Good to see you oh wow so exciting so many great places it's always so fun to see where people are in the globe around the globe zurich in switzerland oh hi alex amazing well thank you so much everybody for joining us this morning we still have some folks funneling through and good morning everyone who's live streaming youtube my name is carly i am our head of community here at learn it and with me i have the amazing stephanie clergy from colby core who will be leading us through our event on making.
Hybrid work strategies for success uh we are thrilled to be here with you to round out the month on creativity in the workplace and heading into a month on motivating teams in the hybrid workplace so we feel like this is just kind of the perfect blend of both how do we bring creative strategies into motivating our teams into making each other successful and also really looking out for ourselves um in the world we're all living in so with that if you're uh new to learn it and these.
Events we are a learning and development organization based out of san francisco california um but really located worldwide and nationwide and we train teams all over the world uh and our goal is to one make learning more accessible and upscaling more accessible to everybody through these free events and also really to get your feedback um on our content to work with amazing guest speakers like stephanie um and also for you to be a part of our community our community and our innovation process um through off-site which i'll go into after the session.
Which is our free kind of community that goes outside of these events uh our events are either based on one of learnet's full-length workshops or and or they're led by a guest speaker like stephanie who brings their wisdom their thought leadership uh to this group so with that today i'm so thrilled to be joined by stephanie um who is the vp of people and product development over at colby core uh before colby stephanie created her own coaching and training practices and has.
Of of colby we do their assessment about once a year um and i've used it in hiring for the two positions that i hired here at learn it um to help me find the skills i was looking for and and find candidates so um just they stephanie individually has been an amazing partner and colby has also really been a partner for us in strategically thinking about our team um and making hybrid work so with that thank you so much stephanie i'll hand it over to you.
Fantastic thank you carly i'm always so excited to be here it's always so fun to you know present to the learnet community it's always a joy for me we can already see people from all around the globe and i know it's just it's a great community of learning which is something that is a passion for me so i have an exciting hopefully presentation for you today lots of lots of information about making hybrid work and i really wanted to uh you know obviously carly.
Just uh went over my credentials and kind of talked about some of why i'm here today but really you know i'm here as a student of hybrid myself you know uh colby corp has you know uh gone hybrid as well and so uh we'll talk about that a little bit but also and you know we work with our clients on all kinds of issues such as uh employee engagement and that kind of thing and so hybrid is something that we both live ourselves and that we're working with others on so i'm certainly not going to call myself a.
Hybrid work expert but i've learned a few things along the way uh to really that i really wanted to share so for those of you who kind of read the description of today's session you know you probably noticed that i said i would you know really discuss hybrid work uh both the obstacles and opportunities and solutions for creating uh hybrid work that we love and it sounded so simple when i wrote the description but honestly i started and restarted this.
Presentation so many times because hybrid work or having a hybrid job is so incredibly uh complicated there's so many nuances to it so i'm going to kind of break down some things that are helpful especially for leaders and managers in an organization but if you're an individual contributor the good news about that is uh you get to learn some of the the secrets you get to learn some of what i think makes it work and i'm also going to give tips for individuals as well because both managers and.
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Employees employers and employees all of us have a role in terms of really making
Hybrid work work but um so let's uh kind of talk a little bit about um these obstacles and opportunities although i'm an optimistic person by nature it's why i wear my sunny uh yellow because i'm always trying to kind of bring the sunshine in you know i really want to start with the opportunities of hybrid work but unfortunately i think i have to uh start with the obstacles because we really have to understand what might be getting.In the way of some of the performance that we want for ourselves individually as well as uh collectively and so um but uh this brings me to one of my favorite things which is obstacles are opportunities so we're going to get to the good stuff pretty soon but i figured let's start with the obstacles the good news is we are finally past this right we're past the point where um we have no control over our children or our cats um when we are um on the remote part of online or the.
Remote part of hybrid work when we're on the online right so things don't feel so new i actually did a presentation uh for the learned community about a year ago also on hybrid work and then we were really talking about re-entry and what it was like to kind of start to thinking about going back into the office and really optimizing the remote part of work so the good news is we're kind of past some of that we know that we need to turn off our camera before we stand up and walk across the room so that people don't see us in our shorts for our yoga pants so.
