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  Today in health it Google acquires epic. Wait, of course that's not right. Oh yeah, it's April 1st, so forget about that. Instead, we focus on the real world and the adjustment of managers to hybrid work environments. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current.

And engaged. We have no sponsor for today. So if you're listening to this, you know the power of podcasting. If you wanna get your message in front of a targeted healthcare audience, send an email to partner at this week in health it.com. Also, if you have a minute today, check out our newly designed website this week, health.com, and provide me with some feedback, any feedback on usability, on the ability to find things.

You name it. We're looking for feedback. So Bill, at this weekend, health it.com. Let me know what you think. Alright, here's today's story. I wanna stay on the topic of adjusting to a remote work environment, really a hybrid work environment. I have the Microsoft study and we are going to get back to that.

There's still a ton of great information in that, but what we're gonna do now is I have found just a plethora of stories on this topic that tell us that as the pandemic trudges on that employees are getting more restless. Today's story is about Microsoft's internal struggle with hybrid work, and this comes from CNBC.

And the title is Microsoft's Message to Managers. After a Decline in Team Connectedness, lemme give you some context from the story. Microsoft is bringing more employees back to the office, but it is continuing to learn big lessons about keeping hybrid and remote work productivity up in the Covid era.

This has been slipping recent surveying of 150,000 plus Microsoft employees by the tech company Head of People Analytics. Dawn. Klinghoffer and her team picked up on a significant decline in team sentiment about connections since the Mass pandemic work. From home experience began, Microsoft saw employees reporting about feeling connected.

Kling Hoffer notes in a report out on Tuesday. At the beginning of the pandemic, people were really focused on staying connected in new ways, she says. But as time went on, those team connections grew harder. To maintain. The reason I'm covering these stories is I believe this is happening across the board.

I don't think this is isolated, and if I were ACIO today, I would be spending time with my managers, talking to my managers about this trend, about these trends, trying to get ahead of them. So let's go on and see what they've learned, what hasn't worked. So what hasn't gotten the job done? According to Kathleen Hogan, chief People Officer at Microsoft, one Ineffective Method.

Was the attempt to lead with the recreation of team experiences in a virtual environment, from lunches to offsites desk, site chats, and happy hours. Okay, you're gonna have to listen to this whole thing 'cause that's not exactly accurate. So let's go on. It goes on to say, our data tells us that employees need us to focus on the basics first, like work life balance and prioritization.

She goes on to say, I. Only then can a spectrum of formal and informal touchpoints like team events help strengthen team bonds. Hogan didn't say that the virtual cocktail hour doesn't have a place in virtual work. Some teams might enjoy it while other teams thrive on virtual chat. But the most important takeaway, this is the most important takeaway.

Is that before these things can be effective, the fundamentals must be in place first. Microsoft managers who have understood this distinction have the teams which have continued to thrive throughout the pandemic versus those experiencing a collective fatigue managers who have taken the greater role in helping individual employees prioritize tasks and manage work-life balance have kept team morale higher.

The company survey data indicates, and I think this is an important point. It's not that those events aren't good. It's not that they aren't beneficial, it's that you have to do them in order. You have to really address where people live. They need to understand how to prioritize things, and they need to understand how to manage the work-life balance.

And that is what they're looking to leadership for. Uh, Microsoft managers with this focus often have weekly one-on-ones during which they can help employees prioritize and overcome challenges. But it's not just the scheduled time that pays off. Hogan says, Microsoft teams have also started to set aside time at the beginning of the meetings for check-ins.

When work gets busy, it's easy to focus on the work, but when managers take the time. To show they care about the whole person. It boosts the entire team's connection and morale she explained. All right, so that's gonna be important. I also love this aspect of continuing the one-on-ones, making sure the one-on-ones are happening.

I think it's important that we do those one-on-ones. I'm sorry, the heat just went on. I'm not in my normal studio. I'm actually traveling and I can't help it. So you're gonna have a little hum in the background for the rest of this. It was important to create those one-on-one environments. And when I was ACIO, what we did is we set up

A mechanism to make sure that the managers were having those relationships. With their staff. And you would think that would just be natural if you promote somebody to a manager status that they would understand the importance of the team morale and the team relationships. But again, we're in a technology setting, it's not always natural.

