Empathy is vital for the forming, strengthening and maintenance of long-term, highly effective ... [+]..Getty Images
When it comes to the traits that help solidify business partnerships, attributes like trust and a willingness to collaborate to find win-win solutions can play a key role in building a strong, mutually beneficial relationship.
But how do you get to that foundation of trust and collaboration in the first place? Quite often, it comes down to empathy — or the ability to detect and understand the feelings of others.
Empathy is often confused with sympathy, but it goes so much deeper than that. Sympathy is essentially a sense of pity when someone else is distressed. Empathy, on the other hand, is seeking to truly understand what another person feels, and demonstrate the compassion and understanding they need to feel valued and appreciated.
When leaders better understand what empathy is and how it can make a difference in their business relationships, they can position themselves to participate in more meaningful and successful partnerships.
1. Empathy Considers How Different Factors Affect the Partnership
While empathy is often described as “walking in someone else’s shoes,” true empathy — especially in the business world — can and should be much more than that. As Brené Brown, renowned researcher and host of the Dare to Lead podcast explained in an interview with Conant Leadership, “Our job is that when people tell us the experience of being in their shoes, we believe them — even when it’s different from our lived experience.”
As Brown explained, regardless of who a leader is talking to, their response should be to believe the experiences and feelings of others, “even when [they] can’t reconcile it with [their] own experience.”
This mindset is especially important when setting expectations for a business partnership. A variety of internal and external factors could affect the viability and results of a partnership — even things such as a partner’s geographic location, capacity or turnover of staff members.
Empathetic leaders consider the capacities and limitations of partners when setting goals, making adjustments as needed to ensure mutually beneficial outcomes.
2. Empathy Drives Open Communication and Shared Goals
Empathy helps ensure successful partnerships because it requires a sense of vulnerability that is often absent from the working world.
As clinician and behavioral psychologist Natanya Wachtel explained to me, “Displaying empathy allows others to open up to you and honestly communicate their challenges, successes, motives and more. And of course, you should be willing to reciprocate. This leads to more meaningful conversations that help us understand each other as people — not just providers of a good or service. This provides a level of depth and meaning to the relationship that helps everyone truly desire shared success.”
In a business partnership, this level of openness and transparency can help partners identify opportunities for growth and determine whether their contributions are meeting expectations. Even more importantly, it ensures that both parties remain fully committed toward a common goal.
Empathetic business partners seek to be truly transparent with those they work with. There’s no withholding information to try to gain the upper hand. You recognize that these are real people who are working with you to achieve a shared goal. As a result, you are willing to be vulnerable and communicate what needs to be shared so that everyone has the resources they need to succeed.
3. Empathy Allows for Better Resolutions When Disagreements Arise
Even in the most successful partnerships, disagreements, conflicts and other setbacks are bound to arise eventually. It’s easy to see this in the music world — once could argue that among the many reasons attributed to the breakup of The Beatles, a lack of empathy was certainly a deciding factor.
Rather than trying to understand the different perspectives of the other band members, the group allowed conflict to gradually overtake the feeling of camaraderie and collaboration that had defined their earlier years.
In a business partnership, a lack of empathy can lead to similar collapses. Lower than expected results and deviations from the goals of a partnership can cause business partners to raise barriers and stonewall each other in a time when they should be more open and empathetic than ever.
With a truly empathetic mindset, partners will proactively open lines of communication to understand what went wrong when these setbacks occur. This isn’t done to verbally lash out at the partner. Instead, it is done with the goal of finding a collaborative solution to improve the partnership and get things back on track.
While there may be some circumstances where ending the partnership will be the best solution, quite often, approaching these challenges with empathy will help you explore alternative ways to strengthen and fix what was previously a successful business relationship.
Do Better With Empathy
While developing empathy may seem like a challenge, there’s a reason why leaders like Brené Brown are so committed to teaching it: this is a skill that you can learn. Just like any other skill you rely on to succeed in business, Brown has said that empathy is “a teachable skill set. It’s not something that you either have or you don’t.”
With the understanding of the very real impact empathy can have on your business partnerships and other relationships, there’s never been a better time to develop this skill.
