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Challenges of leading a hybrid workforce

Jennifer Anzaldi — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 14:00:58 +0000

Challenges of leading a hybrid workforce Jennifer Anzaldi Wed, 11/02/2022 - 10:00

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Brett Josephson, associate dean for executive development at Mason, shares his insight on the challenges of leading a hybrid workforce.

It’s 9 am. Do you know where your team members are?

Before Covid, the answer was simple: They were – or were expected to be – in the office. The pandemic erased that certainty and accelerated the pace toward work-place flexibility. As we move forward in our post-covid work environment, employees are strongly indicating their preference for flexibility and self-determination regarding their working environment. A portion of the workforce will desire to stay at home with high flexibility, whereas others will return to the office by choice.

In my role as Associate Dean of Executive Development at George Mason �鶹��, I’m constantly talking to business leaders about their leadership and workforce struggles, concerns, as well as wins. Since Covid, a central theme of those discussions has been the complexity of managing hybrid teams. Fortunately, as we’ve all grown accustomed to the new normal, more and more managers are discovering that hybridity offers at least as many opportunities as challenges.

In my interactions with managers, I’ve seen that successful adaptation to the new normal requires managers to be intentional, purposeful, and transparent in their actions. Here are two areas managers need to consider as they continue to lead a hybrid workforce.

How to effectively monitor outcomes rather than activity. With hybrid, it is easy for managers to feel cut off from the day-to-day activities of their teams. Back when everyone was in the office, they could easily see what employees were working on. But the activity of remote workers is beyond such moment-to-moment oversight.

To recapture a sense of control, some companies have resorted to surveillance tools that use webcams, keystroke trackers, etc. to closely monitor employee activity. Like any other kind of micromanagement, though, these technologies send a discouraging signal to employees that their organization does not trust them. In some individual cases, that mistrust may be justified, but it shouldn’t be assumed for all employees.

Instead, managers need to experiment with a range of techniques to ensure not only that productivity remains high, but also that employees have the support they need to work effectively. The ideal solution will vary from team to team but could involve a mixture of interactive online tools (e.g., Slack, Teams, Google Docs), regular Zoom check-ins and one-on-one virtual meetings, even some in-person engagements and activities. It may take some time to get the recipe right – but once you do, the result will likely be maximised transparency and trust. A win-win for managers and employees alike.

Addressing power and politics. “Presentism” – the idea that leadership potential can be measured by the length of time one spends in the office – is still alive and well. Before the pandemic, employees who worked late also were more likely to receive personal attention from higher-ups who kept similar work habits, further increasing their opportunities for advancement. By the same token, it could be that employees who return to the office will enjoy an automatic political advantage over their remote-working colleagues.

The above-mentioned monitoring solutions would partly address this problem as well. Managers need a reliable way of measuring performance that doesn’t depend upon physical proximity. Beyond that, organizations should devise and implement proactive strategies for virtual mentoring, so that high potentials do not feel they have to choose between their career prospects and the flexibility of hybrid working. To be sure, any form of mentoring is time-consuming. But so is a preoccupation with office politics – a pre-pandemic obligation that could be lessened by virtual career development.

The politics of hybrid working can go in a different direction when all hands are urged to return to the office. Those with enough power may pull rank and refuse, creating an obvious hierarchical split– frontline staff commuting like it’s 2019, and higher-ups stubbornly staying at home. The perceived double standard could end up being a serious drain on morale. Yet another reason to embrace the new normal, rather than trying to force employees back to the office.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2022 issue of The Business Voice.

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Burnout and the future of B2B sales

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 13:38:21 +0000

Burnout and the future of B2B sales Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 09/20/2022 - 09:38

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Jessica Hoppner

Selling is inseparable from relationship management. In the past, the one-to-one "human touch" of a salesperson compensated for the standardized nature of their wares. However, today's sales environment tends towards customized solutions and co-creation with the client, especially in the B2B space. In many cases, these trends have greatly increased the network of stakeholders whom salespeople are obliged to keep happy.

