Below are three fundamental principles for leaders who aspire to build and maintain a post-pandemic remote or hybrid workplace that inspires innovation, encourages engagement, and cultivates success, with good leadership practices.

1. Trust and transparency

Managing in a hybrid or remote work environment is a likely change for your organization in various aspects. Perhaps it was something that was adopted during the pandemic, but the environment six months ago looks very different from what it is today. With travel on the rise and restaurants reaching full capacity, it is clear that people, although still working remotely, now have significantly different working conditions. Some may choose to work in a vacation home, while others may choose to work in a coffee shop or shared workspace.

We now face competing priorities at all hours and in much greater abundance. And this is not a reason to bring the workforce back to the office, but it is a reason to promote an environment of trust and transparency in which employees feel comfortable sharing their work schedules, home commitments, and optimal focus time. When we allow this information to be openly shared, we encourage an environment that maximizes people's strengths and remains inclusive. Trust and transparency are key to fostering a culture of productivity improvement. Consider having a discussion about "Ways of Working" with your team to better understand how and when they work best.

2. Alignment and accountability of strategy

With the workforce now entirely or partially distributed, it has become essential for organizations to ensure that a clear strategy is communicated by leaders at the top. From there, we recommend establishing OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) that can be disseminated throughout the organization so that each team and individual understands how their work contributes to the company's mission.

The responsibility for these OKRs is then defined by each manager to help ensure that work is completed on time so that other functions can perform their work. Flexible work arrangements require strict alignment and clearly established responsibilities.

3. Exploring how management and coaching have changed

Your organization is undergoing significant changes in its transformation to a hybrid and remote work environment. This statement holds true for companies that had remote practices in place before the pandemic and for those who were forced to try them for the first time in response to the pandemic. Therefore, it is important to remind ourselves, as leaders, that change takes time, planning, and continuous two-way communication between managers and employees.

Management and coaching look different now. What we once identified in a meeting room, we must decipher through web conferencing apps, messaging tools, and productivity metrics. With Monitoo, managers leverage the workforce analytics platform to analyze productivity data so they can understand when employees are most engaged and if they are taking sufficient breaks.

Leading through change

While employees spend much of this year learning how to balance their hybrid and remote workplaces in a post-pandemic world, we as leaders must initially remain patient during the change. Challenges are continuous and should be expected during cultural shifts, and we must embrace them as we guide our organizations to the other side. With the talent landscape becoming increasingly competitive, hybrid and remote workplaces will be a part of the future that we cannot ignore. Instead, we can embrace open cultures, clearer strategy and direction, and, above all, an openness to better management and coaching practices.

What did you think? Now you know the good leadership practices.

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