Coming soon to a job posting near you: Knowing how much it pays.Getty Images
A series of local and state laws, both newly adopted and soon to be in effect, will force companies to divulge what a job pays when posting an open position. Besides being common sense, the intent of these laws is to shrink the persistent wage gap that divides white men from women and people of color. Lowering the pay gap would be an important step forward for equality in the US, affecting everything from Americans’ quality of life to how they see themselves.
But while pay transparency is a much-needed improvement, a lot more is needed to truly create balance for all Americans. In the US, women and people of color get paid less than white men, regardless of job or experience. Pay gaps often begin at the start of careers, then compound over a lifetime as women and people of color are less likely to get raises. A variety of other factors contribute to the gap as well, like the motherhood penalty, wherein women who take time off paid work to care for kids are paid nearly 40 percent less than those who don’t.
There’s occupational segregation, in which jobs that are filled predominantly by women or people of color, like home health aides or food service workers, are paid less. (The pay and prestige of computer science, for example, rose only as more men entered the field.) Women and people of color are also seriously underrepresented in leadership positions, which are paid the most. In sum, that means the median hourly wage for women is 86 cents per hour for every dollar a man makes. Black women make 68 cents.
There’s been little progress on closing the pay gap in the last three decades. Enter this new spate of pay transparency laws. “Transparency is one of the leading tools we’ve identified for closing the wage gap,” Andrea Johnson, director of state policy at the National Women’s Law Center, told Recode. “It is absolutely crucial for both increasing worker power and employer accountability.”
While some of the new pay transparency laws protect workers’ rights to discuss pay without retaliation, others go further. Laws that prevent employers from asking candidates about their salary histories, which have been cropping up from Connecticut to Hawaii in recent years, keep past pay inequality from informing how much a person makes at their next job.
Most promising are laws that require employers to post the pay range for a job when they first start recruiting. One such law went into effect in Colorado in 2021. One in New York City goes into effect in November, while California’s and Washington’s go into effect in January. New York’s governor is expected to soon sign a state-wide law of this nature that would go into effect next year.
Disclosing a pay range lessens the likelihood implicit bias will creep into new salaries because it changes the need for negotiating salary, which typically works out unfavorably for women and people of color. When women ask for raises (which they do as much as men), for example, they’re simply less likely to get them.
“Whenever we take negotiation out or reduce the role of individual negotiation, pay-setting tends to get more equal,” Ariane Hegewisch, senior research fellow at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, told Recode.
The very act of establishing a pay range for a position forces companies to evaluate their compensation practices and potentially fix disparities between existing employees. Finally, pay transparency for new roles would allow already-employed people to negotiate for better pay if they’re making less than others in similar positions. Relying on workers to identify and negotiate the difference is obviously imperfect, but it will certainly help.
“It’s very simple: The more data that’s out there, the better positioned talent can be to know how much they’re worth,” said Josh Brenner, CEO of Hired, a hiring platform that releases an annual study on the wage gap in tech. The company’s software also notifies employers when it detects bias in their salary offers (Hired said the nudge results in updated salary offers about 5 percent of the time, and those offers are on average 11 percent higher).
While research on the effects of pay range laws is new and therefore limited, experts point to the much smaller pay gaps in the public sector and at union jobs, where salaries are more transparent and regimented. For transparency efforts to be successful, the ranges can’t be too large and companies have to be actively penalized for not following pay transparency rules.
Research on Colorado’s new pay transparency law showed that the fraction of job postings with salary information has so far grown 30 percentage points since the law went into effect in 2021, but more compliance is expected over time. Data shared by compensation software company Payscale showed that employees working at companies with pay transparency make 7 percent more than employees with the same job and qualifications at companies without that transparency.
And although these laws are being set at the city and state level for now, it’s possible their effects will reverberate outside of those municipalities, influencing companies to voluntarily share pay information, whether it’s to simplify job posting or to attract talent in a tight hiring market.
“I would say about half of our customers came to us without any requirements on the legal end that they have to post,” said Payscale senior corporate attorney Lulu Seikaly, referring to company inquiries about setting pay ranges. “They know with states like California, Washington, New York, and Colorado being forced to post their salary ranges, they’re going to be also forced to post their salary ranges just to get the talent in the door.”
