5 tips for making hybrid work in IT

When COVID-19 hit, IT had to adjust its internal processes and procedures, logistics and security policies while helping the rest of the organization transition to a full work-from-home environment. Then came the Big Layoff, which further complicated an already difficult situation when many employees, particularly baby boomers, decided not to return to the workplace.

For IT, this is doubly complex. For years, IT leaders have competed in the war for talent to hire the right people with the right skills and experience at the right time. Many of the people who decided to retire early in The Great Resignation were working on legacy technologies like Microsoft ASP Pages, PowerBuilder, and other platforms that were cutting-edge wonders in their time but have over time become technical debts in our data centers – and notoriously difficult to adjust. Add to this the ongoing need to support the billions of production lines COBOLthat will outlive us all.

While moving home was dictated by municipal regulations and fears of a widening pandemic, moving back to the office, fully virtual operation, or hybrid operation is based on management decision. And it’s proving to be a lot more complex than moving home in 2020 – hence the Great Hybrid Confusion.

Here are five tips to help you navigate successfully Operation of a hybrid IT organization.

Use Time Zone Banding as a setting strategy

Once the decision has been made to move to a fully virtual or hybrid employment model, the next question is where to physically deploy your virtual workforce. It’s certainly ideal if they live close to your company office so they can come into the office as needed or on a pre-determined schedule, e.g. B. every Tuesday or once a month for a staff meeting with all employees.

Your next best option is to use the concept of “Time Zone Banding”. The idea is that if you hire employees who live in one of your office’s time zones, rather than from around the world, the time zone-related logistics are eliminated and help you hire the best employees since everyone is working the first shift. For example, if you live in Chicago, IL, Central Standard Time (CST), you can hire employees in most of the United States and from northern Canada to the southern tip just by going east or west of South America and having a time zone all the same business hours.

Use IT as a virtual technology proving ground

Hundreds of millions of dollars are now being invested in new and exciting virtual technology products for use in office environments. Using IT as the company’s test bed for these new technologies allows IT to:

• Be seen as the internal thought leader for using cutting edge office communication, collaboration and productivity tools
• Increasing your own internal efficiency and effectiveness
• Better support these technologies as they are rolled out to the rest of the organization because IT looks at the technology from the user’s perspective

Avoid creating a split home/office team

A dichotomous home/office culture is when the employees who work in the office have a different culture and attitude towards work than those who work from home. This split culture can create feelings of ours against them or possessions and non-possessions within the organization. For example, office-only employees may be upset that they can’t work from home. Conversely, those who work from home may resent that office workers get all the good projects, are more likely to get promoted, and are less prone to layoffs. Whether these feelings are true or false is almost irrelevant. In such situations, perception is just as dangerous as reality.

Change leadership practices for a hybrid workplace

Leading a hybrid team relies on the same best practices and concepts as face-to-face, but you need to be much more strategic, tactical, and thoughtful about execution. Great leaders develop processes over time to run meetings, delegate tasks, motivate employees, and so on. The trick for you as an IT leader is to list each of the best practices you have successfully developed and analyze how they can be modified to work in your hybrid environment.

Beware of the slippery slope

A hybrid-related decision or a well-intentioned favor bestowed on an employee by a manager can inadvertently set a precedent. As an IT executive, your hybrid employee policies must be clearly defined with as little room for interpretation as possible and consistently applied by all IT managers.