Your Hybrid Working Plan Requires Guidance
Whether your company is exploring a hybrid or flexible remote work strategy as part of “return to office” plans you need to understand the requirements and adjust your practices to make it work.
Our Hybrid Working Guide summarizes the highlights from years of experience working with hybrid teams to help your team understand: the dynamics of hybrid teams, the importance of effective leadership, and the critical elements of remote-first and async practices that make hybrid work successful.
This Hybrid Working Guide walks you through:
This Hybrid Working Guide walks you through:
Understand the Dynamics of Hybrid Working
Take the time to make sure that you’re aware of the pros, cons, and challenges of hybrid teams.
Is Hybrid the Best or the Worst of Both Worlds?
Understand the situations when hybrid is better than 100% in-office, when hybrid is better than 100% remote, and when hybrid is worse than both.
Hybrid work is better than 100% in-office because it offers:
- Flexibility and choice
- Wider talent pool
Hybrid work is better than 100% remote because it offers:
- Comfort of in-office environments
- Solution to isolation
Hybrid is worse than both 100% remote or 100% in-office because:
- Two employee groups emerge
- It’s primed for workplace inequities
- “Hybrid work” is undefined
- Executives are out of touch with workplace realities
Top Challenges of Hybrid-Remote Teams
Walk through the challenges that overlap with fully remote teams and those that are unique to hybrid teams.
- Poor virtual relationship building
- Lack of leadership or team buy-in
- Communication gaps
- Failing to maintain a remote compatible culture
Prepare Leaders to Manage Hybrid Teams
When part of your team is in an office and another part is working remotely, there are important differences in how you manage and lead.
Essential Digital-First Skills
Build the eight key leadership practices and behaviors for effective hybrid work:
- Meeting effectiveness
- Remote performance management
- Virtual connections
- Effective use of tools
- Boundary setting
- Autonomy
- Decision-making
- Creativity and innovation
Experienced Advice for Leading Hybrid Teams
15 pieces of advice from leaders who have been guiding hybrid teams for years. Here are the four themes of their advice:
- Balance strategic synchronous and asynchronous communication.
- Upgrade your technology for effective hybrid teams.
- Adjust performance measurement and management with equality in mind.
- Strengthen skills for empathetically leading hybrid teams.
Experienced Advice for Leading Hybrid Teams
15 pieces of advice from leaders who have been guiding hybrid teams for years.
Keys to Successful Remote Performance Management
Unfortunately, leaders feel more comfortable when they can “see” employees working. Learn how to overcome this bias.
All team members need to be wary of inclusion pitfalls on hybrid teams and ways to overcome them, including:
- Establish and exemplify a placeless mindset.
- Don’t be tied to the office.
- Give regular, ongoing feedback.
- Facilitate meetings with the proactive intention of calling on remote colleagues.
- Create regular space for random experience connection.
- Rethink the organic benefits that happen in an office.
- Celebrate each other!
Know That Hybrid Working Requires Remote-First Practices
Adopting a sustainable long-term strategy and guide for hybrid working requires dramatic shifts in mindset, infrastructure, and capability. This supplementary hybrid working guide walks through the critical steps for establishing remote-first practices.
Our Placeless Playbook outlines the steps people at all levels of an organization need to take to achieve digital-first success. A couple examples include:
- For Executives: Model a Placeless Mindset
- For Team Leaders: Establish Practices for Async Communication
- For Individuals: Establish and Communicate Your Boundaries
Adapt to the Trends Affecting the Hybrid Work
Based on our research and industry insights, we added to this hybrid working guide the top 10 hybrid work trends in 2022 that reflect the growing pains and uncertainty of hybrid work. The first five hybrid work trends include:
- A Remote Work Option Is Non-Negotiable
- Hybrid Work Is Uncertain
- Hybrid Companies Still Lack a Strategy
- Autonomy Is the Future of Hybrid Work
- Teams Are Still on Zoom Calls in the Office
Learn to Lean on Async Communication
Async is not a new concept, but one of the most consistent indicators of ineffective hybrid teams is an overreliance on synchronous communication and a hesitancy to embrace async to accomplish more work tasks. Our async communication series outlines the What, the Why, and the How of async.
