No organisation wanted hybrid work. You wanted your employees in the office under your eyes being unproductive in your space. However, it looks increasingly like organisations have to accept this change and then undermine it like any transformation.
In the spirit of CollabSystem’s powerful range of collaboration and productivity products, we thought we’d share our five key principles for organising hybrid work:
- Suggest a cut in remuneration: if employees are going to work at home, decide they should be paid less. Sure you are saving on office costs, but they have greater productivity, new flexibility and no commute. Of course, this means they should contribute more to your bottom line. It’s even better if you point out that now they can live in places that cut their cost of living, but still insist on 3 days in the office, so they can’t.
- Install monitoring software: you never knew what your employees were doing in the office. Now you can get reports on what they are doing at home that you will never read. Monitoring software will create the right atmosphere of lack of trust and fear to destroy the value of hybrid work. Implemented well as part of cyber security measures it will prevent anyone working productively again.
- Extend the working day: now that everything is flexible your emails at 3am should get an instant response. Schedule meetings at 830pm at night for four hours. Start webinars at 4am. Demand everything is on your desk at 6am. Promise clients everything will be done tonight. You can destroy quality and productivity this way as easily as you destroy morale.
- Fill the days with meetings online: whether employees are in the office or at home they should be all in video conferences all day. Meetings all day is a guarantee that time is fully used, not well used but fully occupied by online shopping and social media while meetings go on. Employees in the same room should have to log into calls to each other just in case others want to join and so that they can be monitored.
- Restructure constantly: structure can’t fix a culture or productivity issue. It can keep employees fearful of losing their jobs and give you a sense of being in control. Sure you will lose employees who resign for better things but endless structural changes to tweak the organisation will give plenty of time for your mediocrity shamans to rise. Constant restructures should also confuse accountabilities and also ensure people duplicate work remotely.
Hybrid work is here to stay. CollabSystem might be selling way more product than ever. That doesn’t mean we lose sight of the big picture that work exists to be as dull and as unproductive and as unrewarding for employees as possible. Follow our five principles and you will take the unnecessary joy from hybrid work.
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