75% of employees say their managers weren't trained to oversee a hybrid team

Hybrid work has become a staple in many workplaces across the U.S. in the wake of the pandemic, but despite an embrace of this flexibility, organizations aren't as proactive in teaching their leaders how to manage hybrid teams. 

Today, over half of employees have the option to work from home at least some of the time, according to a recent survey from software company TechSmith. Yet nearly three out of four employees indicated their employer has not trained its managers to lead a distributed team, or adopted best practices to support working across distances.

"In the beginning, the move to remote work was just triage," says Kate Lister, president of Global Workplace Analytics, TechSmith's research partner for the survey. "Business leaders believed we would all go back to the office whether it was after six months or the end of the year, so there was no real incentive to try to change their practices and processes because the shift was only temporary. Well, it's not temporary anymore." 

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Only 25% of employees feel their employer has adequately supported them in changing how they work, while 26% feel like their teams have received any kind of clarity on how to work as a hybrid or distributed team. Overall, 76% agree that their managers are ineffectively managing their teams. 

For many, constant disruptions or an inability to work the hours that work best for them is causing distraction and stress. Fifty percent of respondents said their productivity has been reduced, leading to over $1 million a year in lost costs.

Additionally, employers have continued to prioritize traditional work models, despite the fact that employees have proved their ability to stay productive otherwise. Seven out of 10 employees believe that emails could replace over a quarter of their real-time meetings, and they spend 10% more time working together in real-time versus on their own schedules. 

"Flexibility means something different to all of your employees and as a leader you need to figure out how you can offer it  to the most employees," says Amy Casciotti, VP of HR at TechSmith. "For some people it's whether they can work from home or not, but for others, what time of day or what days they're working is what's important to them." 

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To mitigate these miscommunications, Casciotti and the rest of her team surveyed TechSmith's employees to better understand what would help them remain productive. TechSmith decided to go a month without meetings in an effort to get to the bottom of which topics would require face-to-face resolution, but most importantly which ones could go without. In the end, it made the meetings they did schedule more productive and eliminated redundancies. 

"Leaders are so worried about 'relocating the water cooler,' but who said the water cooler was the best way to collaborate to begin with?" Casciotti says. "There are a lot of reasons why companies are calling their people back into the office, but mainly it's because they can't figure out how to keep their workforce engaged." 

To most effectively navigate hybrid work, everyone needs to make compromises, Lister says. She recommends relying on compressed work weeks, job sharing, floating holidays, part-time work options and seasonal hours to promote a variety of ways to be flexible. Whether employees are working from different cities or different floors, organizations will have to find a way to permanently adapt to a new era of work. 

"We can't continue to resist change because it's accelerating," Lister says. "And it's a one way street. We can't continue to manage by looking in the rearview mirror."