[Mini-Series] Hybrid Work & Company Culture: How Organizations are Helping Their Leaders Equip Themselves for the Remote-First or Hybrid Workplace

Welcome to the Inclusion in Progress podcast where we give you the ideas, actions and insights to help you build more equity at your workplace and in the world at large. I'm your host, Kay Fabella, international expert on diversity, equity and inclusion, a Filipina American living in Spain and your guide in navigating this DEI journey. Having worked with teams at companies such as Philips, the IMF, Red Hat, PepsiCo and more, I know firsthand that the work of inclusion only works when everyone has a seat at the table. Regardless of your personal entrypoint into this conversation: your race, ethnicity, gender, ability, age, sexual orientation, country of origin, or educational background, we all have a role to play in creating inclusion for all and it starts with us having conversations we need to create the change we wish to see. So let's dive into today's episode.

Welcome back to the show!

This month, if you've been following along in real time on the Inclusion in Progress podcast, we're introducing our first ever mini-series on “Hybrid Work & Company Culture”, where we'll be sharing what we've learned from speaking to tech companies like HP and HubSpot during our April 2023 roundtable.

Over the past few episodes, we've been discussing the importance of equity in a hybrid workplace and how flexible working in company culture strategies go hand-in-hand with DEI, as well as actionable ideas we've been sharing with our client partners to support employees in a remote or hybrid work environment.

And today is our third and final episode of the mini-series. So let's dive in!

I'm Kay Fabella, and I'm a DEI consultant for remote teams. And I'm your host of the Inclusion in Progress Podcast where you will get research-backed industry insights into the future of work, as well as helpful practical “how to’s” for Equity and Inclusion. As you know, I also lead a remote team — shout out to Team IIP — and work with clients across EMEA, APAC, and the Americas, which means you'll get a global perspective on how companies are supporting their distributed teams and building workplaces that work for everyone.

So if you want to follow along with the “Hybrid Work & Company Culture” mini-series on the podcast this month, as well as get access to exclusive insights from our team in your inbox, head to the link in the show notes or go to https://inclusioninprogress.com/podcast-miniseries-2023 to sign up. In this podcast mini-series, we'll be discussing our findings from our April 2023 virtual roundtable with the likes of ActiveCampaign, HP, HubSpot, Jamf, and Listrak.

So let's dive into the final episode of our mini-series, how organizations are helping their leaders equip themselves for the remote-first or hybrid workplace.

Since the pandemic began in March 2020 technology became, as we know, business critical. It made remote and hybrid work possible beyond the tech industry. Tech platforms were also equally important for internal connectivity and culture building within these technology organizations, including those we spoke to during our roundtable. In the absence of daily face-to-face interactions, or roundtable participants explained how they've come to rely on different platforms to maintain employee engagement and morale, to foster a sense of community, and to facilitate their ongoing company culture initiatives. During our discussion, it highlighted the wide range of company-led and employee-led initiatives to support community building among distributed team members.

Now, one way that tech companies have been able to adapt and strengthen their company culture in a flexible work environment is through their existing employee ecosystems. Before the pandemic, we all knew about Employee Resource Groups or ERG's and the ways that they offered built in community and networking opportunities, particularly for professionals from historically excluded groups. Our roundtable participants also agree that ERGs continue to be critical factors in translating DEI and company culture initiatives within tech organizations more broadly, and shared some of the different ways that the resource groups are adapting programming for team members from diverse groups in a remote or hybrid work setting.

