Before March 2020, I had never managed a 100% remote workforce. I had to quickly learn the best methods for communicating between me and my team, strategies for keeping projects moving forward, and most importantly making sure that people felt as safe as possible and valued. As the summer continued and we implemented our reopening plans, I found myself facing another first: managing a hybrid workforce. For me that means managing about 11 members of our team, who are working some amount of hours (typically 2-10 per week) onsite, and 3 others, who are continuing to work 100% remotely. Though most of the lessons of managing a team working 100% remotely holds true in this new hybrid model, there are several key differences.
- Response time for communication: When we first went remote, our leadership team established expected response times to help ensure that people stayed connected. We primarily rely on Teams and email. Though several of our faculty/staff really like the chat feature of Team and use it heavily, others prefer not to have it open 24/7. We decided to change our expectations for responding to chat messages to help ensure that the time our faculty/staff spent onsite could be as productive as possible, which generally means spending time working with collections and not a computer or device. Instead, we try not to send chat messages when we know someone’s working onsite, unless the message pertains to their work or will hold someone else up with the work they’re trying to do remotely. We continue to expect that faculty/staff will respond to email with 24 hours. We’ve encouraged our team to indicate in their emails when a response isn’t required or to establish deadlines to help each of us manage our communication and workload.
- Lending a hand: Our plans for reopening included scheduling time onsite using LibCal. We have many shared and confined spaces within our footprint and scheduling time helps us to know when we’re nearing capacity in a particular space. Our faculty/staff have different comfort levels with working onsite and scheduling time helps us to accommodate those needs as best we can. I’ve encouraged our team to reach out to one another and pitch in when needed. This could be checking a file to save someone a trip onsite or setting up a project for someone to pick up with the following day.
- Being a good neighbor: The biggest challenge we’ve faced in the first month of reopening has been being a good neighbor to our partner units, which include cataloging, digital services, shipping and receiving, and off-site storage staff. We heavily rely on these units to help us do our work. Since we’re not keeping regular hours onsite, except for when our reading room is open to researchers from 1-4pm M-F, we’ve had to increase our communication between units and establish point people for them to contact when something comes up. We found that our plans required a number of adjustments once we began working onsite and we’ve spent a considerable amount of time making changes over the past few weeks. I imagine we’ll continue to make changes throughout the fall semester.
- Changing nature of productivity: For some of my team, working remotely enabled them to be incredibly productive and to work on projects they’ve long had on their dream to-do list. They did research and wrote articles, began digital projects, made instructional videos, and participated in professional development opportunities. For others the context of working remotely during a pandemic greatly impacted their productivity. For these faculty/staff returning to onsite work has had a positive impact. For others, the start of the semester has meant an increase in unplanned work, including classes to teach, new donations, and an increase in meetings. I continue to think of ways to help all of my faculty/staff maintain the level of productivity and enjoyment in their work that they desire.
What strategies have you developed to manage a hybrid workforce?