Striking the right balance between remote and office working can be difficult - and costly if you get it wrong.
The key to measuring success is to think deeply about what success looks like at the outset and communicate that clearly, gathering feedback from within your organisation to understand if it is achievable within a realistic timeframe.
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Understand that successful hybrid working won’t happen without proper leadership - you’ll lose the benefits and organisational risks could emerge. However, the payback can be exponential if you do it properly, making evidence-based decisions, monitoring progress over time and altering course based on data.
Here we focus on how to measure the success of hybrid working – the aspects to look at to ensure your organisation’s goals are met while your people flourish with an emphasis on their wellbeing.
How to measure success
Make sure you use a variety of measurements, including surveys, focus groups, interviews and output-based data. This ensures you don’t miss anything and accounts for capturing different roles, feedback styles and job types.
Ensure you monitor at a set frequency to accurately measure progress and identify interventions needed.
What to measure
Does your flexible approach cover everyone in your organisation? Is there some type of flexibility baked into everyone’s role? This may take the form of hybrid working or simply having input into what shifts they work.
It’s rare a one-size-fits-all approach works, so continue to explore ways you can build in flexibility across a variety of different roles.
Use regular surveys and focus groups to get a pulse check
- Ask why people are coming to the office so that you can ensure the workplace has the spaces they need to be effective.
- Ask how they feel about the office environment, and whether it supports them to do their best work.
- Track whether hybrid working is improving their work/life balance, and if so, by how much. Monitor perception over time.
- Check whether potential challenges are emerging. This might mean understanding how connected employees feel, whether they feel productive and if there is any detrimental impact on wellbeing.
- Ask whether employees feel their line managers are supportive of hybrid working to understand if more coaching and support is required at manager level.
- Run manager-only focus groups to discover their challenges in managing hybrid teams.
Discovery through recruitment process and exit interviews
Consider what candidates are asking for or about in terms of flexibility and whether any feedback is being communicated.
Monitor your HR data
Looking out for any impacts on:
- Changes in the diversity or demographics of the organisation.
- Whether there are changes in diversity of employees in senior positions.
- Whether there is a change in the geographical spread of employees over time.
KPIs and corporate success
Monitor for changes in performance of individual teams and the whole organisation.
Analyse any changes against point-in-time data from the other metrics you have collected about hybrid working and talk to the teams to understand more.
Form practitioner groups and empower them with information
Get the HR, tech and facilities teams together regularly to share the challenges related to supporting hybrid working. Feed back to them how the organisation is feeling so they are empowered to make necessary changes.
Measure externally
Formally or informally create benchmarks against other organisations in your industry – creating a regular dialogue where you can swap notes and compare progress. You could, for instance, agree to ask some of the same survey questions.
By understanding what success looks like at the outset and monitoring progress along the way, you can ensure that your hybrid model works for your organisation and its employees.
Emma Wharton Love is a workplace strategist at office design and build company Interaction and former director of hybrid working at the House of Commons.
