COVER STORY: How technology is changing hybrid work and company culture

Hybrid work has become the norm for many organisations, allowing for their employees to have more autonomy over their working week.

Not only has hybrid work impacted performance in the workplace but it has evolved the use of technology, thereby transforming workplace culture.

According to the Harvard Business Review, “The technology experiences that employers provide will more or less define the employee experience — technology and workplace tools are, for all intents and purposes, the new workplace.”

The adoption of technology has a direct impact on a company’s culture.

Rob Castaneda, CEO and founder of IT service management company ServiceRocket highlighted the relationship between culture and technology within his organisation.

“We invested a lot in cultural elements. Some leadership behaviours, leadership training, mental skills development, and models of the business so that people could explain them and they could see where they fit, then the technology supported that,” he said.

Castaneda explained how many organisations think technology is a band-aid solution during a crisis when it needs to be a long-term commitment.

He said companies would buy a software solution hoping it would fix the issue, especially during the remote work phase of the pandemic but they didn’t understand the impact that had on their staff.

“In a crisis that worked, ‘we're adaptable, we can be remote’. But the weighting of that mentally is underappreciated,” he said.

"If someone thinks something is not fair, it doesn't matter how big it is, or how small it is, their productivity will plummet."

Castaneda added, “For us, how do we rebuild the company from the ground up to make sure that we have a psychologically safe space for every ‘Rocketeer’ to know that everything is fair."

Having a new safe space for his staff has meant a new way to compensate their employees.

“We created what we call leadership behaviours on top of values that help guide what we're doing,” he said.

“We restructured our comp and benefits structure so things are consistent across the world as we open up locations and then the technology supported what we were doing.”

Tech enabling better hybrid work

When organisations began the transition back to the office, some already had the core technology in place to support hybrid work.

Anthony Woodward, CEO at Logicalis Australia explained how technology enables his staff to thrive in a hybrid work environment.  

“There was an initial wave, people coming back and realising they had no technology at all in their meeting rooms, and they needed to retrofit that. That provided quite a good opportunity for us and others to start to retrofit that,” he said.

The company is ensuring that each employee has the right tools for the job.

Woodward said, “As we’ve moved further into it, what's now becoming more of a focus is making sure that all the applications that people need to work, both remotely and in the office are available.

“The data that they're dealing with is secure from all of those locations, a work from anywhere capability not just the home office, but on the road, on customer site or wherever else.”

Evolving culture

As hybrid work and technology have changed, so too has the way leaders have promoted culture within their workplace.

Neha Kumar, senior director, CIO advisory at Gartner said there is a strong correlation between flexibility and culture.

“Essentially, what we found is, the more flexibility people have, the stronger their connection to the organisation is,” she explained.

“But the key shift is that culture is becoming less of that macro monolithic culture that a lot of leaders are used to driving in an organisation to more micro-cultures that happen more so within teams where there are stronger connections and day-to-day work happens.”

Hybrid work will continue to evolve as the workplace and economic climate change. Kumar said current pressures like inflation and the talent shortage have impacted hybrid work.

“In our research, we call it that triple squeeze, we've got the inflation, the economic headwinds, we've got the talent, scarcity and labour market mobility, and we've had the supply chain issues,” she said.

“There's a lot that's going on and that's impacting changes on how organisations are approaching it too.”

Organisations are not going back to the old ways of pre-pandemic working and remote work is no longer sustainable, this means that companies need to find a balance.

Kumar said there are benefits to both, with some work better achieved in an office environment, and other work appropriate for a home office.   

“It does show in our research that depending on the nature of the work, it can be done well when we come together, if the work that we're focusing on is more synchronous, it is more collaborative," she said. 

"When there is more asynchronous work, we'd rather do it in an environment where we have the opportunity to focus and get it done. There are benefits to both and we are seeing that adoption of hybrid.”

Challenges of hybrid

At Logicalis Australia, Woodward said during Covid they had a large number of new employees so they didn’t have the opportunity to chat with their peers and create connections.

“Those people have not had the benefit of being near somebody that could just walk up to and ask about something, and get the benefit and some of the experience that some of our longest serving employees could provide them,” he said.

The problem with that, Woodward said was that it meant their employees didn’t have a strong affinity with the organisation.

“If somebody happened to tap them on the shoulder to go somewhere else, they'd have less resistance to leaving because they hadn't built that cultural connection,” he said.

“They hadn't built up their network of friends and peers. They felt that they couldn't have been getting as much as they would in an environment where they've got that support network around them.”

Having an option of coming into the office and speaking with peers brings a mentoring opportunity, Woodward explained.

He said, “It's vital from our perspective, as we bring in new people to both the industry, to our organisation and perhaps earlier in their career development cycle that they can get the benefit of tapping into the experience.

“And the supportive mentoring that they can get from some of the more longest standing employees who are a bit more experienced in things.”

If done right, hybrid work can create a better workplace.

A Swinburne University report noted, “Done right, hybrid working holds the promise of boosting productivity, fuelling creativity and enhancing culture.”

This mini-documentary and cover story is a collaboration from Digital Nation and CRN.