Peter Grabuschnig Archives - MDI Management Development

Purpose – Why Hybrid is more than a Buzzword

by Peter Grabuschnig | Mar 14, 2024 | Impuls series, Leadership Tips, Learning Transfer | 0 comments

Purpose – Why Hybrid is more than a Buzzword

Prefer to listen to the article? Click below to access our AI speech-generated audio. However, if you want to read it as usual, keep scrolling.

Purpose – Why Hybrid is more than a Buzzword

Is hybrid just a new trend? And what do different life realities of our employees have to do with it? In his new Rise Course, our MDI trainer and partner Peter Grabuschnig shares all his knowledge on Hybrid Leadership.

It offers a reflective look at your leadership behavior in times of new work, work location, and increasing flexibility. In this blog article, we will introduce you to the first pillar of the 3P model – Purpose. Enjoy reading!

What does hybrid even mean?

Even though the word hybrid can have different meanings in different contexts, one thing is clear – Hybrid is a mixture of two or more components. When we refer to Hybrid, we mean a combination of different workplaces, such as the office, the home office, or even abroad.

However, if we are honest, hybrid is still not perfect. That’s why I recommend considering how to enable more flexibility for employees in the future.

So who and what does this hybrid lifestyle have an impact on?

1. Ourselves:

In many companies you can now decide for yourself whether to work from home or at the office. This has significantly increased our flexibility.

2. The team:

Simply talking to our colleagues or going for a quick coffee break is not as easy as it used to be. Also, when planning office times, it is more likely to exclude others by forming groups or avoiding certain colleagues.

3. Leadership:

This goes far beyond the team level. It requires transparent communication, clear goals, and a strong commitment to the company. Maintaining performance and much more is expected of you as a leader.

4. Company:

Many companies are already considering what hybrid means for them and what benefits they can derive from it. One international client I advised even had the most productive year after the change to a hybrid setup.

Another customer decided to reduce the number of office buildings to 60%. The latter, however, is not a sustainable solution as there are days on which more people will want to go to the office.

Why should I as a leader care about leading a hybrid team?

Around 45% of the global workforce, at least according to McKinsey, can do hybrid work. Whether we like it or not, for these 45% the newly gained flexibility plays an enormous role in balancing work and life.

Hybrid is also exciting from an evolutionary point of view – we went through the agricultural era, the age of industrialization, and the labor movement. Today, our computers and smartphones dictate when and where we work.

By deciding where we work, we are now able to balance our work and personal lives much better. Not only that, it has also improved other aspects:

1. Technology:

We had to learn how to use new technologies and things are now working that we couldn’t have thought possible a few years ago. For example, taking part in an online workshop with the whole team from home.

From a technical point of view, a lot has developed in the last few years. Some new technologies such as VR will digitalize our collaboration even further in the future. It would, for example, make it possible to meet in a virtual room in 3D instead of just looking at your laptop in two dimensions.

Other developments such as AI or augmented reality are also revolutionizing the way we collaborate remotely.

2. Employees:

We can no longer avoid a hybrid setup – that is mainly because our employees have demanded it and even threatened to quit if they can’t work in a flexible environment.

So to be an attractive employer today, you need to think carefully about what you need your employees to do in the office, where flexibility makes sense, and what you can offer them.

Let’s now take a closer look at the individual life realities of our team members…

People have different expectations and life concepts, their job has to suit them. If it doesn’t fit, you look for another job. The fact that many aspects of our work can be taken over by machines gives us more freedom to create.

The classical performance-based society which encourages a lot of overtime and focuses on presence is becoming increasingly outdated.

A Microsoft study has shown the situation regarding hybrid working among employees and their individual preferences. Two out of 10 respondents would like to work exclusively from the office. This can be due to a variety of reasons, such as feeling lonely at home.

Surprisingly, 3 out of 10 don’t want to go back to the office at all. This could be due to care obligations, for example. Half of the respondents want a combination. Some prefer one home office day per week, while others would like to have more. These figures give us an idea of how many different life realities we as leaders now have to juggle.

The one-size-fits-all approach is no longer possible and there is no uniform solution that satisfies everyone. We have to respond individually to each employee and develop a suitable solution for the whole team.

The work environment has changed considerably, but the requirements for leadership have remained the same. Employees still expect recognition, fairness, open and transparent communication, a motivating work environment in which they can develop, and flexibility to balance life and work.

