With so many people working from home, it is becoming more challenging for business leaders to maintain a vibrant company culture.
Even a move to hybrid work (part-time at home and part-time in the office) magnifies these challenges, making it tougher for leaders to determine team priorities and to implement cultural change. They need to continue to boost employee morale, maintain or improve performance, and keep everyone in the loop, but they find it harder to do so.
In short, business managers need to do everything that makes for successful teamwork. The environment in which they are now forced to work, however, makes this a more challenging task than usual.
Nudges
To help them cope in the new reality, Humu—a technology company based in Mountain View, Calif. that uses artificial intelligence to help organizations manage team performance—has developed Business Edition for mid-sized businesses. The program includes a package of what it calls “nudges” to help mid-sized businesses manage their remote workers and their hybrid workers more effectively.
The nudges—short, science-backed, and timely recommendations—help businesses to build effective teams through virtual yet personalized coaching, Humu says.
Remote work to continue
A Gartner survey that showed that almost all human resources leaders expect that their workers will work remotely at least some of the time into the foreseeable future. That situation will make it even harder for businesses to address many of the issues and challenges that teams naturally face even in an office setting, Humu says.
The nudges have been proven through years of research and experience in their use with Fortune 500 companies, says Wayne Crosby, co-founder and technical lead at Humu. Now, with so many companies starting to live with a hybrid model for their workers, they are being made available to smaller businesses.
Build on each other
The nudges complement and build on each other. Using them, entire teams and companies are able to work toward creating key skills together, the company says.
They focus on what Humu calls the five drivers for effective teams: Trust, purpose, learning, clarity and inclusion.
• Personal coach enables workers to choose the growth areas in which they are most interested.
• Rolling pulse surveys give insight into how workers feel and lets them adjust their programs to those views.
• Nudge control panel enables companies to address issues that occur, such as those that occur with moving to hybrid teams.
• Nudge activity dashboard provides information on how a business is engaging with nudges and how it is improving over time.