Leading Hybrid Teams: 3 Key Conversations for forming a hybrid team.
As a society, we are approaching a once in a generation opportunity to redefine the way we work in teams. Transitioning your team into hybrid work is more than a logistical challenge, it’s a cultural one. Are you ready? Is your team ready?
Last year forced many teams to work from home, away from the office, and away from one another. Now, as offices start reopening, leaders and HR are preparing for what the future of work will look like --- a future that no one has quite figured out yet. According to a recent McKinsey survey, 9 out of 10 companies plan to return to some type of hybrid environment, but 68% of those don’t yet have a detailed plan in place. As we plan for this next season of work, we have an opportunity to intentionally design a way of working that fosters thriving, high-performing teams.
Your team also changed while working remotely. New team members onboarded, team members left, re-orgs happened, new leaders joined, people had to figure out a new way to get work done, many felt isolated and anxious, everyone experienced struggles and pressures in one way or another. You can't simply change the WFH policies and expect your team will just click back into what it was in 2019. The people on your team have changed. Your team dynamics have changed. The world has changed. Now that you're planning for a return to the office (in whatever format that looks like for you), you have an opportunity to re-establish your team norms, culture, structures, relationships and processes.
Team leaders -- this is your moment to shine!
Today, we’re kicking off this “Leading Hybrid Teams” blog series as a guide to help you as you help your teams transition into a new way of working. Leading a hybrid team will require new ways of working from you and your team. You don’t have to go it alone. Over the next few months you’ll find simple team conversation guides, tips on developing psychological safety in hybrid teams, learnings from other leaders, and additional resources to support you in this transition.
This isn’t your average blog series. We’ve been down this road ourselves as members of hybrid teams at Google; we are human behavior research nerds, and we’re also team development consultants who’ve helped numerous teams foster psychological safety, clarity, connection, and culture over the years. We are excited to share best practices, new learnings, and great resources with you to support you in leading your team into a new way of working together. Welcome and enjoy the journey!
With vaccine numbers rising, going back to work is on everyone’s mind. Open any new site or drop in on any leadership conversation and you’ll find hybrid work as a top theme. The plethora of articles and talk about all the change coming our way has us thinking about the critical conversations that team leaders will need to begin having with their teams to successfully make the transition to a hybrid team.
With hybrid work fast approaching, now is the time to start these conversations. In today’s article, we’ll share three key conversations to help you set the stage for forming a successful hybrid team, as well as a few tips to guide you in leading this discussions.
1. Exploring what we are leaving behind and what we are creating
Changing the way you work together is an opportunity to be intentional. It’s important to take time for retrospective reflection. Instead of forging ahead with office logistics, we need to pause and ask our teams what we have learned about our work over the last year. In a hybrid team, we also need to be curious and mindful about who has access, about where power and influence lives, and about what equity looks like for all of us.
Be open in these conversations to different perspectives. People in your team will have had different experiences and have different preferences. From our clients, we saw that many individuals struggled with working remotely: it was hard to bond with work colleagues and build social relationships; there were more meetings, which meant less focused work-time; and there were more distractions (partners, children, family responsibilities). However, we also heard about the benefits in working remotely: more flexibility with where and when you work, less commute time, (for some) a quieter workspace, and more time to bond with family and pets.
Questions to explore with your team:
What do we want to leave behind? We can ask this question at the team and/or personal level.
What are we leaving behind? There will be loss. What does it look like to mark & mourn what we are leaving behind?
How were some of our pre-pandemic ways of working not working? What parts of our teams were they not working for? How do we remove or change those processes?
What do we want to take with us? Amidst the challenges, there were some shining moments over the past year. BCG survey results show a 15-40% increase in productivity, a 40% decrease in absenteeism, and a 10-15% decrease in turnover for workers who moved fully remote during COVID. We need to identify what worked well and take those learnings into the next phase.
What worked well over the past year in how we worked together?
What habits, norms, or practices do we want to continue? What would it look like to take what worked into this next chapter?
What do we miss about working in person? How can we recreate the best of those experiences?
What do we want to create anew? This is a new season. No one has figured out the ‘right way’ yet, and you don’t need the right answers. You just need to be ready to experiment with a learning mindset, and give one another grace in the change. According to our clients, taking on this ‘learner mindset’ as a leader is one of the trickiest parts, but role modeling is essential for bringing this to life.
