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Developing Junior Staff in a Hybrid Model

Developing Junior Staff in a Hybrid Model

Last updated on: June 12, 2023 at 9:59 am by Gleb Tsipursky

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Developing Junior Staff in a Hybrid Model 2023-06-12T09:59:22-04:00 Gleb Tsipursky

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Hybrid Model

Shortly before the layoffs at Salesforce, Marc Benioff, cofounder and co-CEO of Salesforce, recently sent a company-wide Slack message complaining about the low productivity of recent hires made during the pandemic and asked “Are we not building tribal knowledge with new employees without an office culture?” Salesforce permits a high degree of flexibility for employees: teams and their leaders make the choice about what kind of work arrangements suit their needs best. But does such flexibility threaten the development and integration of recently-hired junior staff?

That’s a concern raised by many companies I advise on transitioning to permanent hybrid work arrangements. They recognize that research shows staff are more productive working remotely, but worry this may not apply to junior staff who have not yet learned the systems, processes, and practices of the company. They also worry about the professional growth and cultural integration of junior staff: after all, the future of any organization depends on developing its junior staff into future leaders.

Thus, many leaders join Beinoff in expressing serious reservations about a flexible hybrid model. Instead, they advocate for a return to the office as a means of addressing such concerns and reinvigorating what Beinoff termed an “office culture.”

I tell such leaders that their concerns are real and need to be addressed. Yet there’s no reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Flexibility helps improve productivity and retention while cutting costs; it’s important and viable to find a win-win approach that retains these benefits while also facilitating the development of junior staff.

In fact, a full-time office return is likely to have a negative effect on junior staff, not a positive one. According to the ADP Research Institute report, “People at Work 2022: A Global Workforce View,” Gen Z are the most likely age group to say that “if my employer insisted on me returning to my workplace full-time, I would consider looking for another job,” at 71%. By contrast, 56% of those 45-54 said they would consider looking for another job.

On-the-job Training of Junior Staff in a Hybrid Model

Instead, the solutions I work on with clients involve a more targeted approach customized to the needs of junior staff. It does involve newer staff coming into the office more often, but not simply randomly: they’re not going to just pick up the culture and work habits of a company by osmosis, especially given that more experienced staff won’t be coming in as often as junior staff.

What’s needed is a deliberate, intentional, and structured program to facilitate their development and integration into company culture while maintaining flexible hybrid work arrangements. This policy is distinct from a company’s onboarding program, but should build on and plug into it, so that junior staff transition seamlessly from the onboarding program in their first several weeks into the development and integration program for the first couple of years.

A key component of a hybrid development and integration program involves on-the-job training. Such training comes primarily in the form of senior staff responding immediately to questions and concerns raised by recent hires: showing them how to do the tasks associated with the role, guiding them into best practices and unwritten rules and norms, and introducing them to important internal and external stakeholders. Likewise, such training involves senior staff observing the performance of junior staff and proactively providing them with feedback and suggestions for improvements.

Fortunately, such on-the-job training can easily be done in a small-group style, with one senior staff member helping train six to eight junior employees. It takes having senior staff members coordinate schedules with junior staff to come to the office on the same days, and then work in the same open office space.

All of the employees will work on their individual tasks. When a recent hire has a question, they ask it, and the experienced employee will answer and explain the context; doing so ensures that the whole group gets the benefit of the explanation, without the senior staffer having to repeat it for each person in a one-on-one training setting. Additionally, the senior staff member will occasionally walk around and check in on the tasks of junior staff members, providing them with guidance and coaching as needed. Again, this helps the whole group learn how to do this task.

This kind of activity does impede the efficiency of senior staffers, and needs to be considered in their performance evaluations as a service to the company. But this impediment is relatively small, because of a one-to-many dynamic of teaching many recent hires at once. No one person should be overburdened with training: this task should be distributed among a number of senior staffers known as good on-the-job trainers. It’s helpful for junior staff to get on-the-job training from a variety of senior staff members rather than from just a single individual; recent hires get multiple perspectives and tactics for accomplishing work outcomes, while also learning about and connecting with different networks and stakeholders within a company.

