How to Measure the Success of Your Hybrid Work Model

Thus, if the C-suite chooses to adopt a more flexible policy, I recommend that my clients put it on their website’s “Join Us” page, as did one of my clients, the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute. HR will inevitably find they get an uptick in inquiries from job applicants referencing this policy, as well as potential hires showing enthusiasm for it in interviews. That enthusiasm is something that can be measured.

Retention offers a clear-to-measure, hard success metric, one both quantitative and objective.  A related metric, recruitment, is a softer metric: It’s harder to measure and more qualitative in nature. External benchmarks definitely indicate offering more remote work facilitates both retention and recruitment. For instance, a survey of 1,000 HR leaders finds that 95% of respondents believe offering hybrid work to be important for recruitment, and 60% perceive that hybrid work boosts retention. And in an Owl Labs report surveying 2,300 full-time U.S. workers, 52% indicated they would be willing to take a pay cut of 5% or more to be able to choose where they could work.

A key metric—performance—may be harder to measure, depending on the nature of the work. For instance, a study published in the National Bureau of Economic Review reported on a randomized control trial comparing the performance of software engineers assigned to a hybrid schedule vs. an office-centric schedule. Engineers who worked in a hybrid model wrote 8% more code during a six-month period. Writing code is a standardized and objective measure of productivity and provides strong evidence of higher productivity with at least some remote work. If there is no option to have such clear performance measurement, use regular weekly assessments of performance from supervisors. But avoid software tracking programs, which Owl Labs reports causes 45% of employees to feel stressed.

Top leadership should establish clear success metrics for an organization’s hybrid work model. Measure quarterly to ensure the model is effective and meets the organization’s needs.

Innovation

How to Measure the Success of Your Hybrid Work Model

Which metrics make the most sense for your company?

That’s a mistake. A transition to a permanent hybrid work model is a strategic decision about the company’s long-term future. It requires a proportinal degree of attention and care at the highest levels of an organization. Otherwise, the C-suite will not be coordinated and fail to get on the same page about what counts as “success” in hybrid work, and find themselves in a mess six months after their hybrid work transition.

With 74% of U.S. companies transitioning to a permanent hybrid work model, leaders are turning their attention to measuring the success of that model. That’s because there’s a single traditional office-centric model of 9–5, Monday through Friday, in the office, but many ways to do hybrid work. Moreover, what works well for one company’s culture and working style might not work well elsewhere, even within the same industry. So how should a leader evaluate whether the model they adopted is optimal for their company’s needs, or whether it needs refinement?

Measuring professional development is best done through more subjective tools, such as surveys and focus groups. You can also assess how much staff improve in the areas where they received professional development, and compare in-person vs. remote modalities of delivering learning. Evaluating leadership development is easier and more quantitative and objective. Assess how well your newly promoted leaders succeed based on performance evaluations and 360-degree reviews. Inducting and integrating new staff involves performance evaluations by supervisors and measuring staff productivity.

Conclusion

One way to get at well-being and burnout involves a hard metric: employees taking sick days. By measuring how that changes over time—seasonally adjusted—you can evaluate the effect of your policies on employee mental and physical health.

Measuring DEI is quite easy and objective: Look at the retention of underrepresented rank-and-file staff and leaders as the hybrid work strategy gets implemented. Also, make sure that your surveys allow staff to self-identify relevant demographic categories so that you can measure DEI as it relates to engagement, morale, and so on. 

Once you have the baseline data from these diverse metrics, at the off-site meeting the C-suite needs to determine which metrics matter most to your organization. Choose the top three to five metrics and weigh their importance relative to each other. Using these metrics, the C-suite can then decide on a course of action on hybrid work that would best optimize their desired outcomes.


Measuring retention, performance, engagement, and morale can offer insights into the effectiveness of your hybrid model. But some metrics are easier to measure than others.

Last, but far from least, my clients also consider professional and leadership development, and training and integration of junior team members. A Conference Board survey finds 58% of employees would leave without adequate professional development, and that applies even more so to underrepresented groups. Leadership development is critical to the long-term continuity of any company, and inducting and integrating junior staff is a fundamental need for success. Yet most companies struggle with figuring out how to do these things well in a hybrid setting.

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Getting at these metrics requires the use of more qualitative and subjective approaches, such as customized surveys specifically adapted to hybrid and remote work policies. As part of doing the survey, it’s helpful to ask respondents to opt into participating in focus groups around these issues. Then, in the focus groups, you can dig deeper into the survey questions and get at people’s underlying feelings and motivations.

As the saying goes, “What gets measured gets managed.” But it’s important to remember the full saying: “What gets measured gets managed, even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organization to do so.” The second part of the saying points to the importance of carefully selected metrics that are both meaningful to the organization’s success and can be effectively measured, ideally quantitatively and objectively, but if needed, qualitatively and subjectively, to avoid bias.

A hybrid work model is a strategic decision

Diversity, equity, and inclusion represent an often-overlooked but critically important metric affected by hybrid work. We know that underrepresented groups strongly prefer more remote work. Thus, my clients who chose to have a mostly office-centric schedule had to invest substantial resources into boosting their DEI to compensate for the inevitable loss of underrepresented talent.

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Quality Digest

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