Workers are reluctant to go back. At least, as the pandemic recedes, office workers don’t want to go back to the way it was. In a recent survey by Accenture of more than 9,000 workers in 11 countries, 83% of the respondents said that a hybrid work model is optimal, defined as the ability to work remotely between 25% and 75% of the time. A survey for Prudential found similar results, including 42% of current remote workers who said that if their employer doesn’t continue to offer remote-work options, they’ll look for a job at a company that does, CNBC reported.

Knowing these sentiments, employers are scrambling to implement hybrid work structures, but there is still a great deal to figure out. Among the issues: how to apply policies consistently and fairly, how to maintain long-term collaboration and productivity, and just how hybrid an organization can and should be.

This was the topic of discussion in a recent From Day One Webinar, “The New Hybrid Back-to-work Style: What's Optimal–and What's Fair?” Fast Company contributing editor Lydia Dishman moderated the discussion among six leaders in employee experience and management about the future of the hybrid workplace.

Abhishek Budhraja, the senior HR business partner for global engineering at Uber, said that he has become a student of the topic, since “this is the No. 1 topic of discussion in every HR meeting in every HR conference that you go to.”

Sarah Sheehan, co-founder and president of the professional coaching platform Bravely, anticipates this year will be more challenging than the last when it comes to designing and managing a work environment that satisfies restrictions and preferences. There may be fewer health and safety restrictions than during the height of the pandemic, but employee preferences have changed, she said.

Namita Seth, who leads talent management at the global IT firm Wipro, noted that the size of the problem and the list of decisions to be made can be overwhelming. She recommended employers take it one step at a time. “There’s so many things to solve for,” she said. “If we try to solve for everything, we’re sure to get it wrong. But if we stay focused on what’s most important, it’s probably easier to get more steps done right.”

Getting Started With Building the New Workplace

Where to focus first? Grace Kong, chief people officer for Cox Automotive Canada, said her focus has been on designing work arrangements with employees’ needs in mind. She has been circulating an assessment of those needs, the results of which will help the company redesign their workspace not only for cost efficiencies but also for what’s best for team members.

PC Christopher, regional director of HR at the security-services company GardaWorld, said he’s trying to solve for a balance between giving employees the ability to work from wherever they like and maintaining company culture. “How do we allow that flexibility, but also maintain the camaraderie and the teamwork that you get when you can just be around people in the workplace?”

For Susan McGoff-Miller, head of future of work for the chemical manufacturer Evonik, hybrid work is about considering how to create a consistent experience company-wide. “What we’re trying to do as an organization is create some consistent approach toward institutionalizing virtual collaboration. We want to make sure there’s a consistent minimum level. We want to make sure it’s not left up to the managers individually to decide based on what they prefer,” she said. “So we’re trying to balance it both ways, where it’s not based on the whim of a manager whether or not you have access to [hybrid work].”

Starting by tackling a single problem is good practice, panelists said, though Wipro’s Seth encouraged employers not to marry their first plan. “It’s like a transitionary process. You cannot have a guideline today and stick to it forever,” she said. “You’ll have to wait and watch, see how the market is evolving, see how your clients are evolving, see what your workforce wants, and then keep evolving your guidelines according to that.”

Preserving a Collaborative Culture

As Seth implied, complications will come up as employers build hybrid models. A common problem is how to preserve the kind of culture that employers know can be facilitated in-person. Sheehan said that to preserve inclusion, she created a rule that says no in-person meeting of a team can occur without a member working outside the office in attendance. The hope is that office-based workers will be compelled to always consider those who aren’t. In the same spirit, managers need to make sure that an employee in the office doesn’t hold greater sway than one working remotely, especially in those small conversations that take place after a meeting or in the hallway. “If I’m in a room with you and everyone else is on Zoom,” she said, “I’m going to have the opportunity to influence you in a way that no one else had.”