Mentoring of Junior Staff in a Hybrid Model

As part of the development and integration program, it’s also helpful to provide formal mentoring for newer employees. Most of the mentoring should take place in the office, since it’s easier to have conversations where recent hires can be vulnerable and admit lack of confidence face-to-face, rather than by videoconference.

Make sure to have one senior staff member from the junior colleague’s immediate team. The goal of the senior person within their own team is to help the person with on-the-job learning specific to the team’s tasks and with understanding team dynamics. Also include two from outside the team. One should be from the junior staff members’ business unit, and another one should be from a different unit. At least one should be located in a different geographical area, if the company is large enough. These two mentors will be needed to overcome one of the key problems uncovered by research on company culture in hybrid work: the decrease in cross-functional connections across staff.

Having three mentors decreases the burden on each, allowing meetings of once or twice a month with each. As a result, such formal mentoring is easily manageable for experienced employees.

Digital Coworking for Junior Staff in a Hybrid Model

What about the days when recent hires work remotely? To facilitate on-the-job learning through virtual settings, as well as to promote effective team collaboration, employ digital coworking. It involves team members spending an hour or two per day working on their own tasks while on a videoconference call with their teammates.

To start a digital coworking session, team members should first join a videoconference call. During this call, each team member should share their plans to work on their own tasks for the session and then turn off their microphone while keeping their speakers on, with video optional. Then, team members work independently on their own tasks while still being able to communicate with each other by turning on their microphone if they have a question or comment. More experienced team members would then respond to the question, including using screensharing or a virtual whiteboard to demonstrate how to complete a task. Digital coworking helps to replicate the experience of working alongside coworkers in a shared office space, which is helpful for on-the-job training for junior staffers.

Conclusion

Benioff isn’t wrong to call out the challenges in developing junior staff in a hybrid setting. Yet the solution doesn’t involve returning everyone to the office to ensure an “office culture.” Instead of a broad-brush approach that sacrifices flexibility, and its benefits for retention, productivity, and cost savings, my clients find it helps to have a narrow, targeted approach that addresses the problem. The solution is a structured program that transitions recent hires smoothly from onboarding in the first several weeks into integration and development for the first couple of years, with in-office on-the-job training and mentoring, along with digital coworking.

Key Take-Away

A successful hybrid model depends on effective integration of junior staff. To do so, they should come to the office more often than senior staff to get on-the-job training and mentoring… >Click to tweet

Image credit: fauxels/Pexels

Originally published in Disaster Avoidance Experts

Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky helps leaders use hybrid work to improve retention and productivity while cutting costs. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. He is the best-selling author of 7 books, including the global best-sellers Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters and The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships. His newest book is Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams: A Manual on Benchmarking to Best Practices for Competitive Advantage. His cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 650 articles and 550 interviews in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Inc. Magazine, USA Today, CBS News, Fox News, Time, Business Insider, Fortune, andelsewhere. His writing was translated into Chinese, Korean, German, Russian, Polish, Spanish, French, and other languages. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for Fortune 500 companies from Aflac to Xerox, and over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist at UNC-Chapel Hill and Ohio State. A proud Ukrainian American, Dr. Gleb lives in Columbus, Ohio.

