Five tips for adapting to a hybrid work environment and keeping your teams vibrant
By Katherine Lewis
The first thing I want to tell executives and managers who may be worried about how to lead a hybrid workforce is: Don’t panic.
Don’t assume that everyone who used to work face-to-face has to return to that arrangement, at least not full time. A report in The New York Times details how many of the largest companies in Manhattan are giving up office space to accommodate a changing work environment. At your company, know that you can absolutely create successful hybrid teams with some planning and intentionality. Here are five anchoring thoughts to keep in your toolbox.
1. Refocus on team purpose. For the last 14 months, everyone spent all their energy on how to operate during a pandemic. Now that we are moving out of that, it’s more important than ever to revisit your team’s purpose and ensure it is clear, compelling and unique to the team. No longer is the biggest question about how to stay afloat. Make sure your teams are asking themselves: What are we uniquely designed to accomplish? Team members need to agree on this definition before moving forward.
2. Establish explicit team norms. Clear operating principles go hand in hand with a well-defined purpose. Don’t allow team norms to go unspoken or assume that everyone knows how things work. Put them in writing, keep them short and make sure to get agreement. In a hybrid situation, team norms become even more critical in order to build trust and connection and to ensure that remote workers don’t feel left out of important discussions.
Norms should be customized for each team. For instance, how will team members communicate about schedules and availability? How will they ensure that each member feels heard in meetings? There are no right or wrong answers to these questions, but the team has to discuss them in advance and agree on solutions that work for everyone. Operating without explicit agreement can lead to problems later.
3. Remote workers have to be “unequally proactive.” It’s just a reality of human nature that we rely on nonverbal cues like eye contact to forge emotional bonds and maintain connections. To compensate for a diminished ability to send and receive nonverbal signals, those working from home will need to over communicate. They need to tell their colleagues what they are working on, when they are working on it and how close they are to meeting deadlines. Again, be explicit and don’t leave people wondering. The team can agree on how and when do this, but remote workers may want to consider sending daily status updates to the team.
4. Reflect on what’s working – and what isn’t. Set aside time every week to evaluate how well the team is meeting goals and upholding norms. Each team member should be asked to evaluate both themselves and the team as a whole on previously agreed upon criteria. Create an atmosphere in which discussing failure is not only expected but welcomed. Some companies have started a tradition called Failure Fridays, when they spend a lunch hour or other preset time examining mistakes and failed projects to find the lessons learned. Failure Fridays create a safe environment in which failure is OK, so long as teams are learning from it, moving forward and staying engaged.
Some fascinating research from two business professors, published recently in Harvard Business Review, found that dispersed teams were slower than co-located teams to abandon failing projects because of how they perceived their time investment. Teams can compensate for this with frank and frequent discussion of what isn’t working.
5. Take time for gratitude. Help your employees build stronger connections by encouraging them to relate outside the context of work. Start meetings with 15 minutes of grounding by focusing on the positive. Give people time to talk about what or whom they are grateful for, mention something they are proud of, or recognize someone on the team for a job well done. This could be a great opportunity for remote workers to have their contributions recognized by employees at the office. Encourage team members to make sure everyone’s efforts are noticed.
These ideas will help your teams create trust, which I can’t emphasize enough as a key to success. Those who proclaim that hybrid workplaces won’t last often cite lack of trust and belonging as reasons. But now that you know better, your employees can avoid these pitfalls. Contact me at katherine@lewisrushassociates.comfor more expert advice about building better teams.