Preserving and promoting collaboration and productivity in a new format is something else panelists are figuring out. Budhraja said the most collaborative work he’s ever done took place during the pandemic, but whether that will last remains to be seen. “There’s a little bit of time that needs to pass before we really say whether collaboration has gone down or not, at least from a company standpoint.”

Both he and Christopher talked about the digital tools they’re using to facilitate collaborative work and keep projects moving forward, some as simple as chat programs and features, others as rich as training employees to recognize non-verbal cues on a video call.

Keeping Workers Healthy and Productive

Long-term productivity of hybrid workforces is also on the table. Christopher said the challenge he’s having is caring adequately for employees’ mental health, especially those who are working remotely. “One thing in this virtual environment that I haven’t figured out is how to tell when someone is struggling, when someone is struggling personally because they’re burnt out. You get on the Zoom calls, you participate, you put your best foot forward, but then you’re not around the rest of the day where I can see, OK, you’re struggling, something is wrong,” he said. “I don’t assume they’re OK just because they’re chipper on the Zoom call.”

Evonik’s McGoff-Miller said she has been inviting employees to talk about whether they’re struggling. “Usually people don’t want to hide all of it. They just need the space to share. We have to make that space differently than we used to. We used to do it at the coffee corner. Now we have to virtually make the time for it.”

One of Kong’s imperatives is to keep employees’ energy up. Among her approaches to this, she has created wellness sessions on such topics as balancing work and life and how to cultivate empathy. She has support from the top: Cox Automotive’s CEO has banned meetings during lunch hours and Friday afternoons so employees can catch up on work or simply take a break.

How Do You Measure Success?

Panelists agreed the most difficult part will be measuring the effects of hybrid work.

McGoff-Miller said her philosophy goes back to Evonik’s company values. “We see that institutionalizing collaboration does provide us benefits. We found that this framework for working from home and more virtual collaboration really had our values of trust and openness as a foundation. We find that virtual collaboration is actually a catalyst for performance and speed. We have to measure performance differently. We can’t just value presence as we had in the past, right?”

The productivity that matters “is self-reported productivity,” Uber’s Budhraja said. “And that’s essentially saying, how do you create the right ecosystem for an individual to work there and give their best self to the work and not engineer the last decimal on a productivity metric?”

Kong has a similar approach. She asserted that when life is easier for employees, productivity is simply higher, and it shows. “It actually makes a difference to the KPIs that we’re trying to achieve our goals, but it’s in a way where we’re supporting our team members and putting them at the forefront of what we do.”

Give Them Good Reasons to Return

If you’re still dead-set on bringing all your employees back to the office, consider why. Christopher encouraged employers to identify the business necessity, to “question the dogma” that you need to be in the office. “If you can find a win-win in this labor environment where a good employee that has figured it out can work remotely, great. Why not accommodate that? At the same time, there are some folks that are just dying to come back into the office.”

If you do want to draw workers back to a physical work environment, Christopher said you should give them reasons to be excited about returning. “There’s got to be something that draws them in,” he said. “There’s got to be times where you get everyone together so that somebody isn’t left out and you can have that fellowship and have that enjoyment of each other’s time.”

McGoff-Miller’s team is planning for this right now, studying reasons why someone would want to return to work, with the goal of creating an environment employees are eager to be part of.

The stakes are high, Sheehan warned: Employers who are inflexible about hybrid work or who refuse to adapt to employee expectations risk major turnover. “Employees are going to be dictating what happens post-Covid. Prior to Covid, it was all about, ‘This is what we’re offering to you,’ and now, I’m hearing more and more that companies are losing people, that there’s a lot of turnover happening. And if you’re not able to meet the needs of employees, then they’re just going to leave you and go somewhere else.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.