Jessica Hoppner

Research shows that B2B customers benefit from being more involved in the process, but what about the sales force? Does their increased interpersonal burden translate to higher risk of burnout? George Mason �鶹�� School of Business Marketing Area Chair Jessica Hoppner's recently published paper in Industrial Marketing Management, co-authored by Paul Mills of Cleveland State �鶹�� and David A. Griffith of Texas A&M �鶹��, finds some surprising answers.

Academic explanations of burnout often rely on the job's demands-resources model, which compares workplace challenges against the tools on hand to help employees meet them. When professional demands rise sharply without a corresponding change in available resources, exhaustion followed by burnout becomes more likely.

Hoppner and her co-authors developed a set of hypotheses about the resources B2B salespeople would need to prevent burnout, given the increased responsibilities of customer participation. Their study took the form of a survey (designed with input from actual B2B sales professionals) completed by 210 salespeople. Three-fourths of the respondents reported that customer participation in their company's development process had grown significantly over the past year. The survey went on to ask how burned out they felt by their job, how much autonomy they had in their work, whether they felt sales ability was fixed or changeable and how much they felt it was worth investing time in developing skills, knowledge, and relationships. The final question was about the competitive intensity of their industry in the previous year.

Holistic analysis of the survey responses revealed that the stress of customer participation was not directly heightening the risk of burnout. Instead, B2B salespeople were rising to the occasion by reinvesting in critical resources - the aforementioned skills, knowledge, and relationships. In doing so, they became even more skilled, and better prepared to work with their customers. You could say that they turned stress into their superpower.

The intensity of their resource investment, however, was influenced by (a) their level of job autonomy and (b) their belief that sales ability can improve. The positive relationship between autonomy and salespeople's resource investment was even stronger in less competitive industries.

As Hoppner explains, "The salesperson wants to respond to these new challenges by investing in resources and getting new skills. The autonomy provided by your company influences how much you invest. The competitive environment influences whether you can invest as much. And you only have so much bandwidth as a salesperson to invest in new skills."

But investment always requires both authority and a certain amount of faith. Respondents who believed good salespeople are born not made - i.e. those with what psychologist Carol Dweck called a "fixed mind-set" about sales ability - would presumably consider upskilling a waste of time, whether or not their organization gave them the autonomy to do so. Their fatalistic thinking would prevent them from tapping the resources that might buffer them against burnout. Indeed, the "fixed mind-set" salespeople in Hoppner's sample reported not only less investment in core skills but also higher burnout than peers with a "growth mind-set" grounded in self-improvement.

In today's B2B sector, burnout prevention is a critical issue since value co-creation demands fully engaged and committed salespeople. Widespread burnout defeats the purpose of customer participation.

Hoppner recommends that sales managers remember the winning combination of autonomy and growth mind-set, particularly when customer participation is a top priority. Good B2B sales managers, she implies, will be comfortable transferring some control, especially in high-competition industries that may be more challenging on salespeople to begin with. In addition to receiving a reasonable degree of independence, salespeople should be fully trained in problem solving, project management, and other skills needed for full self-sufficiency.

It is also a good idea to promote a growth mind-set throughout the sales force, so that they will equip themselves with the resources necessary to meet their new challenges. Hoppner emphasizes that mind-sets are malleable. "A lot of times you talk about selection when hiring salespeople. But with one's belief in innate selling ability, companies have the ability to have interventions where you can train, mentor or coach people to have this growth mind-set," she says.

While burnout is a near-universal threat for workplace teams these days, Hoppner is cautious about generalizing her findings, preferring instead that their possible applicability outside of sales remain a matter for future research. She emphasizes that while every individual is different, the typical sales persona and portfolio of responsibilities may foster a preference for autonomy. This preference becomes even greater when their role undergoes a structural shift such as additional customer participation, and they need freedom to navigate those changes more effectively.

"The job autonomy is really the freedom for them to choose what makes sense for the context and what to do for the customer," Hoppner says. "How you're developing close interactions with your client, and creating custom sales solutions. It's definitely a creative endeavor because you are not sure what exactly is going to come up in the processes you're developing, and what the ultimate sale is going to be."

At the same time, she observes that in general "having employees be able to feel in control - over how they do their job and if they have the ability to learn - can help mitigate burnout when job roles change."

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