Leadership Voyage
Leadership Voyage
S4E14: The Latest on Hybrid and RTO Policies
Text Jason @ Leadership Voyage
Jason read the latest from Gallup on hybrid work, so you don't have to! What are the latest trends and best practices in hybrid work? Find out here!
The section below is taken verbatim from Gallup's article:
Gallup research shows that four simple practices can increase employee trust by nearly 30 percentage points. Employees are more likely to feel more trust when they strongly agree with any of the following:
- I receive timely and consistent communication about what’s happening on my team, regardless of whether I’m working from home/remotely or on-site.
- My team has a strong sense of community, regardless of whether we are working from home/remote or on-site.
- My manager holds me accountable for meeting performance expectations when I work from home/remotely.
- When working from home/remotely, I receive the same opportunities for feedback and development compared to when I work on-site.
Leadership Voyage is brought to you by Golden Mean Consulting Group, specializing in the training of new managers.
Leadership Voyage is brought to you by Golden Mean Consulting Group's 6-Week New Manager Boot Camp, an accelerated program for training new managers.
Leadership Voyage
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Did you know that up to 82% of new managers are left completely in the dark, untrained and searching for answers? That lack of preparation doesn't just hurt your new leaders. It holds your entire business back, draining morale and costing you productivity. Stop the clock on bad management. Golden Mean Consulting offers a proven no fluff approach to help your new managers build the right habits from day one. Our co-founders Sonia and Jason have over 20 years of experience in the trenches, so you can trust they know what works. To learn more, visit golden means consulting.com. That's g o ldemeultinggroup.com. Wherever you are on your leadership voyage, it starts here.[Music][Music] All right, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Leadership Voyage, the podcast dedicated to your pursuit of becoming a great leader. My name is Jason Wick, your host. Doing it here for the fourth season. Uh, if you want to get in touch with me, please email me at startyouvoyaggmail.com or at the top of the show notes, you should see a little link that says text Jason. You can send me a text message. Either one, whatever is most convenient. Sometimes emails seem like a long, cumbersome thing I'll do later when I get back to my desk. So, if you want to reach out right away, right, you got a thought on your mind, just hop back to the episode description, tap that text Jason at leadership voyage link at the top of the show notes and give me a thought. It's great. I've heard from some of you along the way with the texting option, too. It's really nice and I know it's a quick option that works well for a lot of people when you're on the run listening on your phone. Okay everybody, so we are full steam ahead in season 4 as we've been saying, right? This is the third consecutive and final for right now solo episode. I love to jump into some of these topics when we start to get a lot of interesting stories coming in related to leadership and management. We are also full steam ahead towards 60 episodes, which will be a great milestone by the end of this season. I think we'll be able to hit around 65 or so for the show, something like that. So, that's wonderful to see. Tons of content for you all. Remember, if you're listening to episodes now, it doesn't mean you can't go back and listen to the old ones. There's so much relevant information from the previous interviews you can always go back and draw from. And we're going to draw from that today. But before we do, two quick reminders. Number one, please rate and subscribe. I know we've got a bunch of folks out here who are already subscribed, but many of you are listening and not subscribed. So, please click that button and give the show a rating. What do you think it's worth? Four stars, five stars? I like five, but you know, everybody gets their own opinion. So, you be honest. Give a review of the show with a right with a star rating. And um I appreciate that sincerely and genuinely, whatever the value is. Okay, folks. So, what are we looking at today? We're looking at a topic that honestly I feel like we haven't talked about in a while. And I think that's because as we get farther and farther away from the pandemic, the less novel this topic becomes. And it's hybrid work. I went through Gallup's latest about hybrid work and the percentages, the trends, the best practices. I went through this so you don't have to dedicate much time to it. You only have to spend a few minutes listening here and take away the highlevel information for your own work situation. And uh we're going to go through all of that. But I want to kick off this episode today in kind of a unique way. Um, generally I've talked in the solo episodes about something and then maybe along the way a theme emerges and I pull in a quote from the past. But before we go through Gallup's insights, I want to introduce the topic with a conversation I had from a guest in the past. So I'm going to do that in a second here. Uh, but I'm going to outline this show for you. three parts today. Okay. So, the first part is this clip from a previous guest uh about hybrid work. Second, going to summarize the latest from Gallup for you. And third, we're going to take the end of that Gallup study and give you four powerhouse ways to tighten up to shore up your hybrid work policies. So, introduction of the topic from a former guest. Um, summary summarize the article and then let you know the four big things. So, here's a clip from my conversation in season 2 two and a half years ago with Peter Hayashida. It's highly edited, but I think it captures the gist of what we're trying to discuss today. looking at on-site, remote, hybrid, do you have any strong opinions, either just your own or or data based that suggest the strong benefits or drawbacks to any of these type work configurations because it really does seem to be an interesting topic and I'm sure in hiring uh it is as well. Yeah, it's it's interesting that we had this