Roughly 27% of employees today work remotely and 54% work in a hybrid environment, according to a Gallup report. As employees continue to demand flexible work arrangements, executives are faced with the challenge of maintaining team collaboration and engagement across different states, countries, and time zones.

For Liz Simon, Chief Operating Officer at Industrious, one of the world’s largest flexible workplace providers, fostering collaboration in a flexible environment isn’t just a smart business practice, it’s an internal policy that Industrious implements with its own staff.

“Flexible work is really important to us because it’s what we sell to companies,” says Simon. “So it’s important that we’re living and breathing it. I don’t believe in an office mandate.”

Instead, she believes employees should have the flexibility to come into the office when they want, with Industrious providing a “hub day” every Wednesday that encourages employees to go to a nearby office for in-person collaboration. There is no mandate for how many days or what days they must work in an office.

During a recent Chief and Industrious partnership event, Simon talked with Trey Boynton, Chief Diversity and People Officer at Chief, and Toni Thompson, Chief HR Officer at Etsy and a Chief New Era of Leadership Award winner, about the ways in which leaders can prioritize collaboration and measures its success, in a flexible, multi-generational workplace.

Clearly Communicate Expectations to New Employees and Managers

With the convergence of five generations in the workforce, it’s easy for tensions to arise when employees have different working styles and expectations. Simon says it’s imperative that executives are transparent with new employees about what is expected of them professionally when they show up in-person or on a Zoom call. This includes training about office policies and protocols, as well as company rules and standards.

“At Industrious, we have a real mix at work with a lot of Gen Z and millennials,” she says. “For people who are newly entering the workforce, they don’t know what the work world was like pre-pandemic, so the importance of expectation setting and norm building is high. People thrive when they know what success at an organization looks like.”

In addition to communicating expectations with new employees, Simon says Industrious, who is a longstanding partner to Chief, is also intentional about ensuring that managers — both new and old — know what’s expected of them as leaders.

“In high growth companies, people get elevated to management roles without a ton of training,” she says. “And we feel like it’s important for us to fill in that gap with the basics.”

At Industrious, leaders hold mandatory training for all managers where they go over the company’s in-house core curriculum covering the leadership and communication skills expected of them. She adds that managers are also held accountable for how well they lead with their year-end bonus being tied to their performance review. With 82% of workers saying they would consider quitting a job because of a bad manager, Simons says ensuring your management team is equipped to properly lead is key to any organization's success.

Conduct Employee Surveys

While it’s hard to measure how well a team is working together in a remote or hybrid environment, Simon says finding clues of success isn’t impossible. She encourages leaders to conduct employee engagement surveys to get a pulse on how things are going not only among team members, but also among executive leads.

At Industrious, Simon says these surveys are given out twice a year, and they dig into the workplace experiences of employees across the globe. (Industrious has employees on site at more than 200 flexible workplace locations in the U.S., UK, Europe, Asia, and Australia, as well as in their New York City headquarters office.)

Additionally, she says local team leaders have more informal meetings with their team throughout the year to get feedback on specific projects, pain points, or overall workplace experiences.

Prioritize Company Off-Sites

Aside from engagement surveys, Simon also encourages companies to have team off-sites that provide intentional opportunities for employees to collaborate, brainstorm, and get to know each other beyond a virtual screen.

Once a year at Industrious, she says the entire company convenes for a three-day offsite where they play games, trivia, and buckle down on building better connections.

“We believe strongly in bringing people together in-person as a distributed team,” she says, while adding that even if your organization doesn’t have the budget for a company-wide offsite, hosting smaller team ones could also be effective.

“Off-sites are one of the things we invest a lot in as a company and we see other companies doing more of that in our business data,” she says. “Basically, 80% of the meeting room bookings that we see on our website are for traveling executives going to visit a remote team or gather a distributed team for an off-site meeting. It’s really the way more and more people are working and connecting, and I love that.”