How to Manage a Hybrid Team Part 2

Employees working remotely in a group video call. AdobeStock_450705400

How to Manage a Hybrid Team, Part 2

In How to Manage a Hybrid Team, Part 1, I explained some practical, proven methods for leading a hybrid team, focusing on the team.

Here are some tried and true best practices for leading teams, now focusing on individual team members. These approaches help team members be confident that they know exactly what they should be working on daily, how their work contributes to the organization’s goals, and to feel valued and supported.

Be Intentional About One-on-Ones

One of the best things you can do as a manager is to put utmost trust and confidence in your employees that they will do the right thing — which they will if employers provide a support structure and clear expectations.

Caitlin Duffy, Research Director in Gartner’s HR practice – from Jordan Turner, 9 Ways to Manage Hybrid Employees for Better Productivity

An essential part of providing a support structure for team members and ensuring that they know exactly what you expect is designing a well-thought-out process for one-on-one meetings.

Confirm an interval for meeting that works for you and your direct report. I met with every member of my team regularly, some weekly and others bi-weekly, based on their individual preferences and needs. My team was a pretty independent bunch, often working on challenging tasks that required much dedicated, focused individual work. If a meeting didn’t make sense at those times, we would cancel or reschedule. But it was better to have the meeting on the calendar rather than leave it up to chance.
Have a standard agenda so that your team members know what to expect and are prepared. Have them document the following information before every one-on-one: Accomplishments, Work-in-progress, Issues or Roadblocks, and Development Needs. Scan the document before each meeting. This process ensures that you are efficient with your time. The document also helps you and your team members track progress on goals and prepare for performance reviews.
Engage your team members about how they are feeling, as well as simply discussing what they are working on. This can help you manage load and assign work thoughtfully. If someone is distracted by problems at home and an overabundance of challenges at work, and you’re aware of those issues, certainly you’ll make better decisions about assignments. There can and should be an ebb and flow within the team regarding who takes on the most challenging projects.
Have explicit discussions about hybrid or remote work and team dynamics. Don’t assume that all is well if no one is complaining. Conversely, this is an opportunity for team members to provide positive feedback about what works well.

Each of these meetings is an opportunity for you to build trust in your working relationships by demonstrating genuine care, respect, and support, communicating clear expectations, and providing feedback.

Provide Opportunities for Development

Companies with a culture that supports learning are almost twice as likely to develop innovative products and processes.

The Josh Bersin Company, The Definitive Guide: Employee Experience

Discussing development regularly as part of one-on-one meetings helps to ensure development activities happen. It allows you to give team members ideas about learning and networking opportunities they might not know about. These discussions also enable collaboration on meeting future technical needs within the team and identifying areas where the team can or should be innovating.

Understanding your team members’ interests and professional development goals will make you a better manager. Documenting development goals should be part of your regular goal setting and performance review activities.

Have your team members schedule time for development – each of them should block time on their calendars. Of course, this is good practice for any team. But it fell off our radar somewhat as we dived into remote work.

Recognition

All of us want validation – it’s just human nature. Here are some creative ways to recognize your hybrid team members:

Acknowledge accomplishments in team meetings – and make the announcement as celebratory as possible!
Email kudos to an individual, copying their colleagues from wider teams and upper management.
Ask company leaders to recognize your team members’ accomplishments in virtual meetings. Provide details and photos. (And maybe write the copy…)
Enter relevant competitions. This is an opportunity for team members to receive industry recognition. Every year, we entered two of our best courses in a competition run by the local chapter of a professional technical communication organization. Our awards were fantastic validation for the team of our superior course development. Knowledgeable and specific feedback on our training content and user interface also inspired us to continue to improve and innovate.
Research what other recognition mechanisms your HR department has put in place.

Ensure that Team Members Take Time to Recharge

When the workflow and the pressure to deliver are constant and unrelenting, it can be tempting to keep your head down and keep working. The problem is that work is a marathon, not a sprint!

Although there will be occasions when it’s necessary to put in extra time – for example, to ensure that a major project is delivered on time – this shouldn’t be the norm.

Normalize leaving work to work hours, taking an actual lunch break, and taking a vacation. You’ve earned it. Use it, and thereby set a good example for your team. I guarantee that you will come back refreshed and more productive.

Set Goals and Give Feedback Regularly

[In 2020], one area of performance management was cast into the spotlight: the importance of clear, agile, team-oriented goals to drive the right actions and align every individual to the mission and purpose of the organization.