extended experiment on remote and hybrid work that we would not have had but for a global pandemic. You know, I I think that none of these three approaches is perfect and I don't think this is a settled question. Um, even in some of the most sophisticated organizations and and part of that is that there really isn't enough history and enough research that would that there and by the way before the pandemic started there was research on on hybrid work. It wasn't very plentiful and it was largely ignored by the business community because it wasn't relevant. Those who were interested in it went and did it. Those who weren't interested in it didn't. The question now though becomes how do we create a path forward that gives employees a greater sense of predictability that gives them the flexibility that is required often to retain high performers. Um hybrid might be the best of both worlds if it's implemented thoughtfully and that means you have to synchronize the inoffice time. you have to set up rules and expectations for hybrid meetings so that the remote participants don't feel left out. Um and then the last thing is just a really practical one which is as as managers when the when the pandemic happened when the lockdown happened we had to think about the the million logistical questions right um where's their equipment where's their workspace do we have shared workspace or permanently assigned workspace not everybody has a luxury in a hybrid situation of having access to a printer at home of having high quality Wi-Fi who pays for the Wi-Fi right there's all those kinds of things that I think if we're going to fix this problem um for good. And when I say for good, for good as possible, for the time being, we're going to have to answer a lot of those questions because those are the questions employees want to know. Love that from Peter Hayashida. Uh let's see, that was season two, uh episode five from February of 2023. Peter, uh you know, I haven't checked in with Peter lately. um he was based in Honolulu, Hawaii and um had been involved in uh university advancement and man uh like just a font of knowledge. I I loved that episode again. Check it out. Maybe even if you listen to it a couple years ago, check it out again because we covered so much stuff in that episode. It was just like I think I used the metaphor of a buffet. We talked about interviewing culture in businesses, remote work and other things. And he just fired, you know, just kept coming boom boom boom with every question I fired at him. It was great. Reminiscent of more recent episode with Sherman Chen in in here in uh season 4 more recently, a few episodes back talking about interview uh excuse me, talking about résumés where we just kind of did a rapid fire about a bunch of different questions. So feel free to check out uh back to season 2 episode 5 with Peter. But Peter, remember we're identifying a conversation here about the three different types of work. Fully in person, fully remote, and then hybrid, which is a mix of the two. And he calls out some of those logistical questions or access questions for people who are at home doing their work. Do they have access to the same things, reliable internet, uh printer or whatever they might need to do their job in full? great things to think about for your work environment and how you can support your employees. So, brilliant stuff to keep in mind two and a half years after that conversation. Uh we're going to get into the um Gallup article now because Peter introduced that topic for us and this this t this title of this uh Gallup article was hybrid work in retreat barely and the subtitle is work location trends. Well, I don't want to steal the steal the thunder here, but this is the subtitle. Work location trends have remained stable since 2022, reflecting the durability of the hybrid work model. So, let's talk about the current and future of work here folks with this headline from Gallup about hybrid work in retreat barely. And there's a link to it in the show show notes. Sorry, excuse me. What I find interesting here is I I try to zoom out on a topic, right? And we read headlines, we hear anecdotes, and we are swayed or emotional or biased. And that's completely normal and understandable. Why this caught my attention when I read this in my inbox in early September was primarily because I had made the assumption based on big headlines that RTO policies, return to office policies, um were gaining significant momentum. You hear the big stories and I'm dropping names. I don't even know if I've got it 100% right, but I feel like I've heard about Chase in the news over the last year and a half uh with their um CEO Jamie Diamond talking about how important it is to be in the office. Amazon comes to mind. They went to four or five day. I couldn't remember exactly depending on the roles, but I had personally been influenced by the headlines thinking that return to office was a big thing gaining significant momentum. And that's why I think it's great to look at data to get some numbers. doesn't change the emotional impact on each person and or family when their work situation changes. Right? Navigating change significant in our lives. Starting a new job, a change in policy, switching from hybrid to full-time in person. Each one of those micro changes for each human being in the workforce is a huge impact on that person emotionally and on their families if they have one. Right? Suddenly I have to worry about
leaving my house at 8:00 a.m. instead of being able to walk into the living room