Other strategies to close the pay gap
Extending these pay transparency laws to existing positions — rather than just new job postings — and to more companies in more states would be even more effective. But pay transparency alone won’t completely close the pay gap. “There is no silver bullet,” Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said. “But I think pay transparency moves us in the right direction.”
While the experts Recode interviewed for this story expect that pay transparency laws will certainly lessen the pay gap, they don’t think that will mean women and people of color will all of a sudden have truly equal pay. As we know, the pay gap is caused by a number of issues, so it will likely take a variety of tactics to solve it. Here are some that experts told us would help.
Require companies to report pay gap data and make it public: In 2020, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) — the government body that investigates employer discrimination and which typically collects workforce demographic information — tested out collecting private sector pay data for 2017 and 2018. The data shows not only which types of positions women hold but how much they’re paid for those positions.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, in an independent review of the data collection, recently found, unsurprisingly, that doing so is a key tool to combat pay discrimination, and recommended that the EEOC broaden and strengthen its data collection (the Trump administration stopped the practice but it’s expected to return under Biden).
Going a step further and making that data publicly available could do more to compel companies to rectify their wage gaps, rather than waiting for discrimination charges to make them do so. Additionally, better funding for the EEOC would make the organization better able to address the pay discrimination complaints they handle.
Raise the minimum wage: Part of the reason for the pay gap is that women and people of color are overrepresented in the lowest-paid industries. Therefore, raising the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009, would disproportionately help women and people of color and would go a long way toward lessening their pay gap.
Affordable, high-quality child care: There’s a child care crisis in America, and it deeply hurts the career prospects of women, who shoulder more child care duties. Without adequate child care, women will continue to be pushed out of the workforce and their wages will continue to suffer. The sector needs more government investment, which will in turn improve the personal and working lives of women.
Make it easier to unionize: Unions help rationalize pay bands and lower the wage gap, but it is incredibly difficult to unionize in the US. Passing the PRO Act, which is stalled in the Senate after passing the House, would make the unionization process easier, and more unions means more pay equality.
Of course, all of this is easier said than done, and it will take a long time for the wage gap to disappear. But the new transparency laws show that progress is possible, and so are more changes on the horizon.
Personal finance knowledge is important to just about everyone, but with the emergence of social media, the conversations we see about it can also be filled with misguided opinions, hot takes or even lies. Jeremy Schneider, founder of Personal Finance Club, is cutting through the noise of risky cryptocurrency bets, leveraging debt and overspending with one concise message to help others build wealth: Live below your means and invest early and often.
This principle — along with selling his first company, a start-up called RentLinx — allowed him to retire at 36 years old. Now, he spends his days running a popular Instagram account featuring all things personal finance. Select recently sat down with Schneider to get a better understanding of his journey, the Personal Finance Club’s growth and impact — and his best advice for building your own net worth.
A man with a plan — and a big exit
Before Schneider struck it big, he lived the life of a regular college student, attending and running track at the University of Michigan. Thanks to some help from his parents, scholarships and money earned by working on the side, he was able to graduate debt-free. Following graduation, Schneider decided to take a big risk, turned down a full-time job at Microsoft and set out on his own as an entrepreneur.
While building his first company, RentLinx, throughout his 20′s, Schneider lived a very modest lifestyle. He still brags about the 1999 Ford Explorer he bought used and how he paid himself a low salary of $36,000 per year despite being a CEO and living in a high-cost-of-living area. All the while, he was still persistent about investing the way his parents had taught him at 16 years old — in low-cost index funds inside a Roth IRA.
In 2015, at 34 years old, Schneider struck gold by selling RentLinx for $5 million. He immediately began dreaming of sitting on an island forever until its new CEO asked him, “What are you going to do when you get back?” It was then that he knew he had to do something else — after celebrating a bit of course. Following the sale, Schneider put more than $2 million in his pocket and continued to work for the same company under new management. Shortly after, he decided to take a year off.
