Attracting Talent With Culture in Hybrid Work

What makes a candidate pick one offer over another when almost every company now promises flexibility? In this episode of CultureClub X powered by CultureMonkey, host Nicole Patrick puts that question to Allison Sproul, Director of People at ConnectRN, an app that connects nurses and aides across the United States with flexible working opportunities that fit their lives.

Allison is a seasoned HR professional with more than a decade of experience in people management. She began her HR career in Shanghai, China, served as head of people at CozyKin, and worked on global talent acquisition teams at EF Education First and Cengage. At ConnectRN she led the organization through COVID-19 and spearheaded its transition to remote supportive work.

The conversation covers the practical mechanics of hybrid culture: meeting habits, Slack norms, goal alignment, manager enablement, and inclusion for neurodiverse employees. Underneath it all sits one argument. Flexibility is now table stakes, and the companies that win talent are the ones that can clearly articulate the problem their culture exists to solve.

Why solving for hybrid starts with optimizing for remote employees

Allison hears the same plea on webcast after webcast: how can we solve for hybrid? Her advice is to flip the question. Instead of treating hybrid as the puzzle to crack, optimize for your remote employees, especially anyone who is fully remote.

The logic is simple. People in the office can easily interject when a colleague is missing from a meeting, while a remote employee can quietly become out of sight, out of mind. Design for the person who is hardest to include, and everyone benefits.

The tactics are deliberately granular. Pause before a meeting starts to confirm that everybody who should be in the room is there. Before a big group decision, check in with the people on Zoom or Teams who may have missed a fast-moving office conversation, and get their buy-in before moving forward.

Allison also engineers recovery time into the calendar itself. Her Google default sends invites for 25 or 50 minute meetings, building the buffer her executive coach recommends for mentally resetting between conversations. That same buffer quietly closes a gap for neurodiverse employees who need extra recoup time before the next meeting.

How can HR leaders fix misalignment between office and remote teams?

When misalignment shows up, Allison traces it to a disconnect somewhere in the internal communication strategy. Leadership teams need to decide deliberately how major announcements travel: asynchronously in Slack, via email rather than in person only, or recorded on Zoom, WebEx, or Teams so nobody misses the information.

Timing matters as much as channel. ConnectRN sets Slack norms that keep major announcements inside a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. window, so people working core hours see them live, while a community support teammate on a midnight shift can reference them the next day without being pinged while trying to sleep.

The second fix is tying everything back to business goals in one centralized place, whether an intranet or HR technology. If Sarah hears one thing in the office and Mary reads another online, alignment collapses. A shared North Star lets a remote direct report and an in-office manager draw from the same source for both performance and development goals.

And step one is actually setting those goals. Allison warns that leaders who are just running, running, running skip the work of reverse engineering goals into smaller, more digestible chunks, which is precisely what creates alignment between the two employee groups.

Flexible policies attract talent, but culture is the real differentiator

On the policy side, Allison points to a pretty dramatic uptick in flexible PTO over the past few years, plus growing flexibility in working hours and schedules. She also highlights parental leave: the push toward 12 weeks of paid leave for all parents, not just primary caregivers or birth parents, is a shift that diversity and inclusion teams have helped drive across companies.

ConnectRN itself was born from a scheduling problem. Its co-founder, a nurse who had relocated his family from his home country, was juggling childcare, financial pressure, and a second round of school because his credentials had not carried over to the American healthcare system. He wanted an app that showed every shift available in his area for the hours he chose, instead of recruiters pitching whatever needed filling.

That origin story shapes her answer on differentiation. Culture is everything, she argues, because statistics show that millennial workers and Gen Z are seeking a bigger purpose over the long term. Her own career has moved intentionally through ed tech, childcare tech, and now health tech for exactly that reason.

The proof arrives in messages from nurses and caregivers: one bought her first home at the age of 50, another finally got his son everything on his Christmas wish list, all because flexible work made it possible. Companies that cannot name the problem their culture solves drift toward comfortable sameness, and comfortable sameness does not win offers.