The Josh Bersin Company, Managing Performance in the New Reality: Goals Matter More Than Ever, retrieved from Talent, Recruiting, and Career Mobility

Most organizations have employees set goals as part of a defined performance management process. How to make that a valuable part of team members’ and managers’ interactions can sometimes be unclear. Indeed, this is why ”performance management is still the most despised people process, with a net promoter score of minus 60” (from the Bersin report cited above).

Start by being clear yourself how your team’s goals contribute to overall organizational goals and objectives.

Give your team clear guidance on how to define their goals, including metrics. Please don’t assume they know how or have time to sort through HR guidance.

Communicate how often you will review progress towards goals and how you intend to provide feedback. Although I regularly provided feedback to my team members at our one-on-one meetings, we also met once a quarter to define, review, and update goals.

Be Intentional About Team Onboarding

Everyone deserves to work in a place where they know to their soul that they are connected to and respected by their colleagues and protected by a caring work environment where they are safe to express themselves fully.

– Wendy Gates Corbett

Joining a brand-new team is always a journey and can be intimidating. New team members have many questions about their work, the new team, and the organization. In an in-person environment, it’s easy to pop your head into a colleague’s office or cubicle to ask a question. Going for lunch together is pretty much a standard ritual.

Becoming familiar with a team and feeling like you belong can be more challenging in the virtual world.

Start by scheduling an event specifically to welcome your new team member. On my team, we created slide or video introductions, telling our personal and professional stories. Presenting these in a group environment engendered lots of great discussion and not a few “aha” moments, even among long-timers on the team.

Pair new team members with a “buddy,” giving them a point of connection outside their manager. This is always helpful, especially on a hybrid or remote team. New colleagues might hesitate to ask for clarification. As a “newbie,” they are likely more willing to ping their buddy than their manager or colleagues they have not yet worked with.

Check In With the Team Regularly

In The Secrets of High-Performing Teams in Hybrid/Remote Environments, Ben Lowell cites five key beliefs of highly effective teams (from an internal research project at Google):

Psychological safety
Dependability
Structure and Clarity
Meaning
Impact

As you review your hybrid team management, consider if you are supporting team members in building these beliefs. Do team members feel safe? Are they able to depend on one another? Do we make decisions effectively? Is our work meaningful, and does our work contributes to the organization’s goals?

Designing meaningful hybrid work is not a policy issue. Work design should not be tackled as a one-size-fits-all scenario. It is a highly tailored and personalized activity. Team members and team leaders can apply guidance and tools provided by the company to their implementation, and then iterate and improve.

The Josh Bersin Company, The Big Reset Playbook: Hybrid Work, retrieved from The Big Reset Research: Big Reset Playbooks

Consider your processes and what has changed in the team, the work environment, and the company that might necessitate adjustments. The cadence of team meetings or activities might need to change. There’s likely new technology worth investigating. Perhaps you need to check in with certain team members more regularly or in a different way.

Are you updating the team promptly about what is happening in the company overall, especially if there are meetings they do not attend? In general, be transparent and responsive to the team’s needs.

You can use technology to help with this check-in task. Anonymous polls can be enormously helpful, primarily to ensure that everyone feels safe to provide input.

Collaborate Continually

And finally, a word about collaboration.

Gartner research shows that teams of knowledge workers who collaborate intentionally are nearly three times more likely to achieve high team innovations than teams that do not use an intentional approach.

Alan Lyons, Inside Hybrid Leadership

When the pandemic began and knowledge workers retreated to their home offices, companies feared that collaboration would stop or certainly that it would be impaired by remote work. The reality was anything but. Sure, gathering in a meeting room to brainstorm on a whiteboard can be helpful. But you can do precisely the same thing virtually. Collaboration tools continue to improve, seemingly at an exponential rate, along with project management and workflow tools.

On top of our regular project work on literally hundreds of content development, update, and translation projects, our learning design and development team created and implemented new approaches to content development, trained and coached wider team members on digital development skills, integrated machine translation into our process, began using AI text-to-speech for our video voiceovers, and made our training and course interface more accessible.

One person could not have accomplished all of this. It was the team who did it. And wasn’t it satisfying!

Resources to Learn More

To learn more, consult the list of resources in How to Manage a Hybrid Team, Part 1.