So, what did this self-made millionaire do with all his newfound free time? He played video games. Schneider admits it was a waste of time, but since he was heavily invested in market-tracking index funds, his net worth still continued to grow significantly, even as he enjoyed hours of gaming. Schneider also mentions on his website that he spent time traveling and figuring out smart ways to handle his money.
After his year off, he created the Personal Finance Club and its community has since grown to more than 400,000 followers.
Schneider says he’s always been passionate about the subject. The Personal Finance Club actually began as a social drinking club about 10 years ago and what started as friendly banter — and eventually became a simple Instagram post about a two-step plan to become a millionaire through investing in index funds — has since turned into a full-scale business with a purpose.
The impact of Personal Finance Club
The education provided for free through the Personal Finance Club’s Instagram account is quite robust. You’ll see everything from investing in index funds, economic news, and tips for paying off your debt to taxes and interest rates, among other topics — and most notably, the results of living Schneider’s two-step plan of living below your means and investing regularly.
Schneider and his team also create comparisons to help illustrate hypothetical investing situations — one person lives by his two golden rules, while the other does not — which seem to resonate with his followers.
Once the Instagram account gained traction, Schneider decided to monetize its growth and create an actionable personal finance course so anyone could learn how to grow their wealth in a realistic manner.
Schneider told Select his “messages of simplicity and transparency” have paid off, including disclosing the operations of his business and how much money the social media account is actually making.
In a recent Instagram post, Schneider revealed the Personal Finance Club had made nearly $1 million in revenue since Oct. 2020, and in the process had changed many lives. He now has two full-time employees, actively donates 20% of his revenue to charity and has helped thousands of people to begin investing for the future.
His best advice for growing your personal wealth
Even with $4.4 million in net worth, Schneider continues to practice what he preaches both on and off the Personal Finance Club Instagram account by living frugally and investing in index funds on a regular basis.
Besides his two golden rules, Schneider tells Select his personal advice is three-fold:
Schneider references a never-ending list of potential investment opportunities that are now available, all clamoring for your attention and money. By simply keeping your expenses low and investing consistently in proven index funds, you’ll be able to grow your net worth, regardless of how much your annual salary is.
He often suggests consistently investing in index funds that track the S&P 500, which have produced an average annualized return of about 10% since 1957 (note that past results do not guarantee future success). Dollar cost averaging and compound interest can help your money grow exponentially over long periods of time. In the example below, if you were to invest $10,000 a year ($833 a month) into an S&P 500 fund starting at the age of 25 until you retired at age 65, you’d have over $4.4 million. While you may not be able to invest that much, it still illustrates that with consistent habits you can become a millionaire when you retire.
Schneider started his business and community with a simple message nearly everyone can follow: By keeping your expenses low, not spending money on frivolous purchases and investing early and often, you can quickly build up your net worth and take financial control of your life.
Any time you put money into your savings account, invest in the stock market, pay a bill or plan for retirement you are practicing personal finance.
Personal finance can look differently for different people, depending on what each individual person’s goal is. Thinking about what these goals are, and identifying realistic steps in how to accomplish them, with your income and living expenses in mind, is what is referred to as financial planning.
However in order to be able to plan effectively, it is necessary that you become financially literate. Meaning, that you are generally aware of the various tips and trends that are out there to maximize the success of your personal finances.
Budgeting is perhaps the most important contributor to meeting personal finance goals. The 50/30/20, offers a simple but effective way to manage your income in a way that will also help achieve your goals.
The method is as follows;
allocate 50% of your income for primary needs i.e. food and shelter
allocate 30% for personalized lifestyle purchases like clothes
allocate 20% for retirement, debt re-pay or emergencies
Credit cards are one of the easiest way to get into debt. But are also absolutely vital to establishing your credit score, making them somewhat of a necessary evil. To make sure your credit cards are helping you, rather than hurting you, make sure you are always doing two things.
1) Never max out your card
2) Always make sure you can pay what you’ve charged at the end of the month.
There are three ways in which you can ensure the comfort of yourself and your family in the future, today.
1) Pay off your student debt, and do so quickly before the interest becomes overwhelming.
2) Save for retirement, and take advantage of whatever tax-advantaged plan your employer offers.