The leadership priorities have shifted. For example, in the hybrid daily routine, much more attention needs to be paid to communication, so that everyone knows everything they need to know.

What has changed is not the content but the context in which we work. Thus, we need to adapt our systems and behavior to the context to be successful.

I would like to give you one more piece of food for thought. I would like to invite you to take a retrospective look at the last 6 months of your work.

What experiences have you had in terms of hybrid working? What has (not) worked well?
What were/what are your challenges?
What challenges will your team face in the future? What would you like to develop or continue from what you have already experienced and tried out?

You can do this task individually, with a colleague, or even in a small workshop with your whole team.

We hope you have enjoyed this snippet from Peter’s Rise course! You can contact us if you are interested in this course or follow along on our blog, where we will share other content of the course as well.

Click Here to Contact us

Peter Grabuschnig

Trainer, Coach & MDI Partner

Peter is a partner and trainer at MDI, advising major international corporations on implementing hybrid work policies and building a hybrid work and leadership culture.

He is considered an expert in training design. With his Webinar Guru Framework he has developed a tool that helps to design training content for successful and activating virtual learning.

Get a glimpse into the elearning:

How to Increase Performance in a Hybrid Set-Up

by Peter Grabuschnig | Mar 14, 2024 | Digital Transformation, eLearning, Leadership Tips | 0 comments

How to Increase Performance in a Hybrid Set-Up

Prefer to listen to the article? Click below to access our AI speech-generated audio. However, if you want to read it as usual, keep scrolling.

How to Increase Performance in a Hybrid Set-Up

Is sitting 8 hours in the office productive? At the moment we are getting paid for the time spent at work. In the future, however, and this is something we already realize, the results will matter more than the time spent to achieve them.

In his new Rise Course, our MDI trainer and partner Peter Grabuschnig shares all his knowledge on Hybrid Leadership.

It offers a reflective look at your leadership behavior in times of new work, work location, and increasing flexibility. In this blog article, he will introduce you to the third pillar of the 3P model – Performance and explain how you can improve the performance of your team.

Time Spent vs Results Delivered

Working a lot of overtime and the associated assumption of hardworking employees is becoming increasingly outdated. Just because someone sits in front of a screen for 8 hours, doesn’t necessarily mean that they are also productive and efficient.

In many areas of our work, we have ready-defined clear factors that show us whether someone is performing. This is especially true in jobs that can be measured through numbers. There, we have personal Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and targets that you have to achieve.

In some positions, however, measuring performance is not so simple. In this case, it is necessary to define the KPIs, measures, and goals together which are used to measure whether one has been productive or successful. What we can see is a shift from Time Spent to Results Delivered.

Debunking Hybrid Leadership Assumptions

One of my clients had the most productive year in its history after introducing hybrid work. This is largely due to the employees working more productively at home. In the beginning, the assumption was that people would be too distracted in the home office or that they would need more motivation than usual.

However, this assumption was quickly disproven. In some cases, even the opposite was true. Due to the social interactions in the office, most employees do not get to 8 hours of focused and productive work per day.

Now, if individuals finish the same work faster at the home office than in the office, they effectively save themselves several hours in their days.

Beyond the Horizon: GenAI and Ethical Leadership

The Future Leader

Companies will have to think about how to deal with this in the future. After all, you are paid for the time spent working and not for the results you deliver. In the future, the focus per performance measurement will be more on the results and less on the working hours.

This means that as leaders, we will have to think about how and what goals we define with our employees. What work packages do we put together? How do we ultimately evaluate and measure performance?

Trust in Hybrid Leadership

Trust also becomes very important, as well as self-organization. Some people are better at this, while others struggle. If you think about your team, you will probably immediately think of people you know who do a good job at home and who you trust.

On the other hand, there are probably some people you are not 100% sure about, right? Now you can of course try to insist on presence in the office with those employees you don’t trust very much. But whether that makes things better is another question.

Because even in the office you can’t know if they are working productively or just killing time. Performance is not necessarily dependent on where you work, but rather on what goals you set and how you track and measure the results.

If you are not sure what performance to measure in your employees, discuss it with them. Work out together what makes sense and how they can show you as a leader that they are actively contributing to the results.