and turn on my computer at 8:30. or um I used to take a child to school on Friday mornings, but now I have to go in on Fridays and therefore I can't take them to school anymore. Right? These are examples of what people face. It's a big deal. But let's look at the macro based on this article, which again, the link is in the show notes here. here. And if you've got thoughts about it after I give you the summary, text me, email me, click that link to text Jason at Leadership Voyage or send me an email at startyouvoyaggmail.com. Let me know what you think. So, here's the news, folks. Here's the reality in terms of numbers. According to the data, work location trends have been stable since about 2022. There has been a very very slight shift away from hybrid, a very small increase in both fully onsite and fully remote. But it is not a win for the RTO folks. the return to office the back to office believers among us uh they have not seen a significant increase in traction and that's where I think it is showing this data is a little bit uh against what I had the narrative I had created in my own mind so the hybrid model it's holding strong as the predominant work arrangement out there and I'm going to do my best to give you a few one to two sentence summaries of where we are today in 2025 with the three different work styles. Okay. So if you're a person who when another human being starts telling you numbers, if your brain starts to scramble and and start to like you start seeing the matrix in a that's I guess that's a positive, but if you start to scramble and get lost, I apologize. Fast forward about 90 seconds, but I'm going to give you a few lists of numbers to let you know what's up here. So all of these numbers are among remote capable jobs. Okay? This does not include your UPS driver. This does presumably does not include your PE teacher, your FIAD teacher, gym teacher. Okay? This is among United States full-time remote capable employees.[Music] Do you know the real reason half your employees are looking to leave? Untrained firsttime managers. You need a way to stop the bleeding, the expensive cycle of disengagement and turnover. It's time to flip the script from surviving to thriving. Let's equip your leaders to build engaged, loyal, and profitable teams. Sign your leaders up for our six-week new manager boot camp. A hands-on accelerated program to grow and learn with like-minded peers augmented by personalized coaching sessions. No theory, just simple tools that Golden Mean Consulting co-founder Sonia and Jason have used for over 20 years. Ready to invest in your team's success? Secure your spot now at golden means consulting.com/services. That's g o lenme consultinggroup.com/services. As of right now, 51% of folks are hybrid. 28% of folks are exclusively remote. 21% are exclusively onsite. I don't know why this blew my mind because this isn't new information. So, hold those numbers in your head. Hybrid remote onsite 512821. Okay. If I go back in this graph to November of 2022, which is almost exactly three years ago, the percentage of hybrid employees was 53. Today it's 51. The percentage of exclusively remote folks was 26. Back in 2022, now it's 28. Just an uptick of two points. And guess what, folks? Amidst all the big headlines, in November of 2022, 21% of folks were exclusively on site. Today, in 2025, it's the same, 21%. I always appreciate having some objective information. Numbers don't tell a whole story, but they tell something. And so that gives us a picture of the US full-time remote capable employees. Okay, a couple more numbers. I'm sorry. I know if you fast forwarded and you don't like hearing numbers, I apologize, but here are a couple more. As far as folks who are hybrid, we wanted to know what percentage of the week do they spend in the office. Again, back to Q 4 of 2022, which is that November time frame, 43% of the week was spent in office for a hybrid employee. Today, 46% of the week is spent in the office for your hybrid employee. So, what do those two things tell us? Big picture. Over the last three years, the percentage of folks working hybrid has gone down by only 2%. And the percentage of the time that the hybrid folks spend in the office has only gone up by 3%. 3% of a work week is what? 40 hours times 3% it's one hour. So one extra hour in the office. Okay. So those are the numbers. So that's what the data is telling us. Hybrid is stable, right? The amount of time hybrid employees are spending in the office has remained about the same for the last year. And we're at 2.3 days per week. Like I said, I think it I just told you a second ago was 46% right of the week. So 2.3 days per week. There are some outliers in these equations when we talk about exclusively in person, exclusively remote or hybrid. And the tech industry is one of them. Fully remote work is much bigger. Hybrid work much bigger in the tech industry. In person is not a common thing in the tech industry. Fully in person, excuse me. However, what's the other outlier? Federal government, right? We obviously have seen huge upheavalss in the federal government in 2025. And with the new Trump administration policies, remote work for federal employees is is essentially non-existent. So you've seen a massive move back to full-time onsite work. And those are two big things to call out. So I gave you the big picture number, US remote capable folks, but we've got these two exceptions, tech industry, federal government. And if you're someone who works or has recently worked in those industries, we would love to hear from you. Uh love to hear some of your experiences and some of your stories around any of these changes in policy. Love to hear from you. So that's this that's the big picture of this article. Okay? Wanted to let you know about that. But let's jump into what can you do, right? We know we know what's happening, but how can you make sure that if you're hybrid or remote that you're doing things well? And this is where some good practices come in. Now, I didn't include it in the Peter Hayashida segment, but he and I talked at the very end after the clip I uh I provided about some of Galla Gallup's oddly enough, some of Gallup's suggestions for how to make hybrid or remote work the best for your organization. And this article in September of 2025 says the same things. Nothing's changed in that regard. Employees used to have more control over their hybrid schedules. Now the decision is fairly even in terms of the split between employees deciding the manager or teams deciding or the company leadership deciding. Here's what the research shows today in 2025. And this is what the research showed in 2022. The team is the level that is the most impactful for a hybrid schedule. Okay? If you are high in your organization and you're listening to this and you and your leaders are are really um insistent on being heavy-handed and determining a policy for your entire organization, I'd encourage you to think about how you are mandating it and where the handoff occurs because