Hybrid Working: engagement and culture (a Build Up & HR Network event)

How can companies maintain their culture when we’re together less often? On 23rd November, I co-chaired with Tina Connell, Director of People at Architects, Buckley Gray Yeoman, a joint Build Up and HR Network event on the contribution of internal communications to culture in our new hybrid world of work. Huge thank you to our three speakers Jonny Wong, Associate Director of Architects dMFK, John Morgan, Director of Leonard Design Architects and Tammy Sternberg, HR Director of Hawkins\Brown (who we must also thank for hosting!). It was a lively and fruitful discussion thanks to the generosity of the panel and wealth of experience in the room – and of course because we were in-person.

My takeaways mirror some of what is coming up in my coaching conversations with current & future leaders:

Career progression – all of our speakers are creating more space and time for 1:1 career conversations – formally and informally. John Morgan stated that some people felt their career development stagnated during the pandemic, others talked about less experienced people not having had the support they needed to grow. Jonny Wong outlined his increasingly structured approach to career progression conversations as the practice grows.

Expressing and maintaining culture when teams are together less often remains challenging, particularly with new starters. dMFK who have grown rapidly during the pandemic have worked hard on distilling their identity and what it is to work at dMFK to make conversations with new starters easier and more consistent. Hawkins\Brown have recruited extensively in this time and Tammy outlined their focused work around onboarding.

New skills needed for leaders and managers – linked to the above point on expression of culture Tammy highlighted training and support to equip leaders for this new environment. Helping them with the different conversations required and the need to be more intentional in their approach to inspiring, enabling and motivating their teams.

Meeting issues – there’s a ‘back to back Zoom/Teams meetings hangover’ from fully remote working. The 7 minute ‘Leonard Espresso’ (short internal CPD) was John Morgan’s antidote to this – removing the 60minute meeting time default and increasing CPD and knowledge sharing across the practice. There was also discussion around hybrid meetings – how to hold successful meetings when you have a mixture of ‘roomies and zoomies’. Asking everyone to dial in individually even if just one person isn’t in the office was one solution, improving technology another.

Keeping the good bits – communication has improved in many ways for instance those with multiple offices who have been enjoying increased inter-office collaboration and communication continuing with larger cross office meetings without the travel.

What was very evident was that no one has all the answers, this is work in progress so let’s continue the conversation.