You have to train managers and help managers with that process of connecting with their employees, listening to their employees, and helping them to overcome those challenges. And so we had a lot of different mechanisms we put in place and a lot of different practices that we educated them on. She goes on to say in this article, hybrid is the new permanent state, and I believe that that is true if it seems intuitive that managers are important to teams.

That's because they are managers have always mattered, says Hogan. In fact, the Microsoft Manager program and best practices were in place before the pandemic rather than being enacted due to the pandemic. . And the work data that we've collected. But Microsoft data suggests that manager support matters even more in a digital world.

And this is where leadership matters. CIOs need to be spending time with their direct managers. Their direct managers need to be spending time with their managers. That whole process of cascading the management to individual employee, individual staff member, uh, relationship and conversation is so critical.

Microsoft is betting the permanent state for many companies. Will . B as a hybrid work organization and that means this emerging role of managers will be critical to understand and support with training and resources. That is a great So what as well? I'm not gonna do a lot of So what here? 'cause it's just baked into the article.

For a company with employees in 190 countries, it is difficult to have one policy for all, especially in a world of work going through unprecedented changes. Decisions on hybrid and remote work are still evolving. Microsoft says for the majority of the employees up to 50% of the time, working from home will be possible without manager approval.

But other issues like relocation policy remains less clear and ultimately it is dialogue with managers and employees that will determine the direction she said at the CNBC event. She also goes on to talk about onboarding. I think this is important to touch on, so I'm gonna go a little, little longer.

Today, Microsoft added 25,000 employees during the Pandemic and Kling Hoffer's team found that at the 90 day point managers were substantially more important than peers. I. For new hires, again, if you're in an onsite setting, peers pick up a lot of the slack. They come alongside, they go out to lunch, they learn the ropes from their peers, but in the case where that interaction is stilted and not happening, the managers fill that void.

Okay, so they go on to say the data showed that compared to pre pandemic, Microsoft New employees said a reliance on managers for support during the onboarding process increased almost 20%, while the reliance on peers for initial support declined 15%. I. This focus paid off quickly in new employee sentiment with Microsoft new hires, who said managers played an active role 3.5 times more likely to say they were satisfied with their onboarding experience and 1.2 times more likely to feel like they were making important contributions to the team.

The Microsoft findings echo other recent research on the importance of managers. . In the evolving study of remote work, a study conducted by Harvard Business School professors goes on to name them, looking at remote interns participating in a large corporation's flagship summer internship program, found that the interns who had randomized opportunities to interact synchronously.

And informally with senior managers we're significantly more likely to receive an offer for full-time employment, achieved higher weekly performance ratings and had more positive attitudes towards their remote internship. So that's probably enough from the article. There's an awful lot to get there. I, I really like focus on the basics first, prioritization and work-life balance.

You have to educate managers. It's not just going to happen by itself. I like the concept of one size doesn't fit all for every team. A virtual happy hour for one team might work and it might not work for another. This is why it's so important for the manager. The manager needs to have their finger on the pulse of the team and put the appropriate mechanisms in place, so

It all cascades down. The CEO has to have great relationships with their direct reports. Have those one-on-ones, find out how they're working. Those people need to do it with their reports all the way throughout the organization, and it's that key that managers have become much more important. We knew that they were important.

The number one reason people leave organizations is because of a bad relationship with a manager. That has been the case, I think for well over a decade. Your direct manager. Oftentimes will determine your satisfaction with your work life and will determine whether you stick around. And I think that last aspect of onboarding and how important it is to integrate the managers into onboarding and how important it's to integrate relationships with managers, with leaders throughout that onboarding process will dictate how well they integrate and how well they perform.

I. Once they get to be a part of the organizations, and one of the stories I'm gonna cover here in the not too distant future says that, uh, well over 50% of people at this point are ready to explore working for other companies than the one they're currently with. You know, this represents the opportunity and the challenge.

If you do this right, you could experience a staffing windfall, do it wrong, and you could end up with whatever the opposite of that is. Well, that's all for today. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com, or wherever you listen to Podcast Apple, Google Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher.

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