As America’s Hybrid Workplace Keynote Speaker, I understand that telling everyone in a pre-pandemic, in-person office that they must now go hybrid is filled with challenges. As I do so much research in this area, let me quickly recommend a Harvard Business Review piece from February 2022, that does a great job of touching on five of the challenges.
In speaking on the “new” hybrid workplace as a motivational speaker, I stress that the hybrid workplace is yet another layer of the blended workplace discussion. I’ve led audiences on the topic of blended workplaces for several years.
The Newest Thing in the Hybrid Workplace is You
In my role as a hybrid workplace motivational speaker, I stress that the problems of creating the hybrid workplace starts, not with them, but with you. If you are willing to enter into “a negotiation” to bring the team from virtual to in-person then you are half-way there. Consider these “negotiating” ideas:
- The culture principles and unique values of the workplace has suffered. What can be done to infuse everyone in the virtual world with the sense of community the organization once enjoyed?
- Imagination and inspiration drive great companies to do great things. Virtual companies maintained fairly well during the worst of the lockdown, but what now?
- Humans are social beings. There is widespread “evidence” across the country of co-workers connecting and socializing; why can’t this occur in an office as well?
- Are you willing to reach out to others and to synchronize, in-person meetings to generate excitement and spark creativity and a sense of team?
- What will it take for an invigoration of old-fashioned talking? I know workplaces where some remote workers who “refuse” to go on camera and aothers who no longer want to participate in brain-storming sessions.
As a national hybrid workplace speaker, let me share that it is now, more important than ever, that negotiation and communication between work groups, teams, generations and levels be practiced and internalized.
The alternatives to non-negotiation and poor communication are not pretty. Savvy workplaces in several industries are starting to make hybrid work. In becoming more hybrid and less virtual, hybrid organizations are once again rediscovering their cultures and core values; hybrid organizations are allowing the magic of between-people creativity to blossom; hybrid workers are once again meeting for lunches, throwing birthday parties and discussing organizational topics; hybrid workers are reaching out and synchronizing plans and hybrid workers are infusing workplaces with possibility and excitement.
If workplaces wait on one another to initiate the interaction so many of us miss, no interaction will take place. It may take a company-wide negotiation to get everyone on the hybrid workplace page, but any negotiation relies on someone to start and push along the process.
As a hybrid workplace motivational speaker, let me be the first to invite you to motivate someone today. Hybrid is a negotiation and its time organizations begin to communicate and act on moving together once again.
To contact Mike Hourigan, America’s Hybrid Workplace Motivational Speaker, for an in-person or virtual presentation, please call. Contact Mike today at (704) 875-3030 or fill out the form below.
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