Warner Bros, Vista Group, BNZ: HR leaders debate the 'ideal' hybrid model

Hybrid, remote, onsite - two days onsite or three? Employers and employees have been weighing up the options since the ceremonious ‘return to offices’ last year.

Panellists at HRD’s recent National HR Summit came together to discuss strategies they used in their organisations.

The panellists, Kiwi HR leaders Anna Ferguson, chief people officer at Vista Group, Kylie Elsom, vice president, people and culture ANZ & Japan at Warner Bros. Discovery, Matthew Cullum, GM colleague strategy, people and culture at BNZ, and Patricia Hubbard, senior consultant at Gallup all agreed that engaging a workforce in a hybrid environment is a balancing act that has been challenging to navigate.

“I want to start off by saying this is hard, this is proving difficult,” said Cullum to nods of agreeance from the sold-out audience.

At Gallup, there’s a big focus on on-boarding.

“Their first couple of weeks of induction are really intense. The one thing that we do is wrap the entire global team around them, they don’t just meet their colleagues in New Zealand they also meet a lot of our global network,” said Hubbard.

Ferguson agreed onboarding was a critical element. “It comes down to having the right processes in place to make sure no one falls through the gaps; we don’t want anyone to say I didn’t know that it would’ve been so much more effective if someone told me that on my first day, or week or month.”

Cullum said that while everyone had to become very slick at induction, the bigger thing for him was culture. “How do you maintain and keep engagement and actually have that long term culture,” said Cullum.

At Warner Bros. Discovery, Elsom said that under the three-day in the office hybrid model the organisation aims for, they want to create “those serendipitous moments where people you overhear can engage.”

Creating meaningful reasons to come into the office was a theme all the panellists touched on.

“I know that some people come in and they’re the only one there and they’re just like, what’s the point, I could be in my pyjamas at home,” said Elsom. “So, we try to create moments by getting whole teams to come in.”

Ferguson agreed, “How do you make sure it’s meaningful to come to the office? We talk a lot about creative spaces and collaboration and that’s really what brings people in and engages them. It has to be the people; it has to be the culture that people create.”

Cullum offers that playing on FOMO could be effective. “You will never win a productivity argument on why maybe being in the office is important – I’ll tell you right now you’ll be on to a loser,” he said.

“But if the conversation becomes more around what is that real fear of missing out, what are the experiences I’m missing out on and ultimately leading to us designing better solutions for our customers – I still think that’s missing because we haven’t figured it out yet.”