to appoint someone to such a role.

On a basic level, however, with big names like Facebook and GitLab already having individuals in place to head up their remote efforts, with others like Gloat, Unilever, and Gartner, investigating the potential for a Head of Hybrid role, it seems likely this is another inevitable shift in the wake of the pandemic. 

Like the need to work remotely, followed by employee reluctance to return to the office full-time, the integration of such a role into your business may simply be the next unavoidable opportunity of the pandemic.

Hybrid work will change our relationship with physical space. But the persistency of the pandemic is a significant reason why fewer people are coming to the office.

When the pandemic passes, people will return.  The questions we’re all looking to answer is how many will return, how often, and what do they hope to accomplish while at the workplace?

Companies are using this downtime (which Omicron has extended) to make meaningful infrastructure changes that will answer these questions and prepare them to lead the shift to the dynamic workplace.

Take-Two’s Larry Charlip, for example, used the downtime created by the pandemic to install Density sensors during working hours, shortening the time from install to deployment.

“We wouldn’t have been able to do that prior to COVID,” he said. “And we’re changing to Zoom rooms, and that’s going to be done during working hours. We would have never been able to block out 12 conference rooms to do that in three days. It would have taken us four weekends to do it.”

Other companies are using this opportunity to upgrade their HVAC systems without impacting the employee experience.

Regardless of the infrastructure changes you do make, what’s becoming increasingly clear is if physical spaces are a part of your future workplace strategy, now is the time to start taking action on preparing for that future.

Minimize the time and money spent on infrastructure changes

Even with fewer people in the office to contend with, making major infrastructure changes across your portfolio is an enormous investment of time and money.

At Density, we minimize this investment by starting small — one floor, in one building. Customers choose one of their most widely used spaces — headquarters, for example — to start with.

This minimizes the time and money spent on installation and lets our customers see — within days —the value of knowing how their space is used.

Based on these initial findings, we work with our customers to determine how many sensors are needed, and how that will look distributed across their portfolio.

Prepare for and lead the next “normal”

We all seem stuck in this time in between the past and future. But this period of purgatory offers you an opportunity to invest in your future with minimal disruption to business as usual.

Many workplace leaders have seized this moment to invest in the future of their physical spaces.

Schedule a chat with our team to see how quickly you can deploy Density sensors in your workplace to discover how your people use your space.

Workplace management teams are responsible for maintaining the operational excellence of all aspects of the office, from facilities maintenance to real estate portfolio development. Every choice a workplace manager makes affects the overall work environment.

To ensure they make the right decisions, workplace teams use a variety of tools, from employee surveys to state-of-the-art workplace management software, to collect feedback and data to inform their office designs, employee policies, and asset management.

What is workplace management?

Workplace management is a comprehensive strategy used to regulate a company’s office environment. The strategy is governed by a workplace manager or team. Their goal is to optimize the office to ensure employees have a positive workplace experience and the company gets as much value as possible from its investments in employees, real estate, and workplace technology. 

Wondering what that looks like in action? Here are some workplace management examples:

• Optimizing space management by moving from assigned seating to hot desking 
• Monitoring space utilization to see where the “hot spots” are that need more frequent cleaning 
• Doing a financial analysis on workplace utilization
• Identifying how much space will be needed to accommodate new hires 
• Creating policies or planning activities to increase employee engagement
• Redesigning the floor plan to accommodate different types of work

What are the benefits of workplace management?

As a general rule, all the benefits of workplace management involve reducing expenses, making workplace optimizations seamless, and increasing employee satisfaction and productivity.

Below are some specific examples of how workplace management can benefit your business.

Reduce operating expenses

Many companies don’t realize how inefficiently their workspaces are utilized. You may think that you need additional square footage to accommodate a period of rapid growth and hiring, but there’s a strong possibility you already have the space you need. It just needs to be utilized better. 

When you have building data such as traffic patterns and occupancy rates, you can pinpoint underperforming areas and find creative ways to optimize them. Workplace management teams can collect this data the old-fashioned way by visually monitoring spaces over time, or they can employ workplace technologies that track utilization trends in real-time. 

Once an office’s problem areas are identified, there are many possibilities for reducing overhead costs.

