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After years of push and pull between RTO mandates and remote worker resistance, hybrid work is here to stay. But flexible work comes with its own set of challenges, and managers may be failing their employees when it comes to preparing for the new normal.
Only 21% of hybrid employees have received any type of training on how to work best in a flexible work environment, according to a recent report from Gallup, a workplace consulting and research company. And managers leading work-from-home teams aren’t much better off—just 28% have been coached on how to lead hybrid workers.
“I wish it surprised me that the numbers are that low. Unfortunately, that trend has been steady since 2022,” Ben Wigert, director of research and strategy for Gallup’s workplace management practice, tells Fortune. “We’re not providing the training for individuals to work effectively in a hybrid environment, and maybe even worse, we’re not preparing managers to lead hybrid teams. That’s concerning.”
Training hybrid workers to be effective is specific to each team and company, but it mainly involves making sure that everyone is on the same page. That includes everyone using the same work and communications tools, and maintaining a constant stream of discourse on what is and isn’t working. Bosses should also engage in proactive casual conversations with their hybrid teams about how they’re meshing—replacing water cooler talks that would have taken place in the office—and make sure they’re doing consistent performance check-ins.
As it stands, it seems that employers right now are just winging it. A lot of advice that employees get about how to best work in hybrid mode tends to be informal. Wigert says managers have laid out more formal rules around scheduling, but that’s more administrative rather than synergetic.
“Organizations do tend to have an organizational-wide policy, but it’s probably very general,” he says. “A policy doesn’t bring your team together on what you expect from each other: who we want to be, what we want to achieve, and how we want to achieve it.”
When employers actually do have a game-plan for flexible workers beyond work-from-home policies, they can reap huge rewards. Hybrid employees who have been trained on how to navigate remote teamwork are 2.2 times more likely to say their organization’s guidelines have had an extremely positive impact on their team’s collaboration, the report says. And this favorable outlook is paired with productivity perks—around 66% are more likely to be engaged on the job, and are 29% less likely to be burned out.
“The simple act of creating a plan together is going to improve teamwork and individuals’ engagement with their jobs, and reduce their stress and burnout. Teams that are good at prioritizing activities like collaboration, feedback, and team-building are the top predictor of how engaged that individual is. It not only improves their teamwork—they’re also empowered to do their best work,” Wigert says.
Until company leaders understand potential shortcomings and well-being issues that can arise from untrained hybrid teams, Wigert recommends that flexible employees ask their bosses for formal training on the skills they need to be more effective with coworkers. And managers should have recurring meetings on how their employees can work best together.
“I’d recommend that every team have a team reset—develop a team charter that refreshes their commitment to their mission, their objectives, and how they’re going to work together,” he says.
Emma Burleigh
emma.burleigh@fortune.com
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Watercooler
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