“Learn from the experts” is a good maxim for professional education, and it was in that spirit that students from the Master’s in Human Resources Management program at Georgetown University met with executives from the Human Resources Certification Institute (HRCI), a leading authority in the field, for a presentation titled, “How to Effectively Manage Hybrid Employees.”
To say that managing hybrid employees—those who work part-time in the office and part-time at home—is an important subject would be a colossal understatement. Since the pandemic, when C-suite executives turned to their HR departments for help navigating this fundamental shift, it has become one of the biggest issues in human resources management, perhaps equaled only by the emergence of artificial intelligence.
“HR really stood up and took the reins to make sure that people were provided with what they needed to get their work done—whether that meant in the office or working from home 100 percent of the time,” says Francie Dalton, an instructor in Georgetown’s Human Resources Management program whose work forming academic-industry partnerships made the presentation possible. “HR professionals won considerably greater respect during COVID because of their ability to choreograph and manage the various work-related challenges that ensued.”
A New Kind of HR
While HR leaders were largely successful in steering organizations through the pandemic, speakers at the presentation said that they can still do more to enhance productivity and ensure that employees working off-site feel that they, and their ideas, matter to their organization. And that means not resisting but embracing the major stressor for hybrid employees: technology.
“The use of technology is only growing; we will never use less technology,” said Katie Freakley, one of three presenters, in an audio recording of the event. “Organizations must actively prepare or risk the consequences … Based on our extensive research and analysis, we strongly believe that the way to successfully manage employees in the hybrid environment fully depends on technology, whether we like it or not.”
Then she thanked her audience and added: “The challenge of presenting new and exciting HR concepts to the authorities on HR [and here she paused for a moment and must have smiled] may be somewhat daunting, but it is certainly a tremendous learning experience within our field of study.”
The students delivered a comprehensive, 47-page analysis on responding to the challenges of hybrid work, and by all accounts, it was well-received.
“We’re happy to hear this,” one of the HRCI executives responded, according to John Tully, who also presented the group’s report, along with Freakley and Yiran Yao. “We’re actually using multiples of these things already, so you guys nailed it: This reaffirms that we’re doing the right thing.”
A Taste of the Real World
The presentation was an example of a Capstone, the final project that most master’s students complete for their degrees at Georgetown’s School of Continuing Studies. They can be done either in groups or individually. Dalton works exclusively with HRM students who are delivering products to client organizations, but students may also choose to do Capstones that concentrate solely on analyzing research or case studies.
With the client-focused Capstones, “students get to interact with a client in the role of a consultant,” Dalton says. “That’s something they’ve likely not done before, and they have the responsibility to keep the client informed and make sure that what they produce is in alignment with the scope of the work requested by the client.”
Tully is now a senior benefits process analyst at the Washington Post. He said the experience of presenting the report to HRCI, along with the other students, prepared him for the kind of work he does now.
Tully worked in a variety of jobs for several years before pursuing his undergraduate degree. At Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J., where he started out as a biology major, he was particularly interested in how organisms interact with one another in a larger ecosystem. That led him to the study of psychology and human resources management, with an emphasis on industrial-organizational psychology and the concept of perceived organizational support—the degree to which employees feel supported in their jobs.
“I realized that a lot of workplaces are similar to an ecosystem,” Tully says. “Everything interacts with and plays into it, and there’s an external force acting on things, whether we’re aware of it or not.”
Tully said the Human Resources Management program was “a lot of work, a lot of reading.” He appreciated the networking opportunities and kept in touch with his instructors after graduating, even participating with one of his professors on a Georgetown panel on artificial intelligence and HR. It was pretty intimidating, Tully says, but he was well-prepared.
“I was a very good researcher” at Georgetown, Tully says. “I still read research articles just for fun. Okay, yes, so I’m a bit of a nerd.”
An Urge to Look Further
Alexa Eason was already a “double Hoya” when she started an internship at Amtrak, having graduated from Georgetown’s College of Arts and Sciences in 2020 and worked at several jobs on the main campus, most recently as a research specialist at The Hub for Equity and Innovation in Higher Education.
Soon after beginning her internship, Eason took the initiative to volunteer for what she would later describe as “a life-changing project”—a Memorial Wall, located in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, that honors employees who lost their lives on the job.
“Someone needs to work on the project,” she recalls thinking. “No one else had the capacity, and I just volunteered and said, ‘I’ll help lead it.’ I didn’t know what the Memorial Wall was in its entirety, but when the time came around for my Capstone, I couldn’t think of a better project.”
Amtrak had envisioned simply a plaque and ceremonies to honor the employees. But Eason thought it could accomplish more and did extensive research on the best safety practices and brought that information to the fore.
“My recommendation was: what’s the point of having a plaque if employees don’t actually know what it is, where it is, why it’s there?” she asks. “And so, I wanted to integrate the memorial into the culture of safety, not only for customers, but also for employees.”
Eason also coordinated Amtrak’s 2023 President’s Service and Safety Award process and spearheaded the 2024 process, which selected more than 35 winners, and she was given the agency’s Outstanding Leadership Intern Award. Now, as a senior employee recognition specialist, she oversees Amtrak’s entire rewards and recognition portfolio.
It’s a big accomplishment for someone who initially thought human resources was “all benefits and payroll.” That was before a friend asked her: “Have you checked out Georgetown’s master’s programs?” She did, found the Master’s in Human Resources Management, and decided it was more comprehensive and hands-on, with a focus in such areas as talent and organization development, strategic human capital management, and employment law and investigations.
“I said, ‘Well, this is right up my alley,’ Eason recalls. “‘ The things I want to focus on.’”
And so, in the spring of 2024, when she graduated from the Human Resources Management program, double Hoya Alexa Eason became a “triple Hoya”.
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