All that stuff is gone and we're sort of past those re-entry pains but now we kind of have a different problem now our problem is something like this right um you're the one person in the office and everybody else is online um or maybe it's the opposite where everybody comes in except there's one person who's online so hybrid work means a lot of times it seems like we're just never in the same place at the same time so some of the tips and things that i want to share with you.
Are going to uh you know solve uh you know or at least uh make help us make some progress towards some of those obstacles and then the other uh issue is employers versus employees unfortunately it feels like there's this tug of war going on right it feels like there's two worrying factions and on one side it's you know the organization or management or you know however you want to frame that and on the other side it's employees it's you know what seems to be human beings against the machine and that seems to be what has turned out.
So what i wanted to do was kind of parse out you know what do employers really want and what do employees want because i think it starts with that basis of understanding and it seems like our wants and needs are different but we'll explore that a little bit so what employees want um i think or excuse me what employers want is they want individuals to work together they want them to collaborate they want them to be creative they want them to solve problems make decisions together um and you know really for the the good of the company for the end result of whatever.
It is that you're trying to do or make they want employees to be connected because they understand that with that connectedness comes trust and with that trust comes a better working environment uh what's interesting about that is you know they want individuals to make both personal and professional uh connections built both through scheduled situations and that kind of serendipitous stuff that happens when we're in the office you know we're walking to the parking lot or going down in the elevator or standing in the break.
Room and those conversations can actually not just elevate personal relationships but uh you know sometimes get business done as well and uh the uh the other thing is uh that uh employers want is they also want accountability access to employees right so it's a lot harder sometimes to you know ping someone uh online and then wait for them to get back to you uh but if everybody's kind of um in the office area it's really easy to just walk up see what someone's doing find out if they're busy or you know getting the.
Results that they need to get and have conversations with them but they also want employees to be engaged and productive so what do employees want employees want um a lot of what's in this picture um i love this graphic because you can um just kind of see uh all the different things from the comfort of the hoodie and the slippers and you know it looks like she's got her hair up especially contrasted with that last picture you know she's got her favorite co-worker which is her cat um and um you.
Know just in a comfortable environment with the flexibility to maybe put in a load of laundry uh at lunchtime or be
There when um the kids are on their way to or from school so you know employees one of the things we really learned from the pandemic is a lot of us went back to basics about what was important to us as individuals and so they love this sort of lack of commute that gives them the extra time and more control over their time and in some cases more focused time without the busy distractions of things.That go on in the office as well as better work life balance so uh employees want all of those things and you know maybe employees want a career too that's the part that i think we're still trying to figure out is you know are individuals really looking for all of these flexibility autonomy comfort and convenience overall else and they're willing to just hop from job to job without really giving their true selves and committing to an employer so what what is really more.
Of a priority for individuals and i think that's something worth figuring out but it really feels like employers are on one side employees are on uh the other side but maybe there's a happy medium here maybe there is um you know even as i went through those lists i'm hoping that you guys saw some of the uh commonalities both uh want to be engaged um there's a lot that comes from collaborating with colleagues and we're going to talk um about that um but the question is how do we get there.
So the goal of hybrid work is really alignment right it is alignment between the work the worker and the workplace and so to make hybrid work we really have to start with um with the work and by the way if the rihanna song is in your head you're welcome um but um if you like that joke you're really gonna like this really cliche slide because we really have to kind of think about what is work right work is you know i've highlighted a few uh things just from this definition right it's about the you know physical or mental energy to.
Achieve a purpose or result but it's also about being engaged in it right the noun versus the verb it's being engaged in that activity and then doing it properly or effectively so really what it comes down to is purposeful activity that's where individuals are engaged and effective and when you put hybrid on top of that as an overlay of work uh it really just kind of reveals some of the cracks that might have already been a part of the organization or cracks in the employee and how they felt about their their job.
About how they felt with their work and at colby that's really what we do we focus on helping people um to work better both individually uh with their teams um and as entire organizations and really what it comes down to fundamentally is we help you achieve what you care about most so we have as carly mentioned we have assessments and solutions that can be used you know really to help individuals identify their best contributions optimize the way they work together.