the research suggests don't just make a policy from the highest level. Let the teams decide how they make that look. So for example, maybe you are telling folks they need to work in the office two or three days a week. Let the teams figure out on their own which two days they're coming in the office because the team should be together in the office and apart when remote. They should share the in-person parts of that hybrid schedule. And the benefit of this, when employees are told by the manager or the team what their hybrid policies are, they have the same positive feeling about it as if they get to chose choose that schedule themselves. Isn't that great? But when the leadership of the company just determines the policy for everyone in the company, they don't feel good about it. So if you have a policy, try to make it loose in terms of whatever that looks like, number of days maybe, but don't mandate the schedules or the cultural uh norms for the teams. Let the teams determine what that schedule looks like. That's when you're going to get the best impact on culture, the best morale around this topic, and therefore the team will work a certain way. But maybe you're thinking, well, we already rolled this out, you know, in 2023, and you know, we're done. Hey, guess what? You can change your policies. You could take that policy, reframe it for your employees and say, "We've been thinking about this. We want to make you more successful, set you up to be better and more cohesive with your teams. And so we're going to take our three-day per week policy on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and we're going to let you decide which three days you're coming in on a per team level. Right? You could do that. You can change it. The impacts will be positive. Okay. What about folks who get to decide their own schedule? individuals decide when they're remote and when they're in person in their hybrid schedule. They are actually the ones who are most likely to have burnout and stress and suffer from work life balance. Isn't that a bummer? When people get to decide their own schedule, they are more likely to be overwork. And maybe that's good for this week or next week, but it's not good for the long-term success of your business. So, that's an important thing to note. Uh, okay, great. So, let's get let's get down to it. The big picture, I'm sorry, the big takeaway for you as someone who leads a team, manages others, is in leadership uh in a company. Uh, it's great news because here are four things that you should know. We gave you the best practice about how to make the policy, but here's the last bit about how are employees actually working, right? It comes up both from managers and individuals that there's a trust issue either I'm a manager, I'm a manager and I'm not sure if my people are working when they're at home, right? Because we still don't know how to measure objectives effectively. I guess I don't know. or employees working at home think that their manager doesn't trust them anyway even if they are doing their work. Okay, so there's a trust issue. But here's the great news. There are four things that they asked individual contributors. Okay, four things they asked them and I'm going to list them for you right here in the survey. Here are the four things that they want people to say. I agree or disagree with these statements. Number one, my manager holds me accountable for meeting performance expectations when I work from home or remotely. Two, my team has a strong sense of community regardless of whether we are working from home or on site. Three, I receive timely and consistent communication about what's happening on my team, whether I'm at home or on site. And fourth, when working remotely, I receive the same opportunities for feedback and development compared to when I work on site. So, we're finding these are four important things that we need to harmonize when remote or in the office. If you can get this is the great news everybody those four things manager holds me accountable team has a sense of community I get consistent communication and I get consistent feedback whether I'm home or on site I'm sorry yeah at home or on site if you can get just one of those four things in the right direction just one of those four things you can increase the employee trust by 30%. So you don't have to um have a an over overwhelming change here with getting all four of these things gigantic initiatives with HR that are, you know, taking quarters and quarters. Can you focus on one of these four things? I mean, goodness, if I'm a manager leading a dozen people, if I can give you consistent communication about what's happening, whether you're here or not here in the office, set up those mechanisms, if I can just boost that for everybody on the team, no matter whether they're there in the office or they're at home remotely, I could get a 30% trust increase, folks. And I don't know if you remember this, but employees are telling us that they're looking for two things from their leaders right now, well above the rest of the things. They're looking for hope and trust. So, if you can boost that trust through consistent and timely communication regardless of remote or on-site, you're giving folks what they need. You're improving the trust factor. You're helping them be more productive. You're enabling a team that's trusted and ready to go kill it. We all want this, right? That's the great thing. We all want great safe environments with exceptional results. We all want it. So, there you go. The intro from Peter Hayashida, summary of the article with the trends which are things are basically the same between these three different work styles, folks. And then when your folks are remote, those four pieces, they're in the show notes. If you can boost one of those with your team significantly, you get a 30% increase in trust. And that increase in trust is what your employees are looking for in 2025. Don't underestimate the importance of your leadership to your team. Okay? So, I read the report so you don't have to. I hope you took something away from this conversation. We have got a lot of great work to do, folks. The results are waiting and the people are ready for you to lead them. Until next time everybody, take care.[Music][Music]