In this fire-side chat, Melissa Wilks-Cunningham, Clark Fuller, and Renee Thomas will detail the most effective way to manage a successful hybrid team.
Moderator:
For those of you not familiar with Wrike, Wrike provides a collaborative work management solution that helps employees organize, automate, and streamline work and collaboration securely across any channel, device, or location.
Organizations that use Wrike are able to modernize operations, meet business demands faster, and deliver a better, more efficient employee experience.
In March 2021, Citrix acquired Wrike. Citrix and Wrike are united by a shared vision—to remove complexity from work so people and teams can perform at their best.
Moderator:
Joining us today to discuss the importance of of having a successful hybrid work environment are Melissa Wilks-Cunningham, Clark Fuller, and Renee Thomas
As Vice President of Marketing + Brand at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Fox & Roach, REALTORS®, Melissa directs strategic marketing and integrated communications programs for the largest single-market, U.S. real estate and financial services company in the Mid-Atlantic region. Recognized for a track record of accelerating growth at Fortune 500 companies and a tenure at BHHS Fox and Roach characterized by successive leadership and development opportunities, Melissa brings extensive marketing, brand strategy, project and account management experience to the role.
From Wrike, Clark has been around the block implementing software applications across many different verticals. He was in the translation industry for 8 years and led a global technology rollout at a leading ecommerce brand. Clark has worked with entities of all sizes and understands through personal experience the unique pressures deployment teams face on a daily basis.
Also from Wrike, as the Head of Customer Success at Wrike, Renee Thomas leads a global team of talented CSMs. She has a passion for helping both employees and customers unlock their potential through personal and organizational development. Renee brings expertise in change management, global team leadership, marketing operations, and project management
Clark is going to kick us off with a brief message. Clark, over to you!
Clark:
Thank you Rayvonne! I’m going to present some data from Gartner’s survey, Redesigning Work for a Hybrid Future. As we all experienced, the pandemic shattered antiquated assumptions about work design and what is required to be successful in business. Executive leaders now have a unique opportunity to break from a location-centric model of work, and to redesign work around a human-centric model that retains today’s top talent and drives superior business performance.
Clark:
Human-centric work design is characterized by flexibility and empathy. This makes employees feel more empowered, and increases their productivity and engagement. When employees are engaged, organizations are more responsive to customer’s needs and more resilient to disruptions in the marketplace. This in turn reduces costs when customer churn, employee attrition, and wasted productivity decrease. In short, the human-centric approach can be a win-win for employees and organizations, but it requires shedding old assumptions and dispelling myths about what hybrid work models look like.
Clark:
Myth # 1 is the assumption that we can go back to how things were. While in some ways we can all agree this would be nice, this isn’t reality.
Pre-pandemic, organizations operated primarily in an in-person environment, designed around locations. During the pandemic, organizations rallied quickly to virtualize this design to remain productive remotely. Some leaders still believe things will revert, but the pandemic demonstrated that many of our work assumptions are archaic and unnecessarily limiting, and now beg for reinvention.
Clark:
The reality is hybrid and flexible workforce strategies are here to stay. Executives who reimagine where, when and by whom work gets done are in a better position to generate both business outcomes and talent outcomes: a win-win for organizations and employees.
You can see here that Gartner estimates companies who try to go back to a fully in-office model can lose up to 39% of their workforce. While companies who stick with the current status quo risk employee burnout and fatigue. That leads us to the future, where we must create a new flexible model based on the hybrid environment that reduces fatigue, increases intent to stay, and boosts performance.
Clark:
Myth # 2 is that employees aren’t as productive when detached from a central work location. Several studies have shown that the opposite is true. One example is a study by Stanford University of 16,000 workers over 9 months. They found that working from home increased productivity by 13%. (https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/f/wfh.pdf)
The real myth here is that managers believe they need to see their employees to make sure they are being productive.
Clark:
Gartner’s data shows that when flexibility is increased, the percentages of high performing employees also increases — but it requires a culture of trust, empathy and empowerment. It also means managers must focus on work outcomes, rather than activity metrics. We’ll discuss an outcome-based mindsets vs time-based mindsets in detail later on in the panel.
Clark:
Finally, if you’re going to provide employees flexible working environments, effective collaboration tools are more important than ever. This often means investing in new technologies to store all your projects and resources in one place so your team can work together, wherever they are. It’s a myth that new technologies are burdensome, however.
Clark:
Successful organizations will make the investment in new technologies to power their flexible workforces as they recognize it’s the future. Gartner defines an “Everywhere Enterprise” as an organization that smartly combines technology, team structures, processes, skills and tools to empower dispersed workforces, harness distributed infrastructures and serve unlimited customer bases.
Clark
In summary, we believe going back to the work model that prevailed before the pandemic is a step backward. And your organization can’t be resilient without rethinking and implementing more flexible workforce models.
Back to you Rayvonne to kick off the panel so we can break this down further!
Clark
Melissa
Renee
Renee
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Melissa
Renee
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*Moderator to ask questions
Seed Questions
How do you measure “successful flexibility”?
When does flexibility go too far and lead to redundancy or inefficiency?
What are your recommendations for how to phase out legacy processes and implement flexibility into your team's processes?
How do you align processes cross-departmentally if everyone is “working their own way”?
