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With 74% of US companies transition to a permanent hybrid model, leaders turn their attention to measuring the success of their hybrid working model. That’s because there is one traditional office-oriented model Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 in the office, but there are many ways to do hybrid work. Additionally, what works well for one company’s culture and work style may not work well elsewhere, even within the same industry. So how should a leader evaluate whether the model they’ve adopted is optimal for their company’s needs — or if those needs need to be refined?
The first step involves establishing clear success metrics. Unfortunately, relatively few companies measure key aspects of the transition to hybrid work. For example, a new report van Omdia suggests that 54% of organizations believe productivity has improved by adopting a more hybrid work style, but only 22% of organizations have established metrics to quantify productivity improvements from hybrid work.
Related: They say remote work is bad for employees, but most research suggests otherwise – explains a behavioral economist.
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Hybrid working is a strategic decision
From my experience with helping As organizations transition to hybrid work, it is important that the entire C-suite is actively involved in formulating the metrics and that the board approves them. Too often busy executives feel a natural inclination to throw it in HR’s lap and let them sort it out.
That’s a mistake. A transition to a permanent hybrid working model requires attention and care at the highest level of an organization. Otherwise, the C-suite will be uncoordinated and unaligned on what counts as “success” in hybrid work and end up in a mess six months after their transition to hybrid work.
It is a best practice for the C-suite to determine the metrics in a remote location where they can step away from the daily hustle and bustle and make long-term strategic choices. Prior to the offsite, it is valuable to gather initial internal statistics, including a baseline of quantitative and objective measurements. While there are plenty external statistics on hybrid work, each company has a unique culture, systems and processes, and talent.
Which success metrics are important in the transition to hybrid work?
Based on my clients’ experience, companies focus on a variety of success metrics, each of which can be more or less important. Each of these metrics should be measured before establishing a permanent hybrid work policy, to get a baseline. Subsequently, the metrics should be reviewed quarterly to evaluate the impact of hybrid work policy refinements.
Retention provides a clearly measurable hard success metric, both quantitatively and objectively. A related measure, recruitment, is a softer measure: it is more difficult to measure and more qualitative in nature. External benchmarks certainly indicate that offering more remote work facilitates both retention and recruitment.
So if the C-suite chooses to adopt a more flexible policy, I recommend that my clients post it on their website’s “Join Us” page, just like one of my clients, the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute. HR will inevitably find themselves getting more questions from applicants who refer to this policy, as well as potential employees who rave about it in interviews. That enthusiasm is something that can be measured.
An important metric, performance, can be harder or easier to measure depending on the nature of the job. For example, a study published in the National Bureau of Economic Review reported on a randomized control trial comparing the performance of software engineers assigned to a hybrid schedule versus an office-oriented schedule. Engineers working in a hybrid model wrote 8% more code over a six-month period. If there is no option to have such a clear performance measurement then use regular weekly evaluations performance of executives.
Collaboration and innovation are critical measures of effective team performance, but measuring them isn’t easy. To evaluate them, we must rely on more qualitative assessments of team leaders and team members. Moreover, by training teams in effective hybrid innovation and collaboration techniques you can improve these statistics.
Several hard-to-measure metrics are important to an organization’s culture and talent management: morale, engagement, well-being, happiness, burnout, intention to leave, and quitting quietly. Arriving at these metrics requires the use of more qualitative and subjective approaches, such as tailored surveys specially adapted to hybrid and remote working policies. As part of the survey, it is helpful to ask respondents to participate in focus groups around these issues. Then, in the focus groups, you can go deeper into the survey questions and delve deeper into people’s underlying feelings and motivations.
One way to measure the well-being and burnout of your employees is a hard metric: employees who are sick. By measuring how that changes over time – seasonally adjusted – you can evaluate the impact of your policy on the mental and physical health of employees.
Related: You need to let your team determine their approach to hybrid work. A behavioral economist explains why and how to do it.
Diversity, equity and inclusion represent an often overlooked but extremely important metric impacted by hybrid work. We know that underrepresented groups strongly prefer more remote work. So my clients who chose to have a primarily office-focused schedule had to invest significant resources to boost their DEI to offset the inevitable loss of underrepresented talent.
Measuring DEI is quite simple and objective: look at the retention of underrepresented rank and file leaders as the hybrid work strategy is implemented. Also, make sure your surveys allow employees to self-identify relevant demographics so you can measure DEI related to engagement, morale, and so on.
Last but not least, my clients also think about professional and leadership development and onboarding and integration of junior team members. A Conference Board investigation finds 58% of employees would leave without sufficient professional development, even more so for underrepresented groups. Leadership development is crucial for the long-term continuity of any company. And onboarding and integrating junior staff is a fundamental necessity for success. Yet most companies struggle with figuring out how to do this well in a hybrid environment.
Measuring professional development is best done through more subjective tools, such as surveys and focus groups. You can also assess how much the workforce is improving in the areas where they have received professional development and compare in-person versus external learning delivery modalities. Evaluating leadership development is simpler and more quantitative and objective. Assess how well your newly promoted leaders are succeeding based on performance evaluations and 360-degree assessments. Onboarding and integrating new staff includes performance evaluations by supervisors and measurements of their productivity.
Conclusion
Once you have the basics of these various metrics, the C-suite needs to determine which metrics are most important to your organization in a remote location. Choose the top three to five metrics and weigh their importance against each other. Using these metrics, the C-suite can then decide on a hybrid work action plan that would best optimize for their desired results. Then determine an action plan to implement this new policy, including using the appropriate metrics to measure success. As you implement the policy, if you notice that the metrics aren’t as good as you’d like, review the policy and see how that revision affects your metrics. Also consider running experiments to compare alternate versions of the hybrid policy. For example, you could be in the office one day a week in one location and two days in another and assess how that affects your stats. Review and review your approach once a month for the first three months, then quarterly thereafter. By applying this approach, my clients found they could most effectively achieve the metrics they established for their permanent hybrid model.
