By Karen Clark Salinas
Parents are desperately trying to integrate a healthy professional life with a meaningful personal life. The pandemic fast-tracked the opportunity to reimagine the workplace so it better reflects their lives. One in which employers value their employees for the work they do, not where they do it from.
Done right, hybrid work is a game changer to rebalance work + life on your terms — without sacrificing career success.
Hybrid Work Is the Future
A majority of companies are offering hybrid work to compete for and retain talent and increase productivity. Taken together, hybrid work is the future of work. High-achieving professionals can leverage hybrid work to redefine how they work, parent, and achieve financial freedom — on their terms.
Experts championing the benefits of hybrid work discuss how it:
- Allows greater control of worker productivity.
- Focuses on results and not butts-in-seats presentism.
- Improves employee self-care.
Undoubtedly, these are real and important benefits. But the following ten benefits of hybrid work need more air play because embracing them helps you:
- Take charge of your career proactively.
- Increase your success by rebalancing work + life.
- Lead and role model what’s possible.
Hybrid Work Is Good for You at Work
Hybrid work can fuel your career success by increasing productivity, focusing on results (not facetime), highlighting how you can show up for your team and become a role model of what’s possible. All factors your employer cares about deeply.
You can make hybrid work positively impact your career by:
- Managing the ebb and flow of work. Workflow — AKA the pace and quantity of work — is one of the significant factors impacting your sense of work-life balance. As a high achiever, you expect periodic and seasonal upticks in your workflow. Greater control of how, when, and where you work becomes a great way to manage your energy during these periods of episodic overwork. For example, it lets you weave in self-care into your day or week and return to work more focused on the tasks that are most important. It can even help you gain a better perspective when dealing with chronic overwork, by taking a break, and rethinking what is truly mission critical.
- Gaining quiet time for focused work. Creating routine quiet time for planning, writing, building, etc. isn’t always easy — especially in today’s 24/7 instant turnaround workplace where you’re always connected and often interrupted. The barrage of communications has workers feeling pressure to keep up with everything, which if not managed successfully can result in digital exhaustion. Hybrid workers learn how to use time in the office to connect with others, and to reserve thinking work, that is best accomplished distraction-free, while working remotely.
- Improving self-management. Autonomy is one of your instinctive psychological needs. When it’s thwarted, your motivation, productivity, and happiness plummet. When you have greater control over how, when, and where you work, you’re more productive, have greater job satisfaction, less burnout, and higher levels of psychological wellbeing. In short, the more autonomous nature of hybrid work helps you achieve more while feeling more engaged and fulfilled.
- Working with a work-life perspective. A work-life perspective is sensitive to and respectful of how you communicate and work with your coworkers. Your behaviors impact their work-life boundaries, either positively or negatively. Done right, hybrid work facilitates better communication protocols to help you choose the best tool for the message content and urgency, such as sending an email to be less disruptive than an IM for a non-urgent message. When you honor your and your coworkers’ work-life boundaries you show up as a team player, increase trust, and lead by example.
- Taking charge of your career development. Detractors of hybrid work correctly voice concerns that the potential out-of-sight, out-of-mind nature of remote work can hurt career advancement. As an antidote, successful hybrid workers proactively seek mentoring, send clear career signals, explore options for learning and development and grow a broader network through maintaining routine connections. In addition, they solicit performance feedback and regularly discuss how their professional goals are aligned with larger business goals.
- Deepening trust. Trust is typically earned, however, hybrid work done right requires a mindset of confident trust in your coworkers from the start. Two types of trust build strong work relationships: relational trust — learning about others’ families, hobbies, experiences, heritage, and culture — and transactional trust — task-focused involving work quality, timeliness, adherence to expectations, responsiveness, and technology use. Team members who trust each other feel psychologically safe and aren’t afraid to speak up, be themselves, admit to their mistakes, or offer honest feedback. This authenticity spurs productivity and wellbeing.
- Enhancing your boss’s reputation. During this time of unrelenting change, demonstrating that your boss is part of the solution by leading well and delivering results will be appreciated. When you consistently contribute to a high-performing hybrid team that achieves outcomes, cultivates an inclusive culture, and retains talent, your boss shines which reflects positively on you too.
Hybrid Work Is Good for You at Home
Done right, hybrid work can level the playing field at home by breaking down gender roles and expectations about how families should operate.
Make hybrid work positively impact your home life by:
- Prioritizing fairness with your lifelong partner. Infusing your relationship with reciprocity reduces resentment and boosts trust. Each partner is empowered to conceive, plan, AND execute caregiving and home management tasks based on an agreed-upon minimum standard of care. Hybrid work and the autonomy it fosters underscores the need for each partner’s time to be valued equally.
- Growing capacity for caregiving and home management. When partners have greater control over how, when, and where they work they can step out of outdated gender roles and into more responsibility for what’s collectively good for the family. Instead of one partner (typically the wife/mom) making family members’ needs and wants magically possible, both partners can agree on what the family needs, and find equally satisfying ways to meet these needs.
- Developing hobbies. Done right, hybrid work permits time and energy to pursue interests that bring joy and feelings of staying true to yourself — thereby improving mental health. Hobbies inherently produce more creativity, confidence, and ways to expand and express your passions. As you build hobbies in one area of your life, they can’t help but infuse other parts of your life. If you feel in a rut, engaging in your hobbies can help you look at a situation with new eyes. And your chosen activity gives you the calm and rest to step back and assess all aspects of your life.
Make Hybrid Work a Triple Win at Work and Home
The time has arrived for overloaded parents to rebalance work + life so both better reflect the lives they deserve. Done right, hybrid work provides the path forward.
Organizations need to place more emphasis on choice for all employees and accept that requests for flexibility in how, when, and where to work represents the future of work. In fact, it’s the secret sauce to attracting and retaining top talent who deliver results and cultivate an inclusive culture where all employees have opportunities to succeed at work and at home.
Don’t wait to make hybrid work work for you and your family. Start with the goal of triple wins.
You can design a triple win at work so it’s:
- Good for you.
- Good for your work.
- Good for the people you work with (internally and externally).
You can design a triple win at home so it’s:
- Good for you.
- Good for your lifelong partnership.
- Good for your family.
As you consider the 10 benefits of hybrid work you can leverage, which one might help you achieve a triple win at work or home? What would it take to make progress?
Thank you Karen Clark Salinas
Karen Clark Salinas, MSW, MSEd, NBC-HWC, is a national board certified health and wellness coach and founder and CEO of Rebalance Wellbeing. She’s on a mission to help more professionals work and raise a family without sacrificing wellbeing. Karen coaches professionals to redefine how they work, parent, and achieve financial freedom.
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