Leadership Hacks, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8Understanding hybrid

The global pandemic launched us toward remote work and a hybrid workforce team, with many leaders now having teams spread over different geographical locations. This was not new to many businesses that had previously set up remote and hybrid office functionality.

After selling my first business in Australia in 2000, I started a training and development company that provided custom learning and development programs on leadership, sales and customer service. Almost immediately I was involved in a large national and international training rollout that required us to recruit and train a team of facilitators who could deliver the training programs we were creating for clients.

As the business started to expand I had to make a decision. Did I take the traditional approach and lease a large office space somewhere in Sydney or should I do something different? The contracts we had were substantial and we quickly grew to deliver 300–400 days of training per year across the Asia–Pacific, which would easily justify a traditional office set‐up. However, when I started analysing the way our staff would work and our operations I questioned the benefit of a traditional full‐time office. Our clients almost always asked our facilitators to deliver the training sessions at their location or at a conference centre. In addition, our staff were located in different states and we didn't want to disrupt their lives by asking them to move to Sydney.

So we created a remote ...