Being Transparent as a Leader

Transparency plays a particularly important role here. The classical micromanager who follows his employees’ every move will have a very difficult time in the hybrid system. On the other hand, too little supervision is also a disadvantage since you should know what your employees are doing all day.

Try to create a balance. Instead of constantly having to ask whether something has been done, first define for yourself what information you actually need and then make a plan with your team on how to get it.

This can happen through a stand-up, a Jour-Fix, but also asynchronously. It is only important that you make it clear to your employees that this is not about checking on them in a narrower sense, but also about their performance and them being seen and noticed.

Think about how you currently measure the performance of your employees. Is it mainly hard factors (numbers, data, facts,…) or is it also soft factors on an interpersonal level?

On a scale from 1 to 10, how satisfied are you per employee with the performance evaluation? Note: this does not mean the performance itself. Perhaps you have a personal proximity bias that rates the performance of certain employees higher or lower?

We hope you have enjoyed this snippet from Peter’s Rise course! You can contact us if you are interested in this course or follow along on our blog, where we will share other content of the course as well.

Click Here to Contact us

Peter Grabuschnig

Trainer, Coach & MDI Partner

Peter is a partner and trainer at MDI, advising major international corporations on implementing hybrid work policies and building a hybrid work and leadership culture.

He is considered an expert in training design. With his Webinar Guru Framework he has developed a tool that helps to design training content for successful and activating virtual learning.

Get a glimpse into the elearning:

Organize Your Team in a Hybrid Workplace

by Peter Grabuschnig | Mar 14, 2024 | Impuls series, International leadership development, Leadership in the digital transformation | 0 comments

Organize Your Team in a Hybrid Workplace

Prefer to listen to the article? Click below to access our AI speech-generated audio. However, if you want to read it as usual, keep scrolling.

Organize Your Team in a Hybrid Workplace

In his new Rise Course, our MDI trainer and partner Peter Grabuschnig shares all his knowledge on Hybrid Leadership.

It offers a reflective look at your leadership behavior in times of new work, work location, and increasing flexibility. In this blog article, he will introduce you to the second pillar of the 3P model – People.

Peter will present you with a few questions regarding People and hybrid work that you can reflect on to improve as a leader. Enjoy reading!

Organization Pre-Considerations

What can you as a leader do to adapt with your team to the realities of hybrid work? I would recommend that you first analyze the current situation of your team. You can answer the following questions:

How is your team currently structured?
Who are the team members?
What work areas are there in the team?
How would you describe the team in regards to belonging, knowledge levels, motivation, loyalty,…
How do you function as a team? What’s going well and what is going not well?
How well do you support each other?
What tasks do you handle together as a team?
What work is currently done in the office or the home office?
What work do you think needs to be done in the office?
Who is open to change and who is more skeptical about hybrid leadership?

This will give you an overview of where you currently stand. Continue with the other steps when you’re done with your analysis.

Expectations

As a second step, I want you to think about your expectations. Ask yourself questions such as:

What do your employees expect from you and vice versa when it comes to hybrid work?
What objections can arise or have already arisen?
What advantages have resulted for the team from hybrid working?
What are your go’s and no-go’s?

The clearer you are about what you want to expect from your team, the better you can communicate your expectations and achieve your goals.

General Collaboration Setup

Lastly, we look at the General Collaboration Setup. Deal with the following issues:

What formal and informal rules are there?
Are they all known, intentional, and communicated? (For example, is an employee allowed to go to the supermarket in the afternoon? Or can a father come to the office later because his child is sick?)

These questions show us some of the things that should be clarified. In a hybrid setup, there needs to be much more communication and coordination on things that may never have been an issue in a normal office routine.

Hybrid working also means that there are new tasks and responsibilities, at least in some teams. As a leader, do you sometimes feel like you have to take care of everything on your own? This can quickly become overwhelming.

Think about this:

Are there new or changed tasks or responsibilities? Is there someone in the team who can take on this task or perhaps even wants to do it? By delegating smartly, you will save yourself some time. This includes how we organize our work.
What processes already exist and are these suitable for hybrid working? Check that those processes that have been changed are working well.

The final area that we will cover in this section is legal frameworks. Our laws are still made for our industrially driven system and as we know, new laws take time. As attractive as it may sound, not every company can offer its employees third-place-working, for example.