3) Depending on your needs, construct a living will or create a trust so that your family may be privileged to whatever wealth you leave behind.
The business world is driven by buying and selling transactions—also known as commerce. Today, the business world sees technological advances and societal changes driving an e-commerce boom. Amazon is one of the leaders in e-commerce today, shaping consumer expectations of fast deliveries, instant order acknowledgments, and increased communication from ordering to delivery.
Amazon isn’t the only one to watch as the global e-commerce market as a whole is expected to grow “from 3.3 trillion today to 5.4 trillion by 2026.” In my experience as a former CFO and now chief solutions architect, there are several possibilities for the future of e-commerce. I touch on a few of them in this piece, but the possibilities extend even further.
The future of e-commerce could see the blend of building communities of buyers and sellers rallied around specific interests or specialized business segments. This could lead to more options for consumers to interact with sellers and other consumers. You may see a shift from a centralized, dominant company platform to an e-commerce platform that hosts various sellers using decentralized technology, including blockchain, where everyone can access the transactions in real time on a distributed ledger.
Social media companies can enable buying and selling in these communities of buyers by connecting sellers to potential buyers to drive sales through e-commerce platforms. Influencers on social media can raise awareness of products and services to influence the purchases made by their followers. Instead of buyers browsing an online catalog, they may be posting stories about the product or service; they could be reading product reviews or interacting with those who already own the product; the buying and selling could take on these elements of social media where people might comment about products and services.
E-commerce companies could use the power of word-of-mouth advertising and apply it by leveraging social media. Some influencers could create a network of multiple influences on sales, creating more employment and offering new sales channels to companies selling products and services.
New investor-funded e-commerce companies will also help meet the anticipated demands. And according to Morgan Stanley, “For investors, the e-commerce boom will likely continue, offering opportunities for gains across multiple businesses, regions, and verticals—and at a time when recent stock valuations don’t necessarily reflect that growth.”
I hear arguments about “why use blockchain technology when you can easily use a traditional database?” We live in a time where we do not trust easily. One way to potentially improve trust in transaction data is to make sharing those records publicly on a blockchain available to all stakeholders. Transparency is created by linking blocks of data to allow people to confirm transactions. Those secured transactions tell the story of the data by putting the data in multiple hands at once.
For example, a transaction is written to a blockchain if the buyer places an order for a bottle of wine. A winery accepts that order, and that transaction is written to the blockchain so the buyer and winery can see what is going on as the transactions are connected. When the winery ships the wine, that shipment record is written to the blockchain. When the buyer receives the wine from the seller, that transaction is written to the blockchain.
These digital supply chain transactions are recorded in a time series to document the process and provide vital information to each person in the transaction. Blockchain can also link payments through smart contracts and digital wallets based on these supply chain transactions.
Blockchain could help bring about the democratization of the internet through decentralization and more commerce opportunities for the average person, whether found in community buyer circles led by influencers or elsewhere.
CFO for AIOne, Inc. to create new companies to form an ecosystem of networks and to reward influencer efforts. Read Dave Sackett’s full executive profile here.
To talk about the future of e-commerce, nothing better than starting with data and statistics, so let’s go to them. According to the Italian consultancy finaria and dissemination of Forbes, global e-commerce retail sales will reach more than 2,7 trillion dollars in 2021, and should reach 3,4 trillion dollars in 2025. These figures express once again that the future of e-commerce is stable, with no signs of falling.
With this growth, e-commerce sales are gaining more and more space in the retail market. If before the pandemic online sales represented only 10% of global retail, it is estimated that in 2021 they will compose 17,5% of all global sales. And the chances of growth are even greater if we think about the quantity and speed of technological advancements and digital transformation of society.
Physical establishments must take this into account and put together a structure to bring their businesses offline to an online platform. If they do not have an online presence, they will lose many customers, who are looking for an easy, fast and convenient purchase, from the comfort of home. Offer a omnichannel experience, or multichannel, for the customer is increasingly necessary and this will certainly be a common practice in the future of e-commerce.
People are consuming more and more online, as the statistics show, but this will not end physical retail, as it is not just preference, but convenience. The consumer does the action that seems easiest and most practical at that moment.
