Could Hybrid Work Actually Build Stronger Connections?
Building culture is a tricky endeavor. There are so many opinions on what a culture should look and feel like, but most of those perspectives involve a workPLACE where people spend 40–50 hours a week physically chatting around the water cooler, knocking on each others’ doors, and being forced to smell the salmon Judy is reheating in the microwave in the break room… as a team.
Judy’s fish is a culture-builder.
Being in-person absolutely removes a barrier from the culture-building equation, but in a conversation with a fellow HR consultant, she made a pretty poignant point: “I just spent 50 hours a week with these people, now you expect me to grab a drink with them??”
Thinking about it, I wouldn’t want to even hang out with the same friends 50 hours a week, even if they were my best friends. That’s a lot of time with one group of people.
Consider the holidays: assuming you love your family, you look FORWARD to seeing them, but if you were to see them five days a week, Thanksgiving would simply become the third Thursday in November… y’know, the one where we pretend Uncle Gary’s stuffing isn’t dry.
What if you looked FORWARD to seeing your coworkers?
Give people a reason to ANTICIPATE seeing one another. The anticipation of seeing someone and laughing together actually builds those emotions as though we’re experiencing them, so the rest of the week, your people are feeling and performing better.
If you’re going to adopt a more hybrid work schedule, be sure to engage your team when they DO come together. Introduce an all-hands meeting where they update one another on the funniest thing that has happened to them this week, or kick it off with an improv game where you go around in a circle and each person adds one word at a time to build a complete story together.
And of course, drinks at the end of the day.
If absence makes the heart grow fond, consider how a flexible work schedule can be best for building your culture. Think about how it would benefit your workplace to see each other 2–3 times a week, once a week, or even once a month (you decide what would be best). I understand each workplace and the cast of characters is different, so imagine your team if they all looked forward to seeing one another. What would that look like? How could you cultivate that culture?
Pretty soon, you can enjoy working with Judy as a person withOUT associating that salmon scent wafting through the air behind her.
