From Office to Anywhere: How Remote and Hybrid Work is Changing the Future of Work Culture

In post-pandemic work, “talent flows where flexibility reigns,” reports GitLab. GitLab provides a web-based Git repository management tool for software development teams. It was founded in 2011 by Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Valery Sizov and is headquartered in San Francisco. 

As a fully remote company, GitLab understands that having the right people, tools, and management systems is essential for producing excellent work, scaling your company, and attracting the best talent (while also keeping that talent satisfied).  

As such, they also know that if you are going to track performance and outcomes, you need to do some measuring. So measurement they do. You can familiarize yourself with GitLab’s most recent report — which is the leading study on remote work from one of the world’s largest all-remote organizations. 

Here are some key metrics to know from the GitLab report:

• Out of the companies that allow remote work, 1 in 3 have a 100% remote policy where employees work in their own native time zone. 42% will take a hybrid approach.

• 52% of remote workers noted that they would consider leaving their co-located company for a remote role— particularly significant given the global job market volatility. 

• If remote work were suddenly no longer an option, 1 in 3 respondents would leave their job— either by finding a new role or retiring completely

• 34% of respondents noted that transparency from leadership leads to connectedness at work, while 38% noted that more visibility into the organization improved their sense of connection. 

• According to remote workers, the top 3 remote-work benefits to employers are increased productivity (42%), increased efficiency (38%), and increased employee morale (31%).

• Worldwide, women only make up about 38% of the workforce. In remote work, they are the majority at 58%.

• In a different report, The IZA Institute of Labor Economics found that the time saved from the average daily commute was 72 minutes. 

• The National Bureau of Economic Research reported that survey data compiled by Barrero, Bloom, Buckman, and Davis suggest nearly 14% of employees worked from home full-time as of fall 2022. About 29% had a “hybrid” arrangement, and 57% were fully on-site.

With a shifting job market and the always-in-demand desire to attract and retain the best talent, many companies are scrambling to adapt to offering a hybrid or remote option for employees. Managing to pivot to this transformation means adhering to some best practices for managing talent and leveraging the right tools. 

The Hybrid Manager: Strategies for Building Trust and Productivity in Remote Teams

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According to Claire Hughes-Johnson, the COO of Stripe, the secret to a company’s success is actually not the business strategy; it’s the operating structure and the systems for managing the most important resource in the company—the people that work there. 

The first challenge faced by many companies attempting to shift their operating models is how to manage workers in a hybrid or remote environment. The first step is to recognize that the skills that made your best managers successful in in-person environments are transferable to the hybrid and remote worlds – you just have to deploy those skills more intentionally. 

Employees value managers with strong interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence. These are fantastic personality traits, well-suited for in-person environments, but they can also work in a transformed environment. 

Managers need to schedule check-ins with their teams or jump on follow-up calls after a meeting to get a sense of how the team felt about the call or their performance. It is essential to create the atmosphere of hallway chatter in a new environment, which requires increased awareness and intention on the part of managers. 

Leveraging tools like Slack to manage communication among the team is key (it also dramatically cuts down on email), but you can also use Slack to encourage cultural and personal chatter. Dedicate channels to sharing new ideas and for sharing the funny, personal communication that makes going to work enjoyable. 

No matter the work environment, employees want to know that the company they work for shares their values and vision. Employees want to feel that their work is valued and has a purpose. They also want to learn, grow, and be mentored. Good managers will offer direct feedback, hold high standards, and demonstrate a deep devotion to the quality of the work and commitment of the team. According to Kim Scott, CEO coach and author of the book Radical Candor, “The highest performing teams value feedback and ensure it is frequent, candid, and flows up, down, and sideways.”

Companies can show their employees that they value them through compensation, but they can also demonstrate respect by offering flexibility and autonomy in how, when, and where their employees work.

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