If he is walking down the street, passes a store, sees a jacket and is interested, he may want to go in and buy it. But if he has an appointment then, he may not want to take the jacket at that time and choose to have another day at his house.
Or, the opposite: you may prefer to search for jackets on the internet, buy online and then pick up directly at the physical store, reducing waiting time and saving on shipping. Hence, physical and digital retail must be connected, ensuring an excellent consumer experience, regardless of the choice you make.
Another strong trend in e-commerce is to give several payment options for the consumer, mainly quick payments, making the checkout process easier and more agile. A virtual store that does not offer this diversity on its website can reduce sales and even lose customers. Because people who use Paypal can give priority to stores that use it, while there are those more inclined to use Google Pay or Samsung Pay, who would definitely like to see such options available in their store.
In addition, with the launch of the PIX and the advances in cryptocurrencies, payment methods are broadening. If today it is essential to provide several payment options, in the future this will be almost an order to remain competitive.
O m-commerce, or mobile commerce, already represents more than 70% of the online retail and, for sure, it will continue to grow in the coming years. According to a survey conducted in August 2020 by Panorama Mobile Time and Opinion Box, 91% of Brazilians who own a smartphone have already purchased online through the device. That number before was 85%. The growth took place in just six months, during the social isolation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Hybrid work isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition. Here’s how managers can better understand and support different preferences and attitudes across their hybrid teams.
The conversation between business leaders and employees about long-term hybrid work plans is a complex one. We’re trying to answer some really big questions: How is our in-person time best used? What tools do people need to succeed, wherever they are? How do we build a sustainable hybrid system?
As we strive to address these big-picture challenges, managers overseeing day-to-day operations are struggling through a messy middle ground. Every day, they’re tasked with guiding different types of employees in an entirely new (and often shifting) work environment that affects individuals differently. Managing hybrid work today can feel like trying to cross a bridge that’s still under construction.
To understand how hybrid work is affecting people, we commissioned a global survey with Economist Impact. One of its central findings was that 77% of hybrid workers agree that their managers need more specific training on managing hybrid teams. To help address this training gap, we took a deep dive into the Economist Impact research and coupled our findings with proven best practices at Google. With the right tools and guidance, hybrid teams can be successful and drive impact together, no matter where teammates work.
Discovering the four types of hybrid workers in your organization
Economist Impact recently categorized employees into four segments based on their relationship to hybrid work: evangelists, pragmatists, fair-minded, and undecided. Interestingly, employees did not fall into categories based on neatly predictable criteria like role, seniority, or industry. Instead, the primary driver was more personal: how hybrid work affects their everyday lives. The study found that feelings about hybrid work are often determined by factors like need for child care, length of commute, and personal work styles.
Here’s a look at the four types of hybrid workers identified by Economist Impact, coupled with tips for managing each one.
The evangelist: Happy with hybrid. They want to sustain the current model.
As you might guess from their name, the evangelists (24%) are the most optimistic about hybrid work and typically very satisfied with the policies, technology, and social dynamics already in place. Many work fully off-site. At Google, we have long had distributed teams who are central to our organization, so we recognize many hybrid work evangelists in our midst by their enthusiasm, productivity, and loyalty. The system is working for them.
The questions we are always looking to answer are: how do we make sure that our most satisfied employees stay that way, and how can we tap into their enthusiasm to help their colleagues see the benefits of a hybrid structure? Here are a few ideas:
Empower them to keep working in a way that supports their natural productivity, using centralized tools like Google Drive for easy collaboration and shared calendars so coworkers can clearly see their schedules and availability.
Invite them to share their best practices company-wide by creating and moderating Google Spaces dedicated to hybrid work tips, work-from-home hacks, and more.
Keep them engaged through short Google Meet check-ins on a quarterly basis, with the agenda focused on how hybrid work practices are functioning and whether improvements can be made.
Offer continuing support by making sure they have the right technology, especially if they work fully off-site. Ask: “Is technology helping them stay in the mix across all the ways and places that hybrid work happens?”
The pragmatists: Optimistic, but facing challenges. They need to be heard.
