Feedback in the Hybrid Environment

Will Gosling, Partner and UK Human Capital Consulting leader at Deloitte UK, discusses hybrid working and its future impact on workplace feedback.

Do you think that hybrid working is going to be the future of work, and if so why do you believe that?

Will: I think it’s a step along the way to the future of work that many organisations are already taking. Professional service firms have worked in that way for some time, so the shift had already begun. Businesses needed to access different talent pools that have more flexible requirements, and partly because generationally younger workers are looking for more flexibility in the contract between worker and employer.

Also, organisations are moving to different work structures with much more team or project-based work that requires less on-site work and the possibility of more asynchronous work – organising tasks in a pipeline and sharing the load between team members. The pandemic has accelerated a number of difference ways of working, and many see this as an opportunity to re-think their relationship with work. Surveys are suggesting 70 to 80 per cent of the workforce expect and want some form of hybrid work arrangement, yet pre-pandemic ONS data that showed only five per cent of the workforce had any form of homeworking. We’ve witnessed decades of growth across organisations over the course of the pandemic.

What do you think will be the effect of the hybrid working environment on feedback between team members but also teams and their managers?

Will: Some organisations will maintain the annual or six-monthly feedback-type mechanism, but they will be increasingly in the minority; and because work is changing, feedback and the medium of feedback needs to change accordingly.

Across businesses, we were already seeing greater proliferation of digital performance management, allowing more real-time feedback, objectives to be continually updated and reviewed, and check-ins to happen. Where businesses were using digital management tools as a record, now they are using these while still having face-to-face feedback meetings. Feedback is becoming more hybrid and often supported by collaboration platforms.

It’s likely that there will still be face-to-face feedback in the future, I just think it will be more deliberate and structured, as the effort taken in making a physical meeting happen needs to be much higher.

The interesting thing is that there will be a lot more scrutiny on how well leaders and managers deliver feedback. Managers need to invest as much time in people who are spend more time working remotely as people who are more frequently office-based. A key performance indicator of leaders will be to ensure there is a level playing field for every employee.

Do you think technology will be able to help companies overcome initial issues in relation to performance feedback in a hybrid working environment, either through feedback forums, tracking software or similar?

Will: I definitely don’t think technology that demonstrates mistrust in a workforce is going to help, so tracking is not going to be very helpful, albeit I recognise in some industries there is a regulatory requirement for some of this technology to be used. 

Technology can help in lots of different ways. Like collaboration platforms allow everyone to look at the same thing, but also interact differently depending on their needs, while even simple aspects like being able to give reactions, as you can in video calls for example, is also helpful. I think technology will enable much more real-time feedback for workers in the future, rather than people having to wait for the quarterly, six-monthly, annual appraisal. It will allow the integration of physical and digital communication, which is an important step forward. 

With that real-time feedback, do you think there’s a risk of too much feedback? Is there an argument for formalised reviews, and technology that helps to quantify feedback?

Will: I think the answer in the future is both. If you over-index on just real-time simplistic ‘well done’ or similar reactions, then you’re undervaluing the need that people have for feedback. In my experience, digital businesses are religious about structured feedback. They provide real-time feedback, but really focus on quarterly reviews. 

Software engineering teams are the same; they set themselves very clear products and outcomes, and then they measure themselves and their feedback to each other against these.

I think the future is a mix. What’s missing today is a lot more of the informal real-time feedback. We’re going to see much more of that, but it can’t be as a substitute, it shouldn’t crowd out more structured feedback, but this won’t always be face-to-face.

Do you think that managers are going to have to adapt their management styles depending on the behavioural traits of their teams, and if their teams prefer more remote or office-based working?

Will: This is going to be a really big topic. I worry that organisations are sleep-walking into the hybrid pattern of working, and aren’t equipping their leaders and managers with the skills they need to be able to manage a hybrid workforce. 

There are people who are much more introverted, where teams may need to work much harder with to bring them into a conversation on a digital platform than they might in the room. Equally, I’ve noticed a difference in meeting people face-to-face who I’d met remotely in the pandemic. I’d formed a view on what they were like, their personality type, and it was completely different to what it’s like when you meet them face-to-face.

Leaders are going to have to be agile in how they respond to different personalities, and not be too judgemental. So, the ability to manage the breadth of neurodiversity in the workforce is going to be hugely important. There must be significant investment and support for leaders and managers to be able to successfully lead both exclusively remote and hybrid teams. 

Do you think that more companies will begin developing their own behavioural trait assessment tools for the hybrid working environment to suit their business?

Will: Personality tests are not designed for business, typically, and I think it can be dangerous to attach a personality profile and say, for example, ‘this person can only do this type of task’.

Interestingly, we developed something five years ago which we use a lot ourselves, designed specifically for business – Business Chemistry. Ten minutes of simple questions and answers and it gives you a profile. It gives you a method to understand the different personality types, in the context of business, not in psychoanalysis. Answering questions such as how do they like to communicate, receive material, or make decisions? Knowing these things about others or themselves is helpful. It helps people remember that there is neurodiversity in the workforce, and, with customers and clients, to be empathetic and think about that when they interact.

However, we haven’t yet thought about what that means in the digital world. We designed it for the physical world. Adapting effectively to the digital world is the next step for it.