The Covid-19 pandemic and the consequential Great Resignation—or whatever your team chooses to label the transition period—has sped up a corporate re-commitment to employees, who now widely demand at least some work-from-home days. However, challenges abound in building a hybrid work environment. A relatively small number of companies have fully adapted to this territory, and even fewer have scaled it to such an extent that will please their workforce. Most companies are making it up as they go along.

That’s why From Day One, as part of its May conference in Brooklyn, hosted a panel conversation covering potential solutions and areas of focus for corporate leaders. Here are some key takeaways from the discussion, moderated by Bryan Walsh, editor of Future Perfect on Vox:

Onboarding Takes on New Importance

One of the pitfalls of a hybrid work environment—with some employees working from home at least part time, or perhaps select team members working remotely full time—is a proximity bias. Unwittingly or otherwise, team leaders overseeing both remote and in-person workers might show favoritism toward workers who clock in and out at the office on a regular basis. As a result, simply because there’s less physical space between a manager and worker, the employee enjoys what the BBC called a “halo effect.”

This phenomenon can cause a host of problems for teams and managers. Among other issues, those haloed workers might find their poor performance more readily excused, while the remote workers’ skills and expertise are disregarded. Considering the halo effect, you can probably guess which type of employee might get promoted at a higher rate, and dynamics like these can lead to a breakdown of trust, motivation and productivity on the part of workers.

“It’s super, super important to make sure that you are not giving advantage to people you see all the time,” said Judith Harrison, EVP of global diversity, equity and inclusion at the global communications firm Weber Shandwick. She observed that simple awareness of the possibility of proximity bias in the office is Step One toward combating it from a leadership perspective. She added that managers have to be extra sensitive to this issue in regards to employees who started their jobs during the pandemic’s social-distancing phase.

“They have only seen [co-workers] on Zoom or Teams,” Harrison said. “So it’s really important to not only do great on-ramping for them, so that you are being very specific about introducing them to the people they need to know to succeed, but also making them feel welcome all the time.”

Harrison shared that her company has onboarded team members throughout the pandemic with robust “intentionality,” producing favorable results. She said at least one worker, whom Harrison recently met in person for the first time after they were hired as an all-remote employee during social distancing, has “developed great relationships with many, many people” on the team.

Coach Managers to Prepare for New Workplace Expectations

Another factor that contributed mightily to the Great Resignation was the sentiment of younger employees from the Millennial and Gen Z demographics who are not happy with traditional work models and office cultures. Nearly three-quarters of such workers say they’ve ultimately regretted taking a job after recognizing, in their minds, the company that hired them does not operate in ways it advertised. These young people may also prolong the Great Resignation, with 52% telling Microsoft in a recent poll that they will consider changing employers in 2022.

It’s widely known how turnover negatively affects an organization, from the bottom line to morale and beyond. So in changing work models to hybrid—something young workers, especially, desire—while fostering and maintaining a culture of strong personal connections between managers and coworkers—something else Gen Zers and Millennials covet tremendously—leaders are going to have to change expectations of what the workplace will look and feel like.

“What I’ve seen is younger generations … they want untraditional work schedules, professional development, to get promoted and know how to get promoted,” said Carmel Boyle-Lewis, an HR director and a diversity and inclusion officer at NYU. “Sometimes I have to tell the manager, ‘You’re hiring someone from a different generation; these are some of the things you might expect.’”

She said coaching supervisors in multi-generational management and varied expectations can help keep young workers engaged and content on the job, which should mean they’ll be more apt to stick around a while. “Everyone wants flexibility,” Boyle-Lewis observed. “That’s key right now.”

Get Creative With Your Hybrid Model

In the spirit of flexibility, leaders should think unconventionally when it comes to building a hybrid office model. This could include reconsideration of individual employee roles and duties. Amanda Quillen, head of employee engagement at IKEA U.S., said the company is figuring out how its retail workers can work from home as well as work in stores. It’s all part of the company’s perspective that “creating a better everyday life for our coworkers means creating a better experience for our customers,” she said.

The pandemic “forced” IKEA, she added, to take stock of the company’s value attached to workers, particularly after it furloughed thousands. “We took a really deep breath and said, ‘OK, our people come first. How do we take care of them the right way?’” Quillen said.

Shortly after the furlough, IKEA brought many of the workers back to stores so they could facilitate the company’s pivot to a “buy online, pickup in store” model of sales. It was what Quillen called “a whole new way of working” for IKEA employees. “As we’ve moved forward, we keep listening to our coworkers,” she continued. “At the core of any response in a crisis, it’s listening to what people need and creating programs to respond to it in a good way.”

Get Creative With Your Benefits Packages, Too

With well-being at the fore during the global health crisis, benefits packages are something that workers are paying closer attention to these days. In a hybrid environment where workers have varied schedules and thus varied needs, flexibility in benefits package construction is also a must.

Kristen Carlisle, general manager of Betterment at Work, a financial-wellness benefits platform, said that last year her company conducted a survey that found 74% of the workers polled said they would prioritize financial wellness benefits over an extra week of vacation. “The sentiment by and large was, ‘How can I really even think about taking a vacation when I can’t financially plan for today and tomorrow?’” she said.

Carlisle suggested that people leaders talk with their workers in ways that can inform the building of benefits packages to fit the employees best. “Ask them qualitative questions that lead you to a better understanding of what they’re dealing with, like, ‘Hey, what are the top three things on your mind right now?’” Carlisle said. “They’re far more likely to share that information than, ‘I am actually sending a lot of money home [to relatives in other countries] and while my paycheck looks good on paper, I can’t afford my bills.’”

One popular piece of benefits programming is “summer Fridays,” in which personnel enjoy shorter hours during the last day of the traditional workweek during the warmest months of the year. However, as Carlisle noted, that benefit might not be an option for select personnel in any given organization—in fact, it isn’t in her own company, as some employees simply have to put in full days on Fridays to monitor financial markets.

“Whenever that kind of thing happens, we make sure we augment those benefits in other ways,” Carlisle said. “We incentivize them with other opportunities, and give them different types of flexibility than maybe other parts of the organization, because there’s just a different need in different parts of where we work.”

Be Mindful and Take Action

In 2021, the American Psychiatric Association found in a survey that the majority of employees who work from home are experiencing “negative mental health impacts,” such as isolation, loneliness, and challenges with logging off from work when the day is done. So while workers may want more remote work, it’s important for managers to be wary of the mental health problems that can come from it.

The stress from the pandemic and other disheartening developments in the world can certainly exacerbate these feelings, too, perhaps leading to burnout.

Amanda Conway, SVP for employer strategy at Talkspace, the digital therapy platform, said that her company conducted two surveys, in 2021 and this past spring, of thousands of U.S. workers about their mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression, stress, and burnout. In spite of all the talk this past year that organizations need to provide more support to its workers, Talkspace found there was no improvement in worker mental well-being. “So the demand, the burnout, and the stress is still a very real issue,” Conway said. “Our work is not done yet.”

She said that change must start from the top, with leaders communicating their benefits packages to workers with vigor and reducing the stigma of mental health treatment. Executives and people managers alike have to offer messaging that sounds like, according to Conway, “We get it, it’s tough right now. We see you, we hear you, we’re listening and we’re responding.”

Michael Stahl is a New York City-based freelance journalist, writer, and editor. You can read more of his work at MichaelStahlWrites.com, follow him on Twitter @MichaelRStahl, and order his first book, the autobiography of Major League Baseball pitcher Bartolo Colón, at Abrams Books.