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About Dr. Gleb Tsipursky

Known as the Disaster Avoidance Expert, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases, which devastate bottom lines and bring down high-flying careers. His expertise and passion is developing the most effective and profitable decision-making strategies, based on pragmatic business experience and cutting-edge behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience, to empower leaders to avoid business disasters and maximize their bottom lines. You can learn more here https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/glebtsipursky/ The bestselling author of several books, Dr. Tsipursky is best known for his national bestseller on avoiding disasters and achieving success in business and other life areas, The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide. His next book, Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters, is forthcoming with Career Press in November 2019. It’s the first book to focus on cognitive biases in business leadership and reveal how leaders can overcome these dangerous judgment errors effectively. After that he’s publishing The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships with New Harbinger in April 2020, the first book to focus on cognitive biases in professional and personal relationships and illustrate how we can defeat these dangerous judgment errors in our relationships. See more information here https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/author-page/ Dr. Tsipursky’s cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 400 articles he published and over 350 interviews he gave to popular venues that include Fast Company, CBS News, Time, Scientific American, Psychology Today, The Conversation, Business Insider, Government Executive, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Inc. Magazine, and many others, as you can see here https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/media/ Dr. Tsipursky's expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, speaking, and training for businesses and nonprofits. He serves as the CEO of the boutique consulting, coaching, and training firm Disaster Avoidance Experts, which uses a proprietary methodology based on groundbreaking research to help leaders and organizations maximize their bottom lines by addressing potential threats, seizing unexpected opportunities, and resolving persistent personnel problems. His clients include Aflac, Balance Employment Assistance Provider, Edison Welding Institute, Fifth Third Bank, Honda, IBM, International Coaches Federation, Ohio Hospitals Association, National Association of Women Business Owners, Sentinel Real Estate, The Society for Human Resource Management, RealManage, The Columbus Foundation, Vistage, Wells Fargo, the World Wildlife Fund, and over a hundred others who achieve outstanding client results. You can learn more about that here: https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/about Dr. Tsipursky also has a strong research and teaching background in behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience with over 15 years in academia, including 7 years as a professor at the Ohio State University and before that a Fellow at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His dozens of peer-reviewed academic publications include journals such as Behavior and Social Issues, Journal of Social and Political Psychology, and International Journal of Existential Psychology and Psychotherapy. His civic service includes over 4 years as the Chair of the Board of Directors of Intentional Insights, an educational nonprofit advocating for research-based decision-making in all life areas. He also co-founded the Pro-Truth Pledge, a civic project to promote truthfulness and integrity for individual professionals and leaders in the same way that the Better Business Bureau serves as a commitment for businesses. He serves on the Advisory Board of Canonical Debate Lab and Planet Purpose, and is on the Editorial Board of the peer-reviewed journal Behavior and Social Issues. A highly in-demand international speaker, Dr. Tsipursky has over two decades of professional speaking experience across North America, Europe, and Australia. He gets top marks from audiences for his highly facilitative, interactive, and humor-filled speaking style and the way he thoroughly customizes speeches for diverse audiences. Meeting planners describe Dr. Tsipursky as "very relatable," as "a snap to work with," and as someone who "does everything that you would want a speaker to do." Drawing on best practices in adult learning, his programs address the wide spectrum of diverse learning styles, as attested by enthusiastic client testimonials and references. He regularly shares the stage with prominent leaders, for example recently speaking on a roundtable panel with the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, Secretary General of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies Elhadj As Sy, Chancellor of Austria Brigitte Bierlein, CEO of Penguin Random House Markus Dohle, and billionaire philanthropist and Chair of the Bertelsmann Management Company Liz Mohn. You can learn more about his speaking and see videos here: https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/speaking/ Dr. Tsipursky earned his PhD in the History of Behavioral Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011, his M.A. at Harvard University in 2004, and his B.A. at New York University in 2002. He lives in and travels from Columbus, OH. In his free time, he enjoys tennis, hiking, and playing with his two cats, and most importantly, he makes sure to spend abundant quality time with his wife to avoid disasters in his personal life. Learn more about him at https://DisasterAvoidanceExperts.com/GlebTsipursky, contact him at Gleb[at]DisasterAvoidanceExperts[dot]com, follow him on Instagram @dr_gleb_tsipursky and Twitter @gleb_tsipursky. Most importantly, help yourself avoid disasters and maximize success, and get a free copy of the “Assessment on Dangerous Judgment Errors in the Workplace,” by signing up for his free Wise Decision Maker Course at https:// DisasterAvoidanceExperts.com/Subscribe You can read more about the author here.

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