Here's what our Active Campaign participant had to say: “For us, our culture is one where we still really lean heavily on our [company] values. We still find ways to build team connection and cohesion despite not sharing a physical workspace. One of the most successful ways we've been able to do that at ActiveCampaign is through our ERGs, [which] provide cross-team collaboration [and] cross-geography collaboration. Our ERGs are also not just US-centered leadership. It’s important for us that we have global engagement, so we’ve embedded co-chairs from outside of the US so that we build that cohesion. We also think critically about how we’re aligning towards community success celebrating the culture, the community that [each ERG] is built in. That has helped [ActiveCampaign] create that culture of being values-aligned, cultivating inclusion and diversity, starting with trust, and iterating often. And then we encourage people to bring that [culture] back to their work teams. We’re also fortunate that our managers, who have leaned most heavily on our company values, are also our biggest culture champions.”
Company culture building strategies, such as ERG programming and awareness events, before the pandemic were aimed more about helping tech teams to feel respected and empowered to contribute their best work in a shared office or shared workplace. Company culture initiatives were designed to embed psychological safety through strategies such as talent development, team building, well-being, and career advancement programs that were designed for teams that occupied a shared office environment; though the groups that we were seeing most targeted in terms of recruitment and representation, such as women, people of color, disabled, and LGBTQIA professionals, often dealt with a decline in psychological safety in many of these physical workplaces prior to the pandemic and were, therefore, less likely to benefit from these initiatives as a result. Some of our roundtable participants shared that now, in a hybrid work environment, they're intentionally considering how hybrid work will affect equity and access to advancement in the workplace, particularly for some of the employees from the groups that we've mentioned.

Listrak had this to say: “From a functional perspective, [we’re asking ourselves] how do we make sure that there's equity? There's benefits to being here on site. There's benefits to working from home. How do we help employees understand that we're okay with you choosing what makes sense for you, what makes sense for your family, [and] what makes sense for you in terms of getting your work done? Some people who work from home will have access to certain things, such as work-life balance. Those that come into the office might have access to other things, such as connecting with their managers face-to-face. We're trying to meet people where they're at without being exclusive to any particular group. And we are by no means perfect around that. For us and for other companies, where people who have face-to-face access, I think we're going to start to see that they are advancing through the organization much more quickly than people who do not. So it’s important to ask how do you keep that fair and equitable for those who aren’t choosing to come into the office as often, who we want to keep in mind for our DEI and work culture initiatives.”

During our roundtable, we were encouraged to hear that participants are sharing how leaders are considering equal access to networking, career advancement, and representation for all employees in a hybrid workplace. Not only will these considerations support the organization's broader DEI goals, they'll also lead to higher psychological safety on their current remote and distributed teams. The increased psychological safety is the foundation on which our participants continue to actively work on building a culture of inclusion, learning, exchange of ideas, and an ability to work through challenges without fear of embarrassment, marginalization, or punishment. So company culture initiatives that are being prioritized today amongst our participants to support psychological safety provide the connectivity tech teams need when working in a hybrid environment.

At Inclusion in Progress we've learned that encouraging communication and connection in the workplace is an ongoing challenge, especially when teams are globally or geographically distributed. We've learned that employees tend to be more likely to hide when they're struggling or suffer silently, particularly when they don't see their colleagues or managers on a face-to-face basis regularly. So remote or hybrid or distributed teams may often lack the tools to openly ask for help if they're struggling, leading to decreased morale and engagement.

So what do effective, top-down company culture initiatives look like in a hybrid workplace?

Increasingly, we've heard that company culture initiatives that rely heavily on life programming are declining in attendance because employees are increasingly reluctant to spend more time on screens for live events, but they're also often unable or unwilling to travel to physical office environments for in-person gatherings.

Second, some employees are simply reluctant to discuss topics like mental health or when they're struggling openly in front of their work colleagues, due to cultural norms or feelings of discomfort, which prevents team members from benefiting from the psychological safety that they need to prevent burnout and enhance their performance at work. Inclusion in Progress continues to support remote teams in engaging with the company culture conversation, the DEI conversation, as well as discussing things like mental health in a hybrid work environment without fear of judgment from their co-workers or managers. This way, if organizations feel that they're better equipped to lead conversations around, say, mental health at work in a way that increases psychological safety for the direct reports or colleagues who may be struggling in silence, they're not just better equipped to engage in their work, but also support others who may be struggling.

It's why we've seen an uptick in demand for our pre-recorded offerings at IIP, such as our keynotes, our workshops or licensed trainings, to help remote teams self identify and better manage their well-being, mental health, their productivity and psychological safety in a hybrid workplace. Which means that employees can increase their awareness and take responsibility for their well-being, managers spend less time in emotional management of their teams, and tech organizations and leaders can reduce the costs of absenteeism and burnout before they become an endemic challenge for the company.

