While getting set up for hybrid working can be hard, it shouldn’t be a hardship to anyone – your employees, your HR team, or your people managers.
Technology makes the logistics easier than ever – whiteboarding, team meetings, one-to-ones, grabbing a colleague for a quick question - these can all be accomplished in a snap from your desk, wherever in the world your people may be. Mobile data, easily available Wi-FI in coffee shops and fast home broadband means that the frozen screens of yesteryear should stay in the past.
The people conundrum
The one thing that can be complicated though, is understanding the people element. How often have you heard someone say that ‘we’re all different’? It’s an obvious thing to say, and obvious to see, but if we all behave differently, have different preferences in how we work, how we prefer to be managed, how we should be recognised and motivated, just how are organisations supposed to work that out? You could ask the employee in question, but not everyone is comfortable enough talking about themselves, or even sufficiently self-aware to be able to describe these things concisely in a usable way.
When you’re hiring and managing people in a hybrid working environment, it’s difficult to get this right, but oh so essential.
At Thomas, for forty years now, we’ve been helping businesses to better understand their employees, to objectively assess whether candidates will be a good fit for a specific role, to build high-performing, collaborative teams, and to engage and retain employees through deep psychometric insight. Our new talent assessment platform, Thomas Perform was released in the UK in 2020 with an aim of making it easier for organisations to recruit, manage and retain their valuable staff with instantly accessible content written to support these business outcomes.
Resilience, risk and remote working, oh my!
Over the past year, our Product and Science teams have been working hard expanding the functionality and content available within Thomas Perform. Our latest release adds new content outcomes that will provide valuable insight and make it easier for companies to better recruit and manage their people in every type of working environment from traditional, in-person to hybrid environments.
This new content will help businesses to understand their people’s approach to remote working, their mental and emotional resilience and their approach to risk.
Resilience is something that is often talked about, but little understood. We all know that we need to be resilient, but how can you tell just how resilient your current and prospective employees are? Thomas Perform can tell you how your individuals will approach challenges, how resilient they are, and how they cope with stress, pressure and challenging situations.
Remote working requires a combination of discipline and effective management to make it a success. Thomas Perform shows how comfortable your people will be with working remotely. What level of guidance and structure will they require in order to perform at their best? Will they maintain their own support network, or will you need to make sure that one is built and maintained for them? Are they an extrovert who will miss the physical interactions that an office provides, or will they put their head down and get on with their work? How will they cope with uncertainty and complexity? This deep insight into their behavioural and personality traits and preferences will make it easier to get the best out of your individuals, while helping you safeguard their wellbeing and mental health.
Risk is something that comes into almost everything we do, but when working in a hybrid environment it is particularly important to understand how your staff will approach risks. Will they get stuck in a cycle of indecision when having to make a choice, terrified of making the wrong one? Will they start to avoid people or situations that require them to make decisions they don’t want to have to make? How much time and effort will they put into evaluating risks? What level of support and guidance will they need to support them when making decisions remotely or even when in the office?
When used alongside the other content in Perform – how to motivate, how to manage, how to onboard and more – these outcomes can help you hire and build an effective and collaborative team filled with engaged, productive employees, whether working together in a traditional office or a hybrid environment.
With easy access to psychological insight like this, hybrid working doesn’t have to be a hardship anymore. Get in touch with us to find out more about how Thomas could help you to see your people more clearly and unleash the power of your people today.
