Hybrid working is here to stay. The CIPD found that 40% of firms already operate a mix of office and remote working and according to Accenture, over eight in ten employees are pro hybrid work.

But, to access the benefits hybrid working brings – better productivity, flexibility and inclusivity, as well as improved work-life balance for employees – organisations will need strong leaders, who understand and have the skills to execute a good hybrid learning strategy.

Successful hybrid leadership

In this new hybrid world, leaders have two roles. They must learn new skills and behaviours themselves in order to drive good individual, team and organisational outcomes. And they must be a champion, model student and enabler of learning, in effect bridging the gap for their workforce, linking existing skills and learning structures with new ways of working.

This is likely to involve the management of conflicting skillsets and mindsets, and the most successful leaders will remain mindful of the impact that hybrid working can have on mental health. Multiple studies have correlated remote and hybrid work with an increased propensity, or actual cases, of burnout, therefore good leaders will need to evolve from managing inputs and time – the traditional ways of working – to focusing on outcomes and energy.

It isn’t easy. Leaders will need to manage individual and team performance, communication, productivity and development in a world that is increasingly distributed and asynchronous, with different levels of employee-leader proximity.

Building new expectations

To be successful, leaders must take an evolved approach to work-life balance, recognising new expectations around flexibility and ways of working and creating revised work structures that take into account individuals’ different situations and their views around meetings, communication and hybrid working – at all levels.

Outcomes and goals should be clearly defined, as well as what mindful communication and response times look like. Transparency and inclusivity should be top priorities. A distributed setting can shift fairness and equity, and a good leader must understand that and seek ways to manage proximity bias, experience sharing, and good work outcomes.

Part of this will include fostering a better understanding of how connection changes in a hybrid world. Chance encounters and ‘water-cooler’ moments now have to be proactively managed and engineered. Regular check-ins allow employees to be supported with mentoring, feedback and sharing of opportunities and give leaders the chance to celebrate growth and success.

Balancing learning and leading

To ensure that learning is an organisational, team and individual priority, leaders must work in tandem with development professionals. They should ensure that best practice hybrid learning structures are understood and align with working structures and business goals.

In fact, organisations that do hybrid learning particularly well actively design new structures to utilise time, space and personal needs for good learning outcomes. They also understand that this style of learning is a different side of the same coin to hybrid working, and what benefits hybrid learning will also benefit hybrid working, and vice versa. Done well, they can perpetuate each other’s positives.

Of course, many won’t get this right immediately – the last two years has taught us that – and hybrid working, leadership and learning will continue to evolve. However, for organisations that are prepared to go on that journey and become a best practice hybrid learning organisation, led by individuals who believe, practice and understand the structure, the benefits are clear.

According to Harvard Business Review findings, these are the organisations that are better at problem-solving and experimentation, taking learning from failures, and quickly transferring knowledge through their organisation. All in all, the best hybrid outcome.