This has to do with country-specific labor laws. The country you work in also has insurance and tax implications. Before promising any freedom, you should take a close look at the legal situation and also keep a good eye on it to react quickly in case of any changes.

Click Here to Contact us

Peter Grabuschnig

Trainer, Coach & MDI Partner

Peter is a partner and trainer at MDI, advising major international corporations on implementing hybrid work policies and building a hybrid work and leadership culture.

He is considered an expert in training design. With his Webinar Guru Framework he has developed a tool that helps to design training content for successful and activating virtual learning.

Get a glimpse into the elearning:

Creating Connectedness in a Hybrid Environment

by Peter Grabuschnig | Mar 14, 2024 | eLearning, Impuls series, Leadership Tips | 0 comments

Creating Connectedness in a Hybrid Environment

Prefer to listen to the article? Click below to access our AI speech-generated audio. However, if you want to read it as usual, keep scrolling.

Creating Connectedness in a Hybrid Environment

In his new Rise Course, our trainer and partner Peter Grabuschnig shares all his knowledge on Hybrid Leadership. It offers a reflective look at your leadership behavior in times of new work, work location, and increasing flexibility.

In this blog article, we will delve into how to create connectedness and a hybrid culture. Enjoy reading!

Flexibility and its downsides

Is hybrid work really to blame for the decreasing connectedness that employees feel for the company? In recent years, the employees’ sense of belonging in the company has decreased more and more. According to a recent study by the consulting firm Gartner, only 25% of employees feel a strong sense of belonging to their company.

Generally speaking, a distinction can be made between two different areas of belonging. On the one hand, clear vision and orientation are important. If people know where the journey is going and the direction is right for them, then they feel a sense of belonging.

Connectedness to the company

Simply put, I know what the culture and strategy of my company are, and I also believe it’s the right one. The second area would be connectedness to the company. This relates to the fact that the culture of the company I work at is important to me and that I also identify with it.

So if you want to create a high sense of belonging, we have to create clarity about the direction and the goals, but also a culture in which the employees feel comfortable and with which they can identify.

Gartner’s Study Findings

If we look at the numbers and the study, and only 25% feel a strong sense of belonging, you could link that number to the fact that people work at home and they don’t feel connected because they don’t see each other as often anymore.

Gartner looked into this with an exciting result: Companies that allow radical flexibility regarding when, where, and how they work, received the highest rates of connectedness with up to 53%. In turn, companies that allowed little to no flexibility had only 18% of employees with a high sense of belonging.

The more trust we give our employees when it comes to flexibility, the more connected they feel to the company.

Other Side-Effects

This has other much-needed side effects. Employees with high connectedness to the company have up to 30% higher performance and are 36% more likely to stay within the company.

In the past, companies have often tried to build an emotional connection through nicely decorated officesand frequent interactions with their employees to make people feel at home where they work. They believed this could create a certain connectedness with their employees.

That didn’t work before the pandemic and continues to be ineffective today in the hybrid set-up. Few who have a nice workspace at home go to the office because it’s so modern or because it has coffee.

So what are ways to create connectedness with your coworkers?

I have three tips for you.

1. Emotional Closeness

It’s not about physical proximity – your employees need to feel that you are there for them and available if they have problems. This will give them the feeling that they are important to you and they feel seen.

Make sure you always know what’s going on with your employees. In a hybrid work environment, it’s easy to overlook when conflicts between employees arise. Be close to your people and be there for them. It doesn’t always have to be a video call, you can just make a phone call and ask how they are and if they need anything from you.

Availability doesn’t mean around the clock, though. Define with your team when and how you will be available to each other.

2. Microcultures

Alignment is important. Company values are important. A well-communicated strategy is important. But these are mostly things that come along on a very high level and are not always easy for your team to graspand implement.

That’s why it makes sense to define yourself as a team. Consider together how you interact with each other. But also, what contribution you can make to the corporate strategy and how you live the corporate values or even prioritize them for yourself.

A micro-culture in a team has nothing to do with separation. Quite the opposite actually – the goal is to ask yourself what identity and integrity you have as a team and how you can contribute to the overall success of the company.

This includes working successfully with other teams and departments. A sense of belonging to the company always starts with a strong connectedness to one’s team or department.

Promoting cohesion and retaining talent: Leaders in focus

3. Spread culture through work and not through the office

Whether it’s a new office with modern furniture, a picture with the company’s values with a hundred signatures on it, or the company logo above the main entrance – our company is always present.