What actually improves employee experience and retention in hybrid teams?

Allison starts from the old truth that employees don't leave bad companies, they leave bad bosses. The number one lever for retaining high performers is making sure the management team is incredibly well supported. That is doubly true in startups, where people get promoted into leadership faster and earlier in their careers than at larger, more established organizations.

She has lived the constraint herself, running a one-woman people team for her first year and a half at ConnectRN. Her advice for stretched HR leaders is to outsource: phenomenal facilitators are a LinkedIn message away, and you can commission one-off workshops or build a curriculum where each topic scaffolds the next.

On employee experience, her rule is to ask before acting. Employees have to tell you what is going on in their minds before you can play diagnostician, so she recommends starting with an engagement survey and actually reading the comments.

A dedicated pulse survey tool makes that listening rhythm sustainable, but budget is no excuse: a Google form works, and so does a listening tour of 25 or 50 minute one-on-ones asking everyone the same questions.

The approach is already paying off at ConnectRN: goal setting surfaced as a gap in the company's most recent engagement survey and is now part of the action plan. Solve blindly, Allison warns, and you might not even be solving your real problem.

Did hybrid change the people leader role, or did the pandemic?

Allison offers a slightly controversial take: hybrid itself has not reshaped the people leader role so much as COVID-19 did. Leaders put on brand new hats, Kentucky Derby level hats with feathers, deciphering healthcare and compliance laws, CDC guidance, and the I-9 process while rules changed almost daily. Every morning brought another SHRM alert about something she had adjusted the day before.

The lasting lesson is permission to be human. You don't have to do all the things all the time, and it is okay to be burnt out, because it was a lot for everyone. People leaders skew selfless by nature, so the role now demands that they put on their own oxygen masks first in order to keep assisting everybody else.

That shift also widened the menu of support. Where leaning on the employee assistance program was the pre-pandemic norm, mental health and behavioral health providers have stepped up across both B2B and B2C, finding new ways to make caregiving affordable and accessible to everyone.

How can hybrid workplaces include neurodiverse employees?

Normalizing conversations about mental health has segued into greater openness with employees who identify as neurodiverse, a group Allison says has historically not felt as seen and heard. Companies furthering their diversity and inclusion efforts keep discovering areas of diversity where they never indexed enough.

ConnectRN builds gaps between meetings so employees with ADHD can mentally reset, and runs a Slack group that celebrates neurodiversity. Threads there help neurodiverse colleagues see they are just as normal as everyone else while celebrating that they think differently. It is a small structural choice that signals belonging more credibly than any office perk.

Why burnout prevention starts at the top

Burnout, in Allison's telling, trickles down. If the CEO, COO, or anybody in the C-suite is burning the candle at both ends, never taking time off and sending emails late, the whole employee population feels the pressure to respond just as quickly.

The countermeasures are visible and mundane. Leaders should actually use their PTO and lean on the schedule feature in email and Slack, which Allison calls a game changer, especially for parents whose only productive window might be 5 a.m. Automation, task reminders, calendar blocks for breaks, and no meeting days round out the toolkit she has watched succeed across tech.

Where employee listening fits in a hybrid culture strategy

Strip away the specifics and one motif repeats through this episode: pause and ask. Ask the remote employee for input before the decision is made. Ask your people what is wrong before prescribing fixes. As Nicole puts it, sometimes the writing is on the wall and we just forget to actually read it and take action based upon it.

That is the discipline of employee listening: a continuous employee feedback loop where surveys, comments, and one-on-ones feed an action plan employees can watch moving. Allison's engagement survey story shows the mechanics at work: collect honestly, read thoroughly, commit publicly.

For hybrid organizations, listening is also the fairness mechanism. When half your workforce is not in the room, structured feedback is how their voice arrives with the same weight as a hallway conversation. Attracting talent with culture only works if that culture can hear the people already inside it.