The year 2024 marks a significant trend toward a hybrid work structure. CEOs need help with the complications of Return-to-Office (RTO) guidelines, and a deeper understanding of company culture is gaining popularity. Based on an open conversation between our CEO, Tom Nguyen, and Melissa Marsh, Plastarc's Founder & Executive Director, this article dives into the complexities of hybrid work arrangements.
As corporations begin implementing RTO policies, CEOs have slowly realized that these policies do not directly correlate to increased efficiency and the betterment of the workplace culture. Melissa Marsh sheds light on how C-Suite executives have realized this and reflect on the environment, noting that many larger organizations continue to oppose it despite longtime encouragement to embrace complete flexibility. The contrast between some firms' strict approaches and others' flexibility provides a starting point for learning more about the various aspects of workplace engagement.
Marsh highlights that professional engagement spans beyond the boundaries of physical space. It includes individual contacts inside an enterprise and collective involvement between employees and employers. In her words, physical workplace engagement refers to how the workplace reinforces and serves as a basis for the total experience inside a setting. Marsh states,
Workplace engagement is one type of engagement. We have engagement between people within an organization, and collectively, we have a level of engagement that might exist between an employee and employer.
Making decisive decisions regarding workplace culture and environment requires considering data that can be insightful in figuring out the next steps regarding RTO policies and how to increase employee engagement. Therefore, effective data use is critical to flourishing in today's dynamic work environment. Marsh provides valuable insights on the various data scales, distinguishing between extensive data, little data, and medium data. This method combines qualitative and quantitative techniques to provide a comprehensive knowledge of the employment experience.
She is an avid promoter of integrating many data sources and methods, claiming combining different data scales provides the most excellent chance for change and understanding.
Our viewpoint on data is really that you need those different scales in order to... really know what you want to change and how the future should be different
emphasizes Marsh. This strategy goes beyond developing a business case and seeks to identify what needs to change and how the future should vary.
As the pandemic shifted day-to-day employee engagement, the hybrid model came into play, which combines in-person and remote employment and emerges as a critical subject when speaking with Marsh. She describes it as the most difficult because of the absence of precedence and the requirement for significant expenditures in technology and digital encounters. Further, she states,
Hybrid is the hardest, partly because there's not a precedent for it... how do we manage or get a balance between the people who may be seeing each other in a physically co-located capacity and the people who may always be having that digital experience?
This strategy challenges enterprises to carefully balance shared and dispersed workforces, raising concerns about technology, inclusion, and preserving a unified company culture.
Big or small corporations must hone in on developing and maintaining a healthy workplace culture to ensure that employee engagement is always at its highest, especially considering a hybrid environment. Marsh recommends intentional measures for improving the office environment, such as minimizing physical space, holding purposeful on-site activities, and scheduling off-site retreats. These projects seek to make in-person encounters more meaningful by creating ties beyond the workplace. Marsh states,
One of the things that we see organizations doing is contracting their physical space... bringing events and programs and activities and things that make it worth coming to the office.
RTO policy mandates are critical for some, and for others, such as Marsh, these are negotiable depending on the company culture and employee engagement rates. Marsh expresses,
Many organizations have tried that mandate and have not been successful... the companies we're working with are investing in learning about who their employees are and what's going to make a difference to them.
Her reservations about such regulations highlight the need to know a culture. She argues for a more nuanced strategy, which includes learning about employees, engaging in physical interventions, and organizing purposeful events rather than imposing inflexible regulations.
Wanting to increase productivity and instill a positive workplace culture, middle management's function in preserving social connectedness is an essential factor. Marsh acknowledges that many managers need help to arrange activities and programs. She proposes training managers and offering tools to help them organize events, emphasizing the need toat develop weak and robust ties inside teams and across departments. She notes,
First and foremost, you know, we are able to get out of the house now, and we have our social activities as well as our office activities... really focusing on building those weak connections and then enriching them into strong connections.
Plastarc's website is an excellent resource for delving deeper into the subtle difficulties and tactics mentioned throughout the conversation. Marsh emphasizes the bibliographies, event information, and resources provided on the site. These include articles, research studies, lectures, and other materials, providing a complete resource for individuals seeking a better understanding of the relationship between people and location.
For that, we have our website plastarc.com, and on that website, we have a bibliography, which is everything that we've written for the last ten years or has been written about us.