Clarify our purpose - why our team exists and what we are striving to achieve. What do we each need to achieve that purpose?
Based on our team's purpose and what we need to achieve that purpose, what new approaches do we want to try on or experiment with?
What are we optimizing for as a team this season? How does this impact our priorities and goals?
2. Fostering psychological safety as a team
Psychological safety, as Google, Harvard researcher, Amy Edmondson, and many others, have proven in the past, creates the space for curiosity, creativity, and innovation. Regardless of the pandemic, we know it is an essential quality for high-performing teams. As we move into hybrid work, the boundaries between life and work will inevitably become blurry, requiring leaders to make decisions that will impact employees' personal lives in ways that they haven’t before. These blurred lines make psychological safety even more important, according to Edmondson in a recent HBR article.
“When it comes to psychological safety, managers have traditionally focused on enabling candor and dissent with respect to work content. The problem is, as the boundary between work and life becomes increasingly blurry, managers must make staffing, scheduling, and coordination decisions that take into account employees’ personal circumstances — a categorically different domain.” - Amy C. Edmondson and Mark Mortensen
Leaders need to create spaces where it’s safe for teams to share their experiences and needs, to experiment with different ways of working, and to develop evergreen processes for evaluating and modifying these ‘ways of working’ experiments.
The key to psychological safety is creating a space where it is safe to take interpersonal risks, like speaking up, sharing mistakes, and asking for help. In step one above, your team discussed your goals for your hybrid team. Next, it’s time to talk about how you will develop new ways of working together. The following questions will help your team to get clear on how you can build the psychological safety needed to embrace the ‘experiment’ mindset for hybrid work.
My top tip: have a mindset of curiosity and compassion as you enter this conversation with your team.
Questions to explore with your team:
How might we create the space for experimentation in the ways we work as a team?
Which experiments aren’t working? How might we learn & iterate when experiments fail?
How will we make space in our team for ourselves and others to share what we need, what is working and what is not working?
3. Setting hybrid policies
For leaders that are designing policies for hybrid work, start with listening. Our clients tell us that employees aren’t ready to go back to ‘normal.’ They are anxious about jobs and worried about their health and their families. Yet, they miss co-workers and look forward to reconnecting. Our teams have been through a collective trauma and they need to talk about it. Listen for their experiences and design your policies around what you hear. People are more likely to get on board when they feel heard and understood in the decision-making process.
After listening, create policies that provide both clarity and empathy. Job related ambiguity adds onto the already heavy anxiety and burnout out teams are experiencing. Your policies should be clear as to provide guidance, but should show that you listened to what your team shared.
At the team level, you will have some flexibility to decide policy, while others will be set at the organization level. Lean towards flexibility with your team where you can to improve well being, productivity, and retention of key talent. Clearly communicate boundaries in what you can change and what you can’t.
Questions to explore with your team to shape hybrid policies:
What was the last year like for you?
What do we miss most about the pre-pandemic ways of working?
What worked well about the way we worked together during the pandemic? What didn’t work well?
What are you most excited about?
What are you most concerned about?
What is most important to you in the transition to hybrid work?
Our tips as you approach these conversations:
Each conversation is an opportunity to co-create the culture you want to build in your team. We recommend you arrive in the conversation with a mindset of curiosity and compassion, and an openness to learning and hearing different perspectives. You won’t resolve everything in one conversation, so plan on having multiple conversations, over time.
A few final tips:
Share the questions you want to explore beforehand to give team members time to think about the answers
Frame the discussion by setting the context on the purpose and goals of the conversation, what decisions will be made, and how you would like the team to participate
If you’re a large team larger than 8 people, use breakout room functionality to have small groups discuss and then come back together to share back
Set some ground rules before diving into the conversation - my favorite is to listen with curiosity
Schedule enough time for all voices and perspectives to be heard. It will probably take longer than you think
Get our free team conversation guides!
In the coming weeks we’ll be launching free team conversation guides to help you support your team through this transition into hybrid work. Don’t miss out! Sign up today to get these guides the day they drop.
The time is here. What will you do with your once in a generation opportunity?
Ready to have these conversations, but not sure where to start? We are here to help! Let us help you to design and facilitate the conversations. Send us a note or schedule time to connect at www.regroup.co.