At home, things look a little different. That immediately raises the question – how do I perceive my company when I’m sitting in front of the screen at home? My physical environment doesn’t have much to do with the company. Whether I’m sitting there with a laptop from one company or another makes no difference, does it?

We have to think about how our employees experience our company at home. On the one hand, this can be possible through haptic objects, but also through individual work processes. A virtual background with office space, logos, or slogans is a start.

Strengthen your connectedness

But small gifts to employees can also be supportive. One participant recently told me about a birthday gift she received from her company years ago – a beach towel with a slogan on it, which she still uses when she goes on vacation. After all, there are no better brand ambassadors than our employees, right?

Think about how your company is perceived by people at home and above all, how it becomes more visible. Processes should always reflect the company’s values. For example, if your company claims to be innovative, your employees should not be troubled by slow and bureaucratic work processes.

It’s also important that our employees continue to see their impact. In the office, this often happens through informal hallway conversations and social interactions with each other. There, you often automatically got feedback when you had changed something for the better.

Today, you proactively convey this appreciation and the feeling that we have contributed something. As a last task, define at least one measure for yourself that you would like to implement to strengthen your connectedness!

We are very excited to experience this new adventure with you and delve more into the complex and exciting world of hybrid leadership!

You can contact us if you are interested in this Rise course or follow along on our blog, where we have shared a few snippets of the course as well.

Click Here to Contact us

Peter Grabuschnig

Trainer, Coach & MDI Partner

Peter is a partner and trainer at MDI, advising major international corporations on implementing hybrid work policies and building a hybrid work and leadership culture.

He is considered an expert in training design. With his Webinar Guru Framework he has developed a tool that helps to design training content for successful and activating virtual learning.

Get a glimpse into the elearning:

Changing the World with Hybrid Leadership

by Peter Grabuschnig | Mar 14, 2024 | eLearning, Impuls series, Leadership Tips | 0 comments

Changing the World with Hybrid Leadership

Prefer to listen to the article? Click below to access our AI speech-generated audio. However, if you want to read it as usual, keep scrolling.

Changing the World with Hybrid Leadership

In his new Rise Course, our trainer and partner Peter Grabuschnig shares all his knowledge on Hybrid Leadership. It offers a reflective look at your leadership behavior in times of new work, work location, and increasing flexibility.

In this blog article, we will introduce you to the overall course and give you a few basic concepts that will be dealt with. Enjoy reading!

The Three Ps

The topic is explored from three different angles: the Purpose-People-Performance (3Ps) model developed by MDI. The course will provide theoretical knowledge and practical tips and tools that you can implement directly into your day-to-day work as a leader.

Purpose – We will look at why hybrid leadership is important and why it is not just a new buzzword.

People – We work and reflect on organizational and interpersonal issues.

Performance – We will evaluate what constitutes performance and how we can better measure performance in the hybrid day-to-day.

What will be covered?

The impact of the flexibilization of the working world on leaders
Why it is no longer possible to avoid a hybrid working world and how to make the most out of it
How to organize your team efficiently in the new environment
How to deal with different life realities and personalities
How to conduct difficult conversations and what is important in hybrid conflicts
Which role do diversity and inclusion play in the hybrid context
What you need to foster innovation in the team
What you need to achieve high performance in the team
How to measure and push performance despite a hybrid setup

Modules

The course is modular. So you can view it entirely, or just focus on areas that are particularly relevant for you. The first module “Purpose” is recommended to be viewed in its entirety.

Goal

The goal is not to reinvent leadership, but to question and reflect on one’s leadership in the hybrid context and to get new impulses and ideas on how to lead oneself and the team in the new context of a hybrid workplace.

We are very excited to experience this new adventure with you and delve more into the complex and exciting world of hybrid leadership! You can contact us if you are interested in this Rise course or follow along on our blog, where we will share a few snippets of the course as well.

Click Here to Contact us

Peter Grabuschnig

Trainer, Coach & MDI Partner

Peter is a partner and trainer at MDI, advising major international corporations on implementing hybrid work policies and building a hybrid work and leadership culture.

He is considered an expert in training design. With his Webinar Guru Framework he has developed a tool that helps to design training content for successful and activating virtual learning.

Get a glimpse into the elearning:

« Older Entries