Managing the Cultural Pitfalls of Hybrid Work

Three years into the pandemic era, hybrid work models abound for business professionals. In the March 2023 edition of The CMO Survey, of 314 marketing leaders, 57% said that they work from home remotely at least some of the time, while 39% do so all of the time.

Here’s the good news: Recent peer-reviewed research shows that hybrid work reduces attrition rates by 35% and improves employee satisfaction. Consistent with this result, data from The CMO Survey finds leaders confident in driving team productivity via both remote work and in-person office work, with 50% reporting no change in worker productivity levels.

However, it’s not all smooth sailing. Over a third of leaders report that remote work has weakened culture, a crucial driver of growth and innovation. Further, 45% of marketing leaders find that younger employees struggle to integrate within their companies in remote work settings. Consistent with this, negative mentions of remote work in intern reviews grew by a staggering 548% between 2019 and 2021 on Glassdoor. Gen Z and millennial employees working exclusively from home feel that they’re missing out on vital mentorship, coaching, and socialization.

Despite these challenges, remote work isn’t going away. Many C-suite leaders value hybrid work because it reduces capital and operational expenses and enables organizations to scale faster into new business areas and regions. For businesses that want to expand internationally, the flexibility of virtual work means that they can cost-effectively recruit individuals from the markets they want to expand into. Marketers are often early hires in a new market.

So, what can we learn from research and remote working practices to empower leaders across enterprise business functions to build a thriving culture where teams can flourish? What does this look like for marketing leaders? We offer 11 suggestions to help leaders build a winning hybrid work culture.

1. Develop new mentoring and coaching models. To ensure that remote workers have access to the same opportunities for informal coaching and mentorship as their in-person colleagues, organizations must develop new approaches.

One option is rethinking the onboarding process. Onboarding is an important means for building connections, which can foster a healthier workplace culture. In fact, great onboarding experiences can increase employee retention rates by 69%. Managers can implement virtual onboarding processes that introduce workers to team members, managers, and internal business partners and provide mechanisms for soliciting and receiving feedback. Department heads can introduce their functions, including strategies, road maps, projects, and team members.

Organizations can help new hires in marketing create relationships across the company by placing them on cross-functional teams focused on solving important customer problems. The fresh perspectives these new teammates offer can help customer experience teams generate new ideas and facilitate collaboration with product development teams.

To further support career development and networking opportunities, organizations can establish internal online universities or career development tracks with courses that certify workers on new skills. For marketing, this may mean creating internal courses on digital marketing or providing stipends so that workers can pursue external certifications in marketing analytics.

Companies can also provide opportunities for virtual networking with senior leaders and peers. Pairing marketers interested in learning the full business with experts in strategy, channel management, and digital technology can help them develop a well-rounded understanding of what it takes to connect with customers and encourage desired behaviors.

2. Establish virtual communities of practice. Communities of practice are groups of practitioners who share their knowledge and experience gained from engaging with industry problems and challenges. Members learn as much about the mindset of the profession as they do specific techniques. Julian Orr’s ethnographic research on Xerox photocopier technicians provides a classic example of how a well-functioning social network can enable learning among practitioners. As Orr detailed in his 1996 book Talking About Machines: Ethnography of a Modern Job, while each technician was responsible for the maintenance of a single machine, they often gathered around the watercooler or coffee machine to share information and experiences.

In today’s workforce, enabling communities of practice through virtual interactions is becoming increasingly important. Teams can interact on digital platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams and in chat rooms that allow them to bounce ideas off of one another. A mix of open and domain-specific spaces on digital platforms allows people to maximize learning by facilitating the cross-pollination of ideas on cross-functional projects, such as new product launches, while also allowing for focused discussion (such as how to run a marketing-mix model). For example, Best Buy created Best Buy Connect, which aggregates tweets, news, and blog posts from across the company’s digital communities and houses them in a centralized location where employees can learn from one another to solve customer problems.

3. Build digital social bonding time. To build strong virtual culture, it’s important to create social structures that bring employees together. In a hybrid environment, using in-person time for social bonding is important, but there are also opportunities to engage employees in nonwork virtual events that are fun and engaging, such as happy hours (perhaps with a cocktail-making class), competitions (such as FIFA World Cup bracket challenges), or digital scavenger hunts (which could be linked to the company’s history, customer trends, or competitor intelligence).

Social media tools can also help build community. For example, Deloitte launched several internal Instagram accounts that provide a glimpse into employees’ daily lives (often at home), humanizing them and showcasing their current projects and interests. Such efforts can help marketers build their social media skills in a low-risk manner by providing insights into the types of messages and images that resonate and ways to interact with customers.

Another strategy is to hybridize teamwork and social bonding, such as by holding interactive hackathons followed by team sharing about key takeaways. To make these exercises more interesting, organizers can create digital Easter eggs — hidden messages and rewards that create a healthy spirit of competition and incentivize teams to work harder to accomplish assignments.

4. Identify in-person opportunities. Meeting face to face is still important to creating and sustaining a strong culture. That’s why many organizations are embracing hybrid work, where employees come in a few days a week, or hosting in-person sprints to facilitate connection. Meals with senior leaders, special events, training, and other types of activities can help make the trip into the office even more valuable. For instance, bringing industry thought leaders in for presentations enables workers to meet them, ask questions, and gain insights. Once they’re at the office, leaders should encourage employees to find time to work, eat, and socialize together.

For marketers, making face-to-face connections more exciting may involve winning a lunch with the company CMO, hearing insights from leading analysts at organizations such as Forrester and Gartner, or learning from startup leaders about fostering an entrepreneurial approach to work.