Skills-Based Hiring: Getting Started and Overcoming Common Objections

It’s never been easier to put skills-based hiring into practice. The tools and the resources are there–and the potential benefits are abundant. And yet, some leaders and hiring managers are skeptical.“One of the major positives about the skills-based approach is that it adds more science and rigor to the hiring process,” said Christopher Rotolo, vice president of global talent at Mitek. Adding science, Rotolo says, adds objectivity, which can remove some of the bias and “increase the validity of the whole hiring process.”“The fact is that over 60% of people don’t have a college degree. But that hasn’t stopped employers from benchmarking candidates that way,” said moderator Lydia Dishman, senior editor for growth and engagement at Fast Company. Dishman moderated a panel of leaders during From Day One’s recent webinar about Skills-Based Hiring: Getting Started and Overcoming Uncommon Objections.Unconscious bias can easily creep into the hiring process when looking at a candidate’s resume, which can reveal indicators like elite educational opportunities, prestige, race, and even generational wealth, none of which are necessarily predictors of career success. Hiring almost exclusively on skill can help employers dial into what really matters.Rather than focusing on degrees, says Amanda Richardson, CEO and head of people at CoderPad, “You have to dissect the role into the skills that are needed, working with the hiring manager and people who are currently in the role. The most important part of the conversation is not just ‘What are the skills?’ but ‘What does good look like?’” This approach requires more in-depth conversations between hiring managers and department leaders to get a stronger sense of not only what success looks like, but how previous successes can be communicated during the interview process.“I find that taking a practical approach [means] literally saying, ‘What does a great answer sound like? Does this person really know what they're talking about?’” said Stacey Olive, VP of talent acquisition and employer branding for Medidata, Dassault Systemes.“Because there’s not an empirical objective test for everything, we really have to go based on our conversations with people.” This means hiring managers need to prepare upfront so they can infer if they’re hearing “flowery language” merely alluding to past success, or if a candidate actually has lived experience that will be beneficial to the role.Focusing on skills-based hiring isn’t just a great way to reduce unconscious bias, it can also make the hiring process quicker. “A little bit of upfront work on understanding and aligning on the skills and the level of the skills needed will actually make a much faster hiring experience,” Richardson said.Semoneel Bamboat, VP and global head of diversity, inclusion and talent acquisition at Capri Holdings, shares that while her organization has a rubric within which they score talent competencies on a scale of one to five, her team does not let the skill scoring fully dictate the conversation.“While we have numbers and rigor around it, nothing is set in stone,” she said. “The purpose of that really is so we can cast this wide net. We don’t want to be that specific, because we don’t want to then lose sight of someone that might not fit that exactly.” Skills-forward hiring should be used to identify previously untapped candidates, not a blanket way to eliminate unusual or creative choices that could be an interesting fit.Richardson adds that getting too technical in the taxonomy can overwhelm the conversation, especially as hiring managers try to parse the subtleties between junior and senior versions of the same role. “I've seen the situation where developers start arguing about the nuances of ‘What does it mean to be very proficient versus mildly proficient?’ And I think you can lose the forest for the trees pretty quickly.”Copying and pasting old job descriptions when looking to fill a role is no longer enough. Instead, there should be periodic check-ins to make sure descriptions are up-to-date as the nature of the work, and therefore the role, continues to evolve. Part of this can be solved by shortening and simplifying the job listing. “It tends to be a lengthy laundry list of desires and needs. Instead, employers should aim to distill it into ‘What is the required skill for success?’” Olive said.With an eye toward DEI, Bamboat’s organization uses short external job listings with neutral language, keeping the more elaborate and specific job description for internal use only among the hiring team. “We take a lot of the details out to be able to cast that wide net,” she said.“We never want to post the exact job and be very specific about those requirements, because we feel like we’re decreasing our talent pool.” Bamboat shared the well-known study that showed women tend to only apply for jobs where they feel they will fit every single benchmark. Shortening the list of requirements can make it more inclusive. Once candidates make it to the interview phase, the hiring manager can discuss the specific details from the full listing to gauge if it’s a fit.In conversation moderated by Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, the panelists discussed the topic “Skills-Based Hiring: Getting Started and Overcoming Common Objections” (photo by From Day One)Pamela Rodas, global senior director of talent acquisition at Telus International, hires for a company with more than 3,000 types of job profiles, all of which are changing rapidly as her organization embraces hybrid workplaces and remote opportunities. In turn, she and her team must change how they assess skills. For example, her newer sales development hires may not have been exposed to an in-person environment where they could hone their technique. Therefore, she finds herself hiring more for soft skills or what Dishman prefers to call power skills, especially as the post-pandemic corporate environment has higher than ever expectations. “All of our clients want to go faster. So forget about skills, do you know how to do the job and do it in less time?” Rodas said.Trying to identify those more amorphous qualities, like being a fast learner, in a candidate can be a challenge. Panelists offered two solutions. The first is reviewing case studies. “To identify these characteristics that lead to outstanding performance, you study what those outstanding performers do,” Rotolo said.The second, is conducting actual testing during the hiring process. “Work simulations can be helpful, whether that means programming together for two hours or sitting and doing a sales demo. What are those real-world experiences where you can actually test the proof points?” Richardson said. Just having a great conversation in an interview is not necessarily enough.But the interview process can still be helpful if you are asking the right questions. “The research still says that behaviorally based questions are the most valid. And there’s really two types: ‘Tell me about a time when’’ past experiences, or situational questions,” Rotolo said.Rodas believes it’s also important to have an honest conversation about the nature of the role and pay attention to the applicant’s response. “The recruiter can [now] spend more time with the candidate talking about how they would endure the type of workload we’re going to put on them. In any type of business today, that’s worth 10 times more,” she said.This also means asking the right questions internally too, to ensure there is no unconscious bias at play and that a candidate’s competency is still at the forefront. “We have an opportunity now to ask [hiring managers], ‘What's the basis of your decision?’” Olive said. “You have to understand and politely point out where you think you see bias happening.”Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Honeysuckle Magazine, and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, and CBS New York.