The largest segment identified by Economist Impact were pragmatists (39%), a group who is optimistic about hybrid work, but experiencing significant challenges with it. Their sentiment can be summed up as, “Yes, but …”. Meaning that they want hybrid to work, and they want to be a part of making it work, but they don’t think it’s working well… yet. Pragmatists feel that their organization’s new policies don’t incorporate enough employee input and are more likely to feel these policies are unfair.
Pragmatists are also concerned with blurred work-life boundaries. This demographic includes workers who have less location and/or time flexibility, so they may not be experiencing significant benefits of a “flexible” workplace. Here are some ways to support pragmatists:
Gather input by creating an anonymous survey using Google Forms. Ask what’s working or not about hybrid schedules, team processes, technology tools and training, work-life balance, etc. Repeat these surveys at regular intervals to ensure that pragmatists’ voices continue to be heard.
To improve flexibility while ensuring collective team work, agree on “core work hours” in which teams determine daily hours when they will typically be online and meetings will take place. Offer flexibility around the “non-core” hours for focused individual work or personal needs such as medical appointments or taking children to school.
Enhance transparency and shared understanding across the team about each others’ preferences and schedules using Calendar features like working location and focus time.
Enable teams to communicate and collaborate across locations and time zones through shared comments in Docs, Sheets, and Slides.
The fair-minded: Feeling good, hoping for continued cultural change. They want to improve the dialogue.
Most concerned about employee wellbeing, fairness, and inclusion, the fair-minded (23%) report an overall positive impact of hybrid work on their lives. Whereas the pragmatists express a “Yes, but…” sentiment, the fair-minded express “Yes, and…”. They like where this is going, and they want more. Over the long term, they are hoping for greater flexibility in their location and work schedule. They believe that better communication and collaboration will strengthen the culture of trust in the workplace and benefit everyone. Here are strategies for managing the fair-minded:
Foster social connection by adopting platforms specifically built for inclusivity and get creative in using them – it’s OK to have fun! Choose thematic backgrounds or break into small groups for a quick icebreaker before a meeting.
Build an inclusive environment by providing opportunities to bond at in-person events devoted to mentoring, discussion, and socializing.
Keep people informed via a “hybrid-work hub” on Google Spaces where management can share the latest policies and employees can ask questions.
Strengthen the culture of trust by shifting toward impact-oriented performance evaluations.
The undecided: Craving connection, direction, and better technology. They need to hear from you.
At 13%, the undecided may represent the smallest number of respondents, but they’re a group that need significant support. Why are they undecided? Overall, it’s because they’ve yet to experience significant benefits from flexible work. They’re more likely to be at organizations that have not issued formal hybrid policies, so they’re working in uncertain environments.
This group also reports higher rates of technology challenges, suggesting that they haven’t been equipped with the right tools to connect, collaborate, and communicate remotely. And finally, many are frontline workers who have suffered from limited social interactions or extra strain during the pandemic that has affected their mental health.
With so many challenges, it’s not surprising this cohort is the least confident about the future. Strategies for meeting the needs of the undecided include:
Clarify your hybrid policies through active communication. Consider hosting regular “re-onboarding” video calls with small groups to make sure everyone understands hybrid policies and gets training on new processes or tools.
Strengthen their sense of belonging with clear, inclusive updates on company wide projects and achievements via Google Meet video conferencing. Use the Q&A function so employees can ask questions and everyone can see answers, or conduct live polling to survey a specific topic. Follow up your meeting with an email recap for those who could not attend.
Help teams communicate and collaborate better with instant communication tools like Spaces in Google Chat, which keeps conversations about scheduling, shared tasks, and files together.
Let’s make it work
As leaders, it’s important to understand and acknowledge your team members’ different experiences of hybrid work. Do you know which of the four types your employees fall into? Taking the time to engage with them and learn their preferences allows you to shape policies while also making decisions that help the organization get work done. A thoughtfully planned hybrid work structure can adapt to individual needs, connect distributed workforces, and, ultimately, strengthen your organization. While our global shift to hybrid work was born out of necessity, we can use it to provide opportunity for every type of worker.
Empathy is vital for the forming, strengthening and maintenance of long-term, highly effective ... [+]..Getty Images
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