Align you know talent to task or align yourself to your job and also it can be used in hiring as well and we work with clients all across the globe with companies large and small from you know tiny dental practices all the way to some of the big names that you might recognize on the slide and as i mentioned we have been going through this transition ourselves we were 100 uh in person prior to the pandemic and now we have moved to a hybrid model.
Ourselves so we're living this ourselves as well as with our clients and uh really uh you know what i think it's about is getting back to basics getting back to basics about what it is that really makes your uh your work your work workers and workplace strong and so these are the three colors that i really wanted to talk about today kind of the firm foundation for hybrid work to work well and what tweaks do we need to make to this foundation in order to move us forward so the first is an engaging culture and.
You might think that this is only going to be a presentation for leaders but guess what culture is really a coming together of the behaviors of an organization a team or a company so every single person has a role when it comes to culture and using some examples um from colby corp ourselves we really took the opportunity during the pandemic to refresh our mission vision and values making sure that they are things that we are willing to hire fire reprimand and.
Reward um based on but it's not enough just to have these values um you know listed somewhere or have the mission hanging on the wall you also need to tell stories and um about those um about those values so for example one of our values is connected and engaged another one is being entrepreneurial and solutions oriented so we've really tried to you know tell stories um that are about our values but also tie hybrid work together so for example there's somebody at our company.
Every year we have a big conference over the last couple years it's been virtual and people were working primarily from home but we needed people to come into the office so that we could execute this virtual conference together so that we could have people speaking and supporting the speakers and doing all the things it we just knew it was going to be a thousand times easier to have people in the office and to be honest some people weren't so happy about having to come into the office as much but there was one employee who not only came into the office each day with a smile but also.
Had a relative come and stay with her dog because her dog was so used to having her home all the time but she proactively had a relative come and stay we didn't ask her to do that but she saw that there was going to be a business need and she figured that out so we tell those kinds of stories to help people really connect what does it mean to live our value of connected and engaged but also be in a hybrid workforce so if you're an individual really try to be the person who those good stories are told about because that's going to be what's going.
To both help your peers make the transition but also hopefully help you in your career and if you're a leader start to think about what are those stories what are those examples maybe they're positive examples which are always good um maybe there's some examples where things didn't work out so well but um really um you know tell those stories and tie them to your mission the next thing is really um focus on um current and prospective employees so kind of starting with prospective employees you really want to go back look at your.
Job descriptions look at your benefits pages or information that you give out and really um add your hybrid work culture in there tell people what does it mean right hybrid has so many definitions from the number of days per week to what it's like when you're in the office versus what it's like at home for some companies when you're at home anything goes you don't have to like put on the face because you don't do your meetings online and to other companies it really means.
Um that you know you have to show up for work and ready camera ready just as much as you would if you were in the office so you really have to kind of help people understand what your hybrid culture is whether they're inside the company or if they are outside of the company so you want to go back and look at job descriptions you want to look at you know do you want to portray your hybrid workplace as a benefit because clearly some people are looking for remote only work uh and some people but some people truly are looking for a hybrid where.
They can go in have the benefits of being in the office um but also have some of the flexibility of being at home um or wherever um wherever you choose to to work from [Music] also onboarding and training is really really critical one of the things that we did was make sure that uh new employees uh were in the office more often so i'll talk about that a little bit a little bit more in the future but making sure that new employees were there so even though our hybrid work looks like two days a.
Week minimum in the office and uh three days working from home uh for new employees we say you really need to be in the office um for the first 30 to 90 days um four to five days a week so that you can get the benefit not only of working with whomever might be training you but also working with um you know getting to know others in the company and so that's something that we had to kind of figure out what is it that we're going to do with new employees um you know if possible can you hire people in smaller groups so.
That they can kind of get to know each other any of those things that you can do to help with onboarding and training can be really can be really critical to the success of new employees stephanie one thing i just wanted to add here because i thought it was um it was a comment that tori from our community commented and she said that their company was working towards a hybrid environment um they weren't there weren't any formal policies but they were just encouraging people to come in.