• Maintain your real estate footprint by repurposing underutilized spaces rather than expanding into additional office space
• Reduce utility expenses by managing light and HVAC systems for empty areas of the building
• Avoid expensive repairs or replacements by automating maintenance visits to maintain the facility

Enable flexible collaboration

Much of the focus of workplace management is on the physical office space, but employee productivity is also an essential aspect. With hybrid work becoming the norm, the physical workplace is increasingly a place for employees to come in to collaborate. Workplace teams can create seamless collaboration experiences for workers in many areas, from room reservation systems to guidelines for how to have an equitable meeting between in-office and remote workers. 

These solutions and policies reduce friction that can cause employees unnecessary stress and frustration and hinder their productivity. The goal for workplace management teams is to make it as efficient as possible for workers to locate and reserve resources and streamline their collaborations.

Improve employee morale

Employee morale is directly tied to employee performance. Satisfied employees are going to be more engaged and attentive to their work, and they are more likely to invest personal interest in your company’s success. A workplace that operates smoothly, is comfortable, and provides the resources workers need to do their jobs goes a long way toward improving employee morale. 

Workplace teams can also improve or maintain morale by offering amenities employees have expressed interest in. “Have expressed interest in” is a key phrase here. Employee surveys can provide workplace managers with valuable insights into how they can meet the wants and needs of workers.

Adding a ping pong table in the lounge area isn’t going to have a positive effect if what employees actually want is a commuter program to offset their expenses. 

What the future of workplace management looks like

The workplace is in a state of flux and will likely remain fluid for the foreseeable future. Employee expectations are changing, competition for talent is increasing thanks to the rise of remote work, and everything is becoming more expensive due to inflation. These three factors have an enormous impact on the world of work and make it more difficult to predict your workplace needs. 

Below are three workplace management strategies to help you reduce expenses while creating a more comfortable and productive work environment.

1. Focus on the employee experience

Remote work has opened up a world of possibilities for job seekers, allowing workers to be picky about the office environments they like best and increasing the competition for recruitment. It’s more important now than ever before to create a satisfying employee experience.

Rethink workplace management choices from the employee’s perspective. Before making changes, understand how they will affect workers. Consider inviting feedback and allowing employees to voice any questions or concerns about proposed changes, such as switching from 1:1 seating to hoteling. You may be surprised at how amenable workers are once they understand the intent behind changes, especially if your workplace management plans stem from the desire to improve the employee experience. 

2. Automate with workplace management technology 

Workplace management and the technologies that support it can help your company make smarter, data-backed decisions about space planning, overhead costs, employee satisfaction, and more. It’s an effective way to ensure your business has the insights necessary to stay flexible and adapt to the changing work environment.

Technology such as occupancy sensors provide workplace managers with accurate utilization data that can be used for various workplace optimizations, from making informed decisions about real estate portfolios to providing real-time information about which conference rooms are available. 

Integrated workplace management systems (IWMS) are another technology solution that can profoundly impact operational excellence. With IWMS software, you can provide self-service options for employees such as reserving a desk or scheduling a meeting with colleagues. It can also help workplace teams monitor security, automate facilities management, track asset lifecycles, and manage suppliers, to name just a few examples.  

3. Repurpose the space and resources you have

The most economical way to update your office environment is by using what you already have. Workplace teams can identify areas with low optimization and find creative ways to repurpose them. For example, let’s say you have one conference room that is rarely used. A workplace manager could turn this into an employee experience asset by making it a comfortable lounge area where workers can take a break and recharge.

Financial resources are precious, especially as inflation continues to rise, and office space with little or no utilization is wasted money. To optimize the workplace, now and in the future, workplace managers must be able to identify these underutilized spaces and find innovative ways to turn them into usable assets. 

Reshaping the workplace

The modern workplace is being reshaped by events such as the pandemic, new employee demands, rising inflation rates, and digital transformations. As businesses continue to look for the “new normal,” they must embrace workplace management strategies and technology integrations to stay informed and agile.

Done correctly, workplace management can help keep employees engaged, reduce expenses, and keep companies operating smoothly no matter what the future holds.