A hybrid work team is one that is by its nature designed to include space for work to be done in a traditional office space, and work done remotely away from the office. Companies employing a hybrid workforce seek to get the benefits of each work location over a completely remote-first workplace.
According to a recent workforce report from UpWork, team managers expect at least 50% of their staff to be fully or partially remote in the next 12 months. In another survey from LinkedIn, when employees were asked their preferred work environment, only 4% responded as wanting to be in a traditional ‘office only’ environment.
This and other data clearly show that the future of work is one where your team will be either fully distributed or at least working in a hybrid model. If your organization is embarking on the hybrid model, read on to find some important tips for helping to ensure your team members are engaged and productive.
The Tips
1) Don’t create second class citizens
The first and most important tip for ensuring your hybrid team gets and stays engaged is to not create an environment where those that live away from the office or are working remotely for any given day feel like they are missing out on critical information or activities.
The primary place this can happen is during work meetings. If you are only asking questions for those in a conference room, or are using a whiteboard that the remote attendees can’t see, you’ve already failed in this area.
Remote conference hardware and software can help enable a more inclusive experience for those that are remote. Another easy way to address this potential pitfall is that if one or more people in a meeting are remote for it, everyone should join the meeting virtually from their personal workspace.
Outside of meetings, other areas that can be neglected are socializing and team building. It can be easy to pop by in-person workers while not connecting with those that are fully or partially remote. It can also be easy to grab office workers for a happy hour while not inviting those that are remote.
As a manager, you need to ensure you lead by example in all of these areas.
2) Empower the team
A great way to show that you support your hybrid team is to empower them to craft a remote and office schedule that works best for both their individual circumstances and their team as a whole.
Dictating a schedule can be harmful as each team member likely has different days where their partner, children, or pets’ needs have to be factored into their schedule.
The team may find that Wednesdays work best for the majority of the team to be in the office for collaborative meetings or socializing. Or they may decide every 2nd week of the month is a fully in-person week.
You’ll be surprised at the structure the team may decide on when given full autonomy to decide.
3) Get the right tools and services
In order to enable your hybrid team, you are going to need some help from tools and services. Bigger conference rooms, more whiteboards, collaboration corners, coffee machines, and snack cupboards aren’t going to help here.
For hybrid teams, we’re talking about different forms of technology, and we’ve got a brief list here of the top tools or services to check out for your team:
Virtual meetings - We wouldn’t have survived the pandemic without tools like Zoom to create virtual spaces for us to gather, so this is the first place to start.
Communication - Communication doesn’t just take place in the hallways and meeting rooms, now communication can happen anywhere at any time. We’ve found tools like Slack work great to make this easy and effective. Also, check out some of the important Slack channels for teambuilding.
Collaboration - Since whiteboards are an in-person luxury, the best way to collaborate in real-time with everyone is using productivity software like Google Docs. Make sure you get all of your documents online and create a cadence where members invite each other to the documents so they can see progress, comments, and updates together.
Project management - In order to keep everyone on track, tools like Asana are great for giving everyone’s tasks visibility and status. Like other tools, they aren't going to be effective if you don’t get everyone using them consistently.
Team building - Since on any given day, the majority of your team may be working from their homes, you need to take happy hours out of the bar and rethink them. We’ve found that virtual trivia events are a great way to add a fun and engaging team building experience to any meeting or happy hour. In-office team members can join from their desks or a conference room while at home team members feel like everyone is together.
In Conclusion
As your team becomes more and more remote and hybrid, it is clear that your strategies for getting them engaged and productive will need to evolve and adapt over time. You need to make sure you enlist the right tools to enable this new model, but more importantly, you need to ensure you are both empowering the team and showing you support them by leading by example.
Do you have any other tips that you’ve learned work well for getting your new hybrid team engaged and productive? Share them with us!