Of course, none of these initiatives mean anything without the support of leaders’ top-down, without the continued investment in resources and teams and capacity to support company culture more broadly in a hybrid work environment. As we learned at the roundtable, maintaining a company culture in a hybrid workplace is most effective when everybody's on board with DEI at the core of your flexible work strategy. We learned that tech companies, while better prepared than some industries for a remote environment, have been facing similar challenges across their distributed teams.

First, they’re troubleshooting how to manage and maintain equity in a hybrid work environment. Participants shared that they learned over the last three years that not all identities are visible, that not all distributed teams are facing the same challenges, and that not every worker is comfortable voicing their needs in a hybrid or remote-first environment. So different employee groups need to be pulled regularly to provide tailored levels of support for teams’ psychological safety, connectivity, and therefore engagement while working remotely.

Another challenge is, as we've looked at in this episode, equipping leaders for remote-first or hybrid teams. Flexible work will continue to shape tech companies long after COVID-19 ends. And that means that managers and leaders at every level of the organization have a key role to play in fostering remote team connectivity and collaboration, and therefore sense of connection to company culture. Our roundtable participants talked about the different ways that they were empowering leaders and managers to lead things like handling mental health challenges, or communicating with employees more effectively while working virtually.

Finally, the other main challenge we saw was flexible working and company culture strategies and expanding the definition to include not just one or the other, but approaching it with”yes…and”. Not only has hybrid work helped exponentially expand tech companies’ talent pools, it's considered a non-negotiable for employees post-pandemic. Multiple participants shared how not only were they coming up internally in their post surveys, but also how it was becoming an increasingly a more present need and question asked for new recruits. Our roundtable discussion stressed the benefits of flexible working arrangements for distributed teams, the need to double-down on company culture initiatives with a remote-first mindset, and how mental health and well being needed to be prioritized for distributed teams, and how those things can be modeled from the top-down.

Giving employees more flexibility in where and when they work improve the inclusive distributed work experience for everyone. But it makes the most significant difference for the same groups that many tech companies have targeted in their diversity recruitment efforts. Tech firms that are looking to keep their competitive edge and successfully recruit top talent on the other side of this recessive period must continuously expand their strategies to retain existing talent and ensure that current and future employees who opt to work from home or work from a different place outside of a physical office space still benefit from the same psychological safety and access to advancement opportunities as they're co-located colleagues.

And, thankfully, the roundtable participants we spoke to are keeping that top of mind.

So there you have it, the third and final episode of our “Hybrid Work & Company Culture” mini-series, all about how organizations are helping their leaders equip themselves for the remote-first and hybrid workplaces of today. Tech firms pride themselves on agility and innovation to meet society's needs. The participants we spoke to in our April 2023 Roundtable indicated that they were adopting that same agility and innovation to DEI, leveraging the unique circumstances of our post-pandemic hybrid workplace to reshape their company culture initiatives, while keeping remote-first as their core mindset.

Now we know that employee expectations of flexibility and well-being will continue to mark and shape our future workforce. And it means that company culture will need to continue to evolve to accommodate those demands. At Inclusion in Progress, we've learned that discussing equity, company culture, and DEI in a workplace is not just a struggle, but also an opportunity for People and HR leaders who are forward thinking and continuing to prioritize equity and inclusion for all, particularly when they consider the needs of teams who are globally distributed and how our shared expectations of how we live and work change.

Which is why we're pleased to announce the release of our latest whitepaper, “Is hybrid work killing company culture?” We wanted to make available all of the things that we're seeing from our client partners and from those at our roundtable, so that you are able to lead equity, inclusion, and company culture initiatives in our post-pandemic world.

You can download a copy of that whitepaper on our website at https://inclusioninprogress.com/learn or head to the link in the show notes of this episode to grab your copy.

So thanks again for tuning in to our July 2023 podcast mini-series. We'd love to hear your feedback on how we can continue to provide content like this for leaders like you! And if you want to get in touch with us or share an idea for a future episode, you can always email us directly at info@inclusioninprogress.com.

On behalf of Team IIP, we wish you a great rest of your summer and we'll be back in August with our normal monthly episode schedule. Thanks in advance for sharing this out with people who can benefit and we'll see you next time on Inclusion in Progress!