5. Create space and time for informal digital connections. Remote work complicates learning for young employees, because it diminishes the power of informal internal networks. Without the ability to casually walk down the hall to ask for help, young workers may struggle to model their behavior on that of high-performing colleagues.

Content executive Sean Blanda argues, “You need exposure to new ideas and people. You need the serendipitous fortune of sitting in on the right meeting, attending the right happy hour, or earning the respect of the right observer.” Young employees working from home might find it more challenging to be in the right place at the right time.

To combat this, senior team members should schedule regular informal office hours, and younger employees should actively participate. Using platforms like Microsoft Teams, team members can show their availability and set up instant meetings for quick check-ins with colleagues and managers to gain input on their ideas and projects.

Recording events (those that workers used to observe in person) enables team members to continue learning through observation and participate asynchronously. For marketers, this may include data analytics reviews, customer meetings, or project wrap-ups so that they can learn about cutting-edge processes and evolving customer needs.

6. Encourage digital lingering. Experts note that in-person meetings offer the opportunity for people to hang out afterward and ask follow-up questions, share ideas, get feedback, or make a plug for involvement. Virtual meetings typically don’t end with people lingering to chat, but they could.

For example, the first time Christine taught MBA students on Zoom, she offered a 10-minute post-class debrief for anyone who wanted to take the extra time. To her surprise, a third of the class of 75 students stuck around. Many just wanted more contact time during the COVID-19 pandemic, but others had experiences they wanted to share or questions to ask. These kinds of digital hangouts can also offer an opportunity for employees who may be more reticent about asking questions or making points in larger groups to gain more confidence in their ability to do so.

7. Harness digital tools to build and reinforce culture. While digital communication has its weaknesses, it also offers some advantages for culture-building. Chat functions enable fast feedback and instant engagement, promoting participation from everyone, whereas only one person can speak at a time during face-to-face meetings. Too often, the same people consistently dominate discussions. Using breakout rooms, where people meet with one another or work through problems in smaller groups, can also be interesting and so much more efficient than physically moving around in an office. Additionally, the mute button allows leaders to manage meeting dynamics and prevent negative behaviors from harming team culture, though we advocate that leaders use this function carefully to avoid being overbearing.

8. Encourage overperformance of social cues. When remote work became more widespread during the early part of the pandemic, employees started to notice that they were waving at the end of meetings — a social cue rarely performed in person. Experts say this is because we’re trying to add a personal touch and communicate our intentions in a very demonstrative way that would be overkill in an in-person setting. We find the same thing happening with head nodding and smiling: There’s a lot more of it in virtual settings. We think this is a good thing and that such social cues should be encouraged to make digital interactions more human. Just as important, we hope it will weaken the tendency for people to vent more anger and express more extreme opinions in virtual exchanges — a tendency called flaming.

9. Ensure equity among remote, hybrid, and in-person employees. It’s crucial that employees across different locations are all treated fairly. When differences surface, employees worry that their work won’t be rewarded equitably or that they won’t be given the same opportunities if they’re not at the office. Establishing transparent guidelines for promotions, raises, and opportunities for work projects should be a structural part of the culture.

Pay special attention to coordinating nonoverlapping working hours. Research shows that temporal boundaries (working across time zones) are actually harder to overcome than spatial boundaries (working in different cities but in the same time zone) due to the asynchronous nature of communication. For that reason, it is easy to imagine that mentoring, coaching, bonding, and learning would be more difficult when employees are connecting remotely.

Leaders should foster inclusivity by scheduling culture-building activities at various times to allow more employees to participate. Encourage at least one weekly or biweekly synchronous meeting among distant team members for all of the reasons we have already discussed.

Teams can be made more mindful of these issues by using apps that display all relevant time zones for key contributors, varying meeting schedules to avoid always inconveniencing the same people, and mentoring team members from other cultures and geographies.

10. Challenge in-group/out-group thinking. It’s important to realize that the conversation around remote work has evolved over the past few years. The transition from COVID-19 lockdowns to a “post-pandemic” period with increased flexibility may lead to polarization and less understanding between employees with differing work preferences. Taking steps to eliminate an us-versus-them mentality will be critical, not only between managers and subordinates but also among members of the same team who choose to work in different locations.1 To that end, it may be useful to mix up teams and leaders in different locations.

11. Foster initiative-taking among team members. Younger employees should also be mindful of the best ways to make the hybrid model work for them. To begin, they should assess their need for face-to-face interactions and select jobs that are a good fit for their preferences. They should actively structure physical and digital interactions to meet their need for contact, knowledge, and feedback. This will be an evolving process as young workers gain confidence and skills. If the balance isn’t working, they should provide early feedback to managers and work with them to fine-tune the approach.

Young workers may hesitate to voice concerns about work structures, so leaders should model openness to learning about staff experiences with hybrid work and emphasize that these models are evolving. Leaders can share that they want to help workers build long-lasting, exciting careers and are open to accommodating different work styles.

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Work is transforming in real time, creating both opportunities and challenges. Hybrid work is here to stay, and it’s up to marketers and other leaders to ensure that digital communication complements — rather than undermines — organizational culture and the socialization of new employees. Organizations have the exciting opportunity to experiment with physical and virtual work, platforms and tools, asynchronous collaboration, and other ways of working to add more value to the employee and customer experience. We hope our recommendations will support these efforts.

Findings from the March 2023 edition of The CMO Survey, which is based on responses from 314 U.S. marketing leaders at for-profit companies, can be found on the company’s website. You can also sign up to participate in future surveys.