This post is written by Tahmid Chowdhury, Personal Development Coach, and Programme Manager at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership.

  • **The problem: **Managers are questioning the best method to keep their staff motivated, engaged and clear of their responsibilities as we move to a new hybrid style of working.
  • **Why it matters: **Management is a key facet to both the success of a company and the wellbeing of an employee.
  • **The solution: **Committing to the principles of good management.

The post-pandemic world of work has changed. A growing number of organisations are now seeing a ‘hybrid’ approach to the norm, i.e. that there will be a blend of working in the office and working at home.

It has been tricky to understand how this might affect principles for good management. To what extent should we stick to our pre-pandemic practices of management compared to newer, hybrid style of meeting?

"Just because we were distant, this didn't actually change the fundamentals - indeed a whole lot of the same practices still worked"

As a manager, I’ve found that managing remotely can be advantageous in some ways – it is easier to be flexible to different staff schedules, and the practical issue of finding a meeting room for a private conversation is actually easier! Nonetheless, I’ve also enjoyed arranging coming into the office to have my one-to-one conversations to have an added dimension that physical meetings provide.

So looking at the experience of managing a team throughout the pandemic, here are a few of my reflections:

1. Remote management is not that different to normal management

Shifting to remote working made me concerned about whether I should be re-evaluating my wider 'how' when it comes to management. Fortunately it became obvious quite quickly that just because we were distant, this didn't actually change the fundamentals - indeed a whole lot of the same practices still worked. As long as my staff had clear objectives and expectations, they were content.

Moving into a hybrid world, this still seems the case. The principle of where someone is working does not matter much. I put the time in for my catch-ups and give my instructions. If we’re both in the office, we can talk it through in person. Perhaps it’s also an opportunity to catch-up more broadly, so I try to schedule a bit more time than usual. Equally, if that is not possible, catch-ups work perfectly fine online if we are not in the same place at the same time.

So the fundamental point is that good management principles are followed, no matter the locality. Simple things like catch-ups, setting clear instructions and giving clear roles and responsibilities are key, and if anything more important now.

If your management relies on telling people who happen to be right in front of you what to do, or that you need to physically check up upon them, this will likely cause some bumps on the road. However, if that is the case, it's probably your management style that's the issue!  Technological advances have demonstrated that one-to-one meetings and performance reviews can easily be replicated online, and there is no real reason for anyone to be skimping out on managerial responsibilities or feeling the need to enforce 'oversight' based on the idea that management equates to control.

2. Connections that would have happened when everyone was in the office need to be cultivated in a more deliberate way

Hybrid working shifts the dynamic between how you interact with one another. Unlike when everyone is in the office, people cannot simply get together to chat, or have a quick catch up via the water cooler. As such, having things like informal online chats and where appropriate, more team check-in via web calls may be a useful way to ensure people are working with one another across the whole team.

Similarly in larger organisations it becomes trickier to highlight who does what in outside teams, so it is worth making extra efforts to invite other colleagues into your team meetings or encouraging internal coffee connects to build connections outside of your immediate team.

**3. We are not yet at the ‘new normal’ – Covid still affects our way of working and we still are learning. **

It is important to state that what we are experiencing now is not yet what will be the future of work. There are still the teething issues of when people come into the office, and how we make hybrid meetings work properly in practice.

Whilst the temptation for many of us is to ‘move on’ from Covid, there are also many staff that still have additional caring responsibilities or indeed long-term effects of Covid. So a ‘new normal’ may take another year or two to see.

It’s important to be patient, and learn by trial and error. People will not know their exact preferences, and each individual will be different. Whilst some may prefer to have catch-ups in the office, others may prefer the safety and privacy of doing it online, where they are at home. I can certainly envisage this for some people when looking at their personal development. Equally others find it easier to feel ‘at work’ in the office. It’s good to be adaptive, but also to understand what your own needs are as a manager.

Photo credits: Mathias PR Reding, via Unsplash