How to Manage Performance (and Boost Engagement) in a Hybrid Era

BY Angelica Frey | January 08, 2023

Melissa Luff Loizides, a VP of HR at the mobile computing company  Zebra Technologies, has a global team sitting in every time zone. Thus, her approach as a leader has to abide both by intention and nuance, and how time and calendars affect people around the globe. “When I do meetings with team members who are in the APAC region, I take them in my evenings–their morning hours. As the leader, [I think] it’s an opportunity for them to be at their best. I can take a late meeting,” she said in an executive panel conversation titled “Managing Performance and Boosting Engagement in a Hybrid Environment,” part of From Day One’s December conference on the future of jobs. 

Loizides’s behavior and attitude are part of a larger paradigm shift. In the past three years, we learned that a deciding factor in motivating a distributed workforce and ensuring productivity is a pattern of constructive feedback and a show of recognition and gratitude, with Harvard Business Review recently reporting that 72% of respondents in a survey at a major company “cited as a major signal of leadership’s new focus on a collaborative culture.” Regardless of how transactional one’s employment is, people still want to feel like they matter, and that their contributions are valued. The key is intentionality, speakers told moderator Lydia Dishman, senior editor at Fast Company.

Intentionality in Goal-Setting

Yana Smith, the VP of people development and future organization design at Teach for America, witnessed a change in her management style once a hybrid work structure was solidified, with a particular eye on collectivism, grit, and empathy. “Given the pace and frequency of change, I moved towards quarterly, versus annual goals,” she said. These come with progress checks, and the acknowledgement of when goalposts might have moved. 

It’s a two-way street. “One of the things I changed is the focus from the goals of my reports to my goals too, making sure we’re both on the same page when things are changing from their perspective and my own, explains Paul Agustin, who leads the solution and engineering team at the performance-management platform Betterworks. “Especially in this hybrid work environment, there’s only so much we can do from a business standpoint. We want to make sure we develop them as people.”

And while transparency has been a buzzword in recent times, it’s now top-down instead of bottom-up. “Grabbing a cup of coffee, walking by a desk is no longer a given,” said Natalie Baumgartner, PhD, the chief people scientist at the employee-recognition platform Achievers. “Ensuring we’re communicating, giving space, and supporting one another, we do that on a regular basis, and that’s much more explicit than we used to.” 

Intentionality in In-person Settings

Loizides observed that voluntary turnover is higher than it used to be, starting with the Great Resignation and continuing with workers seeking higher compensation. “When you do onboarding into a virtual environment, that’s all you know. It does not create the same bond.” She is based in New York, but her company headquarters is in Illinois, and, to stave off the turnover phenomenon, has been advocating for purposeful travel for smaller teams to create stronger bonds. “I traveled to where I needed to be. I spent a fair amount traveling to Illinois; a good part of my team is there. What I am encouraging the team to do is find a reason to bring teams together, make sure there’s human connection.” 

Nicole Turner, who is SVP of global HR for the technology hubs at Mastercard, is now leading a pilot program for managing 3,000 individuals across regions to see how culture differences affect their feelings about hybrid work. “How people look at it in the EMEA is different than [how they look at it in] North America,” she said. “You have some cultures saying, ‘Being present is important,’ as opposed to ‘I feel compelled by a cultural perspective to show up.’ That’s where the purpose came up. If I am creating this purpose, if I want to create FOMO.” 

“We’re seeing early signs on how that’s playing out. Our completely remote workers are ready to come back to the office,” said Smith, citing more efficiency with in-person meetings as opposed to the act of scheduling, say, one Zoom call with a follow-up one week away. “If you put me in the same room with someone for two to there days we can knock out a lot of work.” 

Intentionality in Reviews and One-on-one Meetings

Back in the day, everyone hated annual reviews, and the workforce disruption has been a good occasion to disrupt that model as well. Agustin advocates for moving to quarterly conversations. “The traditional way was backwards, compliance driven, as in this is something we’re doing to see who’s doing what,” he said. [Now it’s about] shifting from backward-facing to forward-looking. It’s less about, What have you done? and more about What are you doing now and what’s next, which focuses more on enabling and coaching your team.

Part of the new approach centers on recognition. “Recognition is just the appreciation of who people are, what they deliver,” said Baumgartner. “It’s one of the most powerful drivers of productivity, engagement, and retention. We wanna be appreciated. It has to be meaningful, but it’s the frequency that’s most predictive of business outcomes: it can boost productivity to up to 30%.” 

One-on-one meetings are becoming more human-centric as well. “I allow direct reports to decide a frequency of them. Some need longer, less-frequent meetings, others the opposite,” said Smith, who also encourages managers to determine who is the agenda owner between the report and the manager. “When that falls apart, the question is, ‘What is the conversation only you and I can have?’”

Another Word on Those Well-Meaning Zoom Gatherings

The way we have framed intentionality now is at odds with those intentionally-minded online meetings and meetups of the early days of the pandemic. “I feel like we’re still navigating the tension,” Smith said. Her organization recently engaged in a virtual clue room, where participants had to remember what the hashtag on their CEO’s LinkedIn page was, and where Smith herself had to hum Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas.”  

“We’re still learning, Fun isn’t the same for everyone,” she said. “What fun is, though, is not being at another meeting at the end of the day.”

Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Boston and Milan.

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Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | September 30, 2024