With the onset of COVID-19 many organisations moved quickly to adopt a remote working model to maintain the safety and well-being of their workforces. Many companies and government agencies are now looking longer term at what the future work model will look like. Many are opting for a hybrid working model where staff are office-based for 2-3 days and the rest of the working week at home.  Executive, leadership and management teams now need to figure out how best to support team members and hybrid teams to best work together.

What if I don’t like hybrid?

In any team there are likely to be team members who prefer to work from home and those that prefer the office, or that prefer a combination of both. This means when creating productive and effective teams, team leaders not only have to generate plans that consider both what tasks suit office and/or remote delivery, but take into account the many individual preferences in the team. The difficult it that you may not be able to please everyone.

Baby steps, we’re all learning

Going forward, the work experience won’t look or feel like it did before COVID – we’re all still in a transitioning stage of learning about how best to function in a hybrid work setting. We each need to re-learn, change and transition from old working behaviours to establish new patterns for productive hybrid working. Be kind to each other as you try different approaches and don’t forget to share your winning strategies with others so that they can benefit.

Top tips for hybrid success

Here are 9 evidence-based, proven strategies to help you lead your hybrid team effectively:

1. Set out expectations and accountability early

Team leaders need to make the implicit, explicit. Help your teams clarify what autonomy looks like, when flexibility is okay and when it is not okay (and can be compromised), technologies to be leveraged, what are the communication norms, work hours, response times, new practices and protocols. This may start with the creation of a “hybrid team agreement”, where the leader and the team members agree about their purpose, goals, accountabilities, metrics and methods. Progress on key projects should be shared regularly with the team to celebrate success and maintain momentum.

2. Communicate well and often

In a hybrid model it is important to foster and maintain human connections. Leaders and team members, together, should establish ground rules for communication. For example,

• How and when are we going to communicate?

• Who needs access to what information when?

• Who needs to be in which meeting and why?

Guidelines about which communication channel to use should also be set (i.e email, Slack, MS Teams, phone). If possible, dig deeper and create a team communication matrix to share people’s communication preferences. Where necessary, team leaders should coach team members on when to escalate ineffective virtual exchanges (e.g. if it’s the fifth email on the same topic, pick up the phone or schedule a virtual meeting).  

3. Promote conversation and support

The nature of hybrid working means it can be difficult for team leaders to build and maintain a close relationship when they don’t see their teams face-to-face on a regular basis. Team leaders should hold regular one-on-one conversations with their team members to understand their challenges and concerns, whether related to work or not. These conversations are an opportunity to ask questions, build relationships, show commitment and make clear the level of support and care that is available – spaces for their people to feel listened to and understood. Some people may want to make it clear they feel resentful about being asked to return to the office, and just want a space to open up about their feelings. By understanding concerns and creating an open and safe space where people feel cared for, it is also possible to generate solutions to drive productivity.

4. Trust your people

Trust is the foundation for leading a successful hybrid team (see our article, ‘Trust in remote teams’). Remote working success depends largely on team leaders trusting team members to do their work despite a lack of line of sight. Compounding the issue is when leaders are co-located with teams in the office they may be impacted by ‘proximity bias’ whereby they unconsciously give preferential treatment to those in their immediate vicinity. Those working from home are ‘out of sight, out of mind’. Team leaders start to perceive team members working in the office as better performers and may give preferential treatment.

5. Emphasise an inclusive team culture

‘Us’ and ‘them’, ‘office group’ and ‘home group’ or any other terminology that signals a divide between those working in the office and those working at home or elsewhere, must to be avoided. In-groups and out-groups aren’t helpful. Team leaders need to reinforce a ‘one team’ culture that prioritises the team as a whole integrated unit, not just the sum of the parts.

Make sure you don’t exclude remote colleagues, such as through side-chats in the office. Do things that bring people together and create a culture of inclusiveness, openness and transparency. Encourage people to readily pick up a phone if they think someone off-site has an answer to the question they’re pondering. Consider a rule that all meetings take place using video-conferencing technologies even when people are together in the office. Doing so provides diversity of voice, it’s easier to see facial expressions, eliminates the side conversations and keeps communications on track. Try pairing in-office and remote team members together on tasks. Foster these peer-to-peer relationships. When team members are kept in the loop, are receiving group feedback and being included they feel empowered to do their best work. The culture becomes one of inclusiveness, connectedness and collaboration.

6. Meet face-to-face

It is important to schedule face-to-face meetings for both building relationships and progressing work in the team. Be intentional about what tasks and time are addressed in the office versus working at home. Team members should plan to engage in activities that are easier in person such as team building and collaborating on highly interdependent tasks. Research also suggests leaders need to help team members build stronger professional relationships with each other, versus personal relationships (Maynard, Mathieu, Gilson, Sanchez & Dean, 2019). For example, by having team members share on knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) or work-related strengths, weaknesses and past experiences.

7. Develop fair performance measures

The nature of remote work can make evaluating performance difficult. As there is no direct line of sight, team leaders can fall into the trap of subconsciously focussing on work being done in front of them. Having clear indicators of performance assists both team leaders and team members to know what is expected of a team member. With the adoption of hybrid work there has been a shift in measuring performance from focusing on effort and hours at the desk to objectives and outcomes – the quality of the work. Progress can be tracked against deadlines and targets, while feedback can be both leader and peer driven.

8. Take care of you

Team leaders of hybrid teams may find themselves juggling competing demands of managing team dynamics, spending sufficient time with individuals, managing their own leaders and delivering on their work. It is essential that team leaders manage their schedule and workload by effectively prioritising and delegating resources as required.

9. Have fun!

People need to come together to just talk and get to know each other. There’s no lunch room or water cooler for informal conversations and bonding, so you need to purposefully create ways for people to feel connected. For example:

• Reserve time at the start or the end of meetings for personal updates and small talk

• Schedule regular catch ups that are not just about work. This might be a lunch meeting where people are encouraged to share stories, their lives, what they have planned for the weekend etc. Allow for conversation about each other

• Set up a Slack channel, MS Teams board for other instant message technology where people can post of set topics that are not work-related, such as their favourite movies or books, pictures of their pets, or ad-hoc questions to respond to, like ‘what’s something interesting you did this weekend?’ (use the many Slack Conversation Starter Tools to things off).

• Organise a virtual team trivia session or digital scavenger hunt (the internet has many activities for engaging hybrid teams)

Final thoughts

There is no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to leading a hybrid team: there are lots of nuances to creating an effective rhythm of hybrid work. Many workplaces today have fewer people physically in them now, as more team members exercise the flexibility to work in the office a few days a week and at home the other days. This has changed the dynamics of both the workplace and the teams, and team leadership needs to adapt accordingly.

References

Diemar, E. (2021, May 14). Is proximity bias hurting your hybrid workplace? HRM Online. Retrieved from https://www.hrmonline.com.au/behaviour/is-proximity-bias-hurting-your-hybrid-workplace/

Edmondson, A.C. & Mortensen, M. (2021, April 19). What psychological safety looks like in a hybrid workplace. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2021/04/what-psychological-safety-looks-like-in-a-hybrid-workplace

Maynard, M.T., Mathieu, J.E., Gilson, L., Sanchez, D.R., & Dean, M.D. (2019). Do I really know you and does it matter? Unpacking the relationships between familiarity and information elaboration in global virtual teams. Group & Organisation Management, 44(1), 3-37.