The Long-Term Shortage of Talent in the Post-Industrial Age: How Companies Can Respond

In the early industrial age, companies had a hierarchy built around manufacturing and machinery. But now workplaces are organized much differently. Their new priority? The talent. We’ve entered an era where the shortage of workers, obsolescence of skills, and new levels of employee agency will present employers with historic challenges. Most companies are not ready.The new Intelligence Age is a time when skills, employee creativity, information and AI will define our companies. In a recent From Day One webinar about “The Long-Term Shortage of Talent in the Post-Industrial Age: How Companies Can Respond,” speakers explored three strategies for success: rethinking the organization as dynamic rather than static, rethinking management with human-centered leadership, and rethinking HR as no longer an expense center, but rather a function like R&D that must build and invest in the company's people.All told, this means we need to redesign our companies around the person and shift to a new model for work. The time to act is now, experts say.The Changing Power Structure in the Labor MarketThe renowned Josh Bersin, founder & CEO of The Josh Bersin Company, says that with Baby Boomers retiring and declining fertility rates, there will be smaller generations coming forward to replace them. Employers will have a high demand for skilled workers but a much smaller talent pool, he says.“If you look at the supply and demand of workers and the labor force, it’s absolutely different from what we’ve seen in the past,” said Sania Khan, chief economist and head of market insights at Eightfold, an AI-driven talent intelligence platform.This could signal tough times ahead, especially in an age where companies are defined more and more by people and ideas than by machinery and products. “Scarcity of talent is one of the biggest challenges out there for companies,” said moderator Steve Koepp, From Day One’s chief content officer and co-Founder.Bersin notes that his company is getting consistent feedback from employers post-pandemic that they are having trouble sourcing new talent and with the retention of what is “a highly empowered workforce. We have employees saying, ‘I'm going to quietly quit. I'm going to work my wage. I'm going to do what I need to do. I don’t care what you say. You don’t like hybrid work? Tough luck, I’ll go find a job where I can work remotely.”Bersin predicts this is a long-term trend, and companies need to get smarter about finding and keeping their people. This is especially true in industries like healthcare, which is facing a major labor shortage despite a recent BLS report predicting 54% of new jobs will be in healthcare due in part to that same aging population that is decreasing the workforce.A Renewed Focus on Employees and ProductivityWith technology changing rapidly and more and more roles relying on it, companies will need to prioritize upskilling and reskilling opportunities to keep their workforce up-to-date and competitive. “Companies will need to focus on their employees,” Khan said, noting that companies that don’t prioritize training are already experiencing higher employee turnover.Another way to curb turnover is to take a hard look at workplace policies and make sure they are serving employees personally to make the organization more attractive, whether that is through flexible hours, hybrid options, and even AI assistance, Khan says.Bersin’s organization just finished a report on the prevalence of the four-day workweek or work time reduction. “This is becoming a big deal because employees want flexibility. We’re finding that this idea creates job productivity, and forces companies to redesign jobs,” Bersin said. “There are things that we’re going to do that seem unnatural now to deal with this labor shortage. In the future they will be commonplace. That’s just one example.”The recent webinar featured Josh Bersin of the Josh Bersin Company and Sania Khan of Eightfold (photo by From Day One)This changing definition of productivity, a focus on “revenue per employee” rather than hours worked, will also serve working parents well, Khan says, as they manage to get more work done in a shorter period.“Hiring more people isn’t necessarily more productive,” Khan said. Companies will start to measure their success by how efficiently they are utilizing their human resources to generate revenue, a focus on output rather than the size of the team. “The companies that are really good at productivity are good at human resources. They’re good at training, facilitating workshops, redesigning jobs, flattening the corporate hierarchy, changing the role of leaders, and democratizing career development,” Bersin said. “These things that might have felt like ‘nice-to-haves’ ten years ago are becoming critical to becoming productive in this new economy.”Reimagining a Skills-based HierarchyIn the information age, employment has been less about job titles and more about the work, Bersin says, with employees taking on tasks and using their skills for objectives far beyond their stated job description in order to accomplish the mission of the day, week, or month. “These rigid job descriptions, titles, and hierarchies are getting in the way of reorganizing and redesigning the company to be more efficient,” Bersin said. He anticipates an existential change in which the titles of managers and corner office perks will be deprioritized in order to get the work done.In turn, companies will be looking less at what skills prospective employees currently have and instead look at adjacent skills that show an employee has the potential to be upskilled to be the right fit, Khan says. A focus on skills, says Bersin, can also pave the way for automation. Employees can be allowed to utilize the top of their skill set if their lower-level, less skilled tasks can be automated.“If you look at the needs of an organization, you can put employees in specific, goal-centric projects,” Khan said. “Instead of just having you siloed to one department, you can now move around to where you’re needed based on your skills.” This would also allow employees to be well-versed in the whole enterprise, rather than just one area, so both the individual and the organization benefit. And tools like Eightfold can use machine learning to help companies analyze what skill areas are lacking and fill those gaps with talent.How Leaders Can Adapt to the New Workforce“Leaders have to understand this labor shortage existentially and operate in a company where transformation and growth isn’t an episodic thing–it's never-ending,” Bersin said. “The new model of leadership is, ‘can you build a company that can move people around, that can develop people, that can hold people accountable, but also give them the opportunity to move when you need them into a new place?’ Those are different kinds of leadership skills.”And with the hierarchy flattening, workers need to be prepared to sometimes be leaders and other times be more subordinate depending on the current project. “We have to democratize the concept of leadership.” Those with flexibility and an appetite for innovation will be most attractive to potential employers, Khan adds.And in a talent-driven company, HR will become more and more essential, and will be called on to understand a wide variety of skills, roles, and changing corporate models to operate within skills-based planning, Bersin says. Gone are the days where HR will be associated with conflict resolution and complaints. Instead, HR is becoming a forward-thinking, technology, and data-driven career path.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Eightfold, for sponsoring this webinar. You can read more from Josh Bersin on the post-industrial age here.Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Honeysuckle Magazine, and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, and CBS New York.

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