Like one day a week and she said she was super reluctant to it for at first and then she started slowly coming in and she said um she's like she's like the first time i had i had to return to the office i dreaded it but i got there and found that i truly enjoyed the time there while i enjoy my days working from home i choose to work two days in the office to support my team and it's really rewarding and i hope to encourage others to do so so i thought in that light too i found that just in the last week or two that actually going in i'm like oh this is good for my sanity so.
Maybe if there's even those just those champions like as an individual or like a mid-level manager if you're having like a good experience or you're feeling more socialized with going in i feel like that's also an opportunity to be like hey you know i was like really grumpy about this but i am actually shocked at how much i'm enjoying it or you know like you said like finding those champions because i think for some of us it's also shocking that i was like oh this actually is really nice to be back in um because we haven't been used to it for so long but yeah well humans.
Naturally build habits and but humans also naturally resist change to some degree i mean some people definitely lean into change a little bit more but in general we kind of like to you know get back to sort of homostasis we like to kind of get um back to things being the way they were so for a lot of us for um you know a year year and a half two years however long you know you got used to working from home and not being in the office and so it takes a while to kind of get in the office but i told people just do it the more you do it the.
More it starts to feel natural again and it is a little bit like riding a bike you're like oh yeah i used to do this five days a week especially for those companies that used to um to do that prior to um switching over so yeah i think it's a really good point and then yeah being that light for other employees i think can be helpful helpful too and there's all kinds of things that the company itself really needs to think about in terms of hybrid and the culture so for example we used to be a little bit more dressed up every day and only could wear.
Jeans on friday and then you know as a leadership team we looked at the culture and said you know what everybody's you know used to being at home in their yoga pants um or in their jeans so you know now we can probably bring that into the office but we wanted to make sure that people also understood on client days or other types of things they would have to kind of still step it up a notch so you know don't give away all your nice clothes but on a regular basis why not give that flexibility because again to some degree you're competing a little bit against what other people have now seen as their.
New normal so the other uh big the big big learning and the big thing i want to um share with everybody is about communicating clearly and often this is something that's important in any culture whether you're full-time in the office your full-time remote or whether you're hybrid obviously this is a thing but with hybrid it's just even uh more important and you have to be more intentional so we actually added a few more meetings um.
To our schedule um most importantly a weekly all-staff meeting now our staff isn't huge so for you this might be a department meeting or something else um but we really wanted to kind of um you know give everybody an opportunity to see each other at least once a week so we do it on zoom um we do it with everybody on screen so that you just remember oh hey there there's like a live person behind accounting so i'm not just gonna like throw my stuff over the wall because that person is actually a.
Live person so it kind of reminds you of the humanity of things a little bit it's also a great opportunity for us to kind of mix and mingle so we use technology to our advantage you know we put people in different breakout rooms we mix them up by department so that they can you know um hopefully it just slightly tries to recreate some of that serendipitous thing that i was talking about earlier where you might just happen to be in the elevator with someone going down well now you're in a breakout room but we did try to get intentional with you know some fun.
Questions some days like what tv shows are you watching or what are you doing for vacation this summer or you know um if you were to take three things on an island what would you what would those three things be right so trying to do some of those things um but also solving business problems together so throwing out certain cir situations in the business and having people work on those in small groups as well as a part of some of these at staff meetings so we really had to put more intentionality into the meetings whereas before you just kind of get people in a room and you kind of go through here's.
What's happening in business here's some of the pass downs now we are really taking more time um you know it's just 45 minutes a week and sometimes we end early every once in a while we cancel it but um for the most part it's really that time and i think you know the feedback for us has been that people really look forward to that time and getting to connect um with their colleagues uh also you know we had to switch up the way some of our meetings were so you really have to think about your meetings and is there anything that needs to be in person maybe it's a brainstorming.
Session and you know the that physical whiteboard or physical sticky notes just can't be replaced by um all the great online tools that we have for that kind of thing or maybe it's okay if everybody's online or maybe it doesn't matter you can do the hybrid thing and make it work as long as you have great technology and more importantly you know how to use the technology that you have so we actually had to invest in a little bit of technology and invest a lot of time to make sure that there were not just the tech department that understood it but also some other people in our office.