Working in a hybrid environment offers many advantages, but also raises challenges for HR teams and employees alike. Managing a workforce split between the field and the office requires constant adjustment to ensure fair and effective coordination.

One of the main pitfalls of this model is that the data used for management comes predominantly from the central organisation, at the expense of frontline teams. The result is a partial view of reality and a risk of decisions becoming disconnected from day-to-day operational life. How can the data from a hybrid working environment be fully leveraged without rendering frontline teams invisible?

Hybrid Environments: A New Challenge for Data-Driven Management

HR data analysis in the context of hybrid management aims to improve the management of talent dispersed across several workplaces. The resulting reports and dashboards provide key information on office attendance patterns, working habits and the specific challenges of managing a hybrid system. Some data, however, surfaces more readily than others.

Multiple and Sometimes Opposing Working Realities

Office-based tasks revolve around planning, analysis and management. Operational teams focus their efforts on execution, resolving on-site issues and direct client interaction. Whilst field training takes place primarily through informal channels, office-based talent has easier access to training, mentoring and tutoring.

Sales representatives, repair technicians, technical specialists, insurance experts and logistics operators: all organisations want to improve the performance of these profiles and ensure working conditions equivalent to those of mobile staff. Remote working does, however, isolate frontline teams and weakens the social bond with their colleagues. Implementing a comprehensive data-driven management strategy makes it possible to build bridges and establish positive synergies between the different working realities.

The Temptation of "Office-Centric" Management

The workplace does not affect a team's capacity to do good work or to thrive. Yet HR strategies tend to exclude operational field workers. These employees do not receive the same support or benefit from the same development opportunities as colleagues based in the office.

In a hybrid environment, this office-centric management is not intentional, but often results from the sidelining of frontline teams. When all employees work in the office every day, interactions with members of other departments and feedback occur naturally. Under a hybrid working policy, management becomes more delicate and the risk of creating silos increases significantly.

Which Teams Are Most at Risk of Being Rendered Invisible?

Teams working primarily remotely may experience a sense of isolation. Sales representatives, technicians and operators at various levels in the field feel less connected to the rest of the team. This sense of exclusion goes hand in hand with difficulty in making their ideas heard: low levels of recognition, harder relationships to maintain with the rest of the team, and exclusion from decision-making.

International teams are also less likely to take part in mentoring programmes, training and the informal conversations that structure the collective life of the organisation.

The Biases of Management Based on Incomplete Data

Data-driven management in a hybrid environment can promote equity, diversity and inclusion. It can also give rise to biased behaviours, as the Progress study on the hidden risks of artificial intelligence highlights: 65% of respondents suspect bias in their organisation's data, and 78% anticipate the situation worsening.

Exclusion of Non-Instrumented Activities

Proximity bias affects data analysis and predictive models. The latter are only reliable if the information feeding them is too. Incomplete, inaccurate or duplicated data can create distorted interpretations, skew decision-making and exclude non-instrumented activities from the equation.

Does a manager perceive the performance of an employee they rarely encounter in the same way as that of a colleague with whom they interact daily? This perception bias, fed by partial data, is one of the most underestimated risks of hybrid management.

Under-Representation of Field Skills in HR Tools

The operational tools within organisations do not always take into account frontline expertise and local specificities. Without these two dimensions, the data collected omits the real performance of a sales representative, the tacit know-how of a technician or the needs of a group of operators.

According to the 2024 Hybrid and Augmented Work Observatory, this tendency complicates collaboration and the onboarding of new arrivals. 57% of respondents believe it is detrimental to spontaneous interactions, and 65% of the professionals surveyed consider the loss of cohesion to be the primary risk of the hybrid system.

Consequences for Equity, Recognition and Performance

Management based on incomplete data leads HR managers to set similar objectives for all employees, without taking the realities of field work into account. This results, for example, in sales representatives with unachievable targets, unvisited clients and a growing sense of frustration within teams.

Distance sometimes replaces travel time as the criterion for assigning field responsibilities. Yet this notion varies from one region to another, which can penalise certain employees and undermine equity between teams.

Reconciling Field Data and Office Data in a Hybrid Environment

Data-driven management facilitates communication with leadership on the basis of objective and factual information. The primary challenge for hybrid organisations lies in integrating reliable field data: team performance, results achieved and challenges encountered.

Better Capturing Weak Signals From the Field

Performance indicators provide an overall view of the health of an organisation. Through predictive analysis of the data collected, HR teams can map development areas onto a dashboard. This process makes it possible to detect weak signals from the field: a decline in engagement and motivation, difficulty in achieving objectives, rising absenteeism or lateness, changes in working behaviour, and neglect of safety rules.

Adapting Measurement Tools to Hybrid Contexts

According to Forbes, 71% of organisations planned to accelerate their investment in Data Analytics from 2018 onwards. This shift is materialising today in many organisations. The optimisation of management tools must, however, follow a logic of adaptation to the hybrid context: a hybrid working environment requires digital data governance to exploit information in a more sophisticated way.

Sharing actionable data with managers (continuous learning, internal mobility, talent onboarding, knowledge transfer) makes it possible to visualise the real state of operations and assess risks. Reconciling field data and office data provides a fairer and more complete reading of operational reality.

Involving Line Managers to Enrich the Data

Line managers play a decisive role in ensuring compliance with remote working policies. Acting as mediators between leadership and teams, they guarantee smooth and effective communication, contribute to preserving the mental health of employees and promote a balance between productivity objectives and teams' need for flexibility.

This versatility makes them indispensable relays for collecting field data and improving the organisation's data-driven management.

Sources: Forbes, Beedeez, Progress, Arctus (Hybrid and Augmented Work Observatory 2024)