Teleworking and hybrid working methods have shaken up the organizational patterns of businesses. They created the need to comply with new uses and to question old practices. Hybrid management constitutes an element of response to guarantee the quality of life at work and maintaining committed and productive teams, with greater caring, autonomy and accountability. Discover the challenges of hybrid management, as well as the tools on which a manager can rely to align and unite employees around common goals.
The evolution towards a hybrid way of working with the development of teleworking
The “command and control” model usually refers to a vertical system, where management is given to a manager who makes decisions for his collaborators, and limits them to subordinate tasks with limited initiative. But mentalities are changing, and the health crisis has precipitated the adoption of teleworking by a growing number of companies and employees.
A new organizational mode is emerging: that of hybrid work, with employees who alternate between face-to-face and remote work, or with teams composed of both employees present on company premises and working remotely. Teleworking is becoming the new normal, between days spent in the office and days spent at home. It raises challenges and requires rethinking our approach to work, for which an innovative team management model has gradually been put in place: hybrid management. This consists of coaching employees face-to-face and remotely from their place of residence, in coworking spaces or in a situation where they are on the move. Sometimes arrived suddenly during the health crisis, teleworking must be appreciated in terms of the opportunities it offers companies, in particular with the idea of reinventing practices, of transforming the company more quickly and of bringing out more agile teams thanks to hybrid management.
Talents who aspire to remote work
Teleworking has become commonplace. Beyond the sometimes idealized image of these “digital nomads” who work from a paradisiacal destination, remote work has become a reality for a majority of French people: according to the 2022 barometer published by JLL on the work preferences of employees, 55% of the active French population has already used teleworking.
Also according to the JLL barometer, two-thirds of office workers consider that hybrid work will become a fundamental criterion for retaining talent in the years to come.
Young talent is particularly sensitive to these new organizational approaches. As a result, nearly three-quarters of Gen Z members practice hybrid work.
Teleworking or hybrid working can also become a lever at the service of corporate social and environmental responsibility. As a result, two-thirds of caregivers use hybrid work. This mode of operation is essential to carry out its professional missions while taking care of a young child or a person with a disability.
Managers who have massively adopted remote working
Hybrid management also takes into account another parameter: the massive adoption of remote working by managers themselves!
According to the JLL 2022 barometer, three-quarters of managers already practice hybrid work themselves.
Management tools must integrate this specificity, and allow remote support for teams by managers who work from home or a coworking space.
To meet a major organizational challenge, the hybrid approach calls into question the management of managers, who must more than ever commit to the autonomy and accountability of their teams. They must succeed in making a model based on trust coexist and a more traditional one based on control and delegation, with an equitable, inclusive and engaging approach, aimed at activating collective intelligence.
Hybrid management: the challenges of a new team management
Hybrid management is profoundly changing the procedures and tools of traditional forms of management. Its implementation requires a phase of testing and adaptation, to offer a working environment conducive to the development and productivity of employees.
Respect for the right to disconnect
The hybridization of work has been able to promote the progression of practices that compromise the relationship between employees and digital technology. Hybrid management requires a strict framework for uses outside of work with The right to disconnect, but also during working hours. The balance must be found so that all the technological tools that facilitate exchanges and collaboration do not tend to become intrusive. Untimely videoconferences or emails transformed into a place for exchanges in real time, such as on instant messaging, represent practices that should be banned in order not to fuel the over-solicitation of cognitive load with the digitization of interactions.
A fuzzy delineation of living and working places
While some have an office set up at home, others need access to a coworking space to work in an environment conducive to concentration. In the first case, employees can meet difficulties in delimiting their private life from their professional life. In the second, in addition to the cost that access to these spaces represents, it is above all a loss of confidentiality that can be observed in these common places.
At the heart of the company, the last decade has seen the gradual abandonment of individual offices in favor of open spaces or shared spaces, in order to facilitate communication and to reduce the size of the premises for financial considerations. Today, many employees denounce the impact of repeated interruptions due to movement or noise in these collective spaces. Since the hybridization of work is based on the sharing of time between different places during the same week, open space is currently proving to be unsuitable and obsolete to the challenges of hybrid management.
A flexible but organized framework
While candidates want more freedom, flexibility and flexibility and hybrid working methods tend to do so, there is no question of abandoning all forms of management or maintaining the old abusive control mechanisms. The once tangible and physical managerial framework was provided by the workplace; today, the manager alone embodies it. To this end, hybrid management forces managers to become ubiquitous and to constantly juggle between face-to-face and remote management. Its role is to maintaining strong team cohesion in a model that is inherently unequal, which favors asymmetric relationships between collaborators.
To succeed, hybrid management must lead to the emergence of a virtuous and egalitarian managerial framework, which regulates the organization of work and empowers each employee. Managers must be relieved of this time-consuming and energy-consuming logistics, in favor of pure team management in order to gain fluidity and efficiency. Managers intervene in support of their employees, to provide solutions or boost the desired dynamic.
A new approach to performance evaluation
Teleworking has undermined the culture of presenteeism, which values the work of the employee through the prism of his time spent in the office. Hybrid management brings new ways of evaluating the performance and contribution of an employee, with more operational management based on close and concrete objectives. Indeed, it is obviously no longer possible to continue to want to appreciate the work of your employees through their time in the office when they are at a distance.
Delimiting a field of action in order to achieve an objective is a technique that is more appropriate for hybrid work, where the manager delegates more and shows letting go. Hybrid management is based on a results-oriented culture, but should not leave unattainable goals on the shoulders of each employee without an excessive workload.
Hybrid work requires more empowering management, where managers and employees define their goals in a climate of total trust, and where transparency is required to prevent difficulties.
The use of digital tools in hybrid management
Forced to adapt urgently, businesses did not have time to put in place the processes necessary to move from face-to-face exchanges to remote exchanges. Quickly, all the profiles of a company, regardless of their profession, age and level of ease with digital solutions, had to take advantage of various videoconferencing tools, collaborative platforms and shared document spaces. Real facilitators for some and real scourges for others, these new digital workplace tools required teams to demonstrate great agility and strong adaptability.
The challenge for managers in these hybrid working methods is to succeed in adopting new uses and rituals, in order to maintain a hierarchical link coupled with cohesion between team members. This context requires the use of communication tools adapted and, above all, accepted by all, in order to facilitate collaboration and make the success of remote projects possible.
The Cenareo solution integrates a internal communication software multichannel, a powerful collaboration tool that is deployed in the company's digital workplace. This solution allows generate employee engagement by transforming any screen — smartphones, tablets, tablets, PCs and digital signage screens — into powerful and attractive broadcast media. Thanks to its integration with collaborative tools, the Cenareo solution increases the performance of your internal communication campaigns tenfold to meet the challenges of hybrid management. Through the dissemination of unified, impactful and relevant messages to everyone, managers can connect their teams on sites, teleworking and in the field in one click. It is becoming a real centralized point of reference, which guarantees the digital inclusiveness of employees.
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To maintain the link in a context of hybridization of working methods, the manager must propose a unified employee experience in order to promote team unity and cohesion. The Cenareo solution dedicated to dynamic corporate signage increases the commitment of teams tenfold, but also their productivity and efficiency. It contributes to developing the spirit of collaboration, by maximizing the reach of messages in order to strive for ever greater performance and inclusiveness.
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