How to Manage a Hybrid Team, Part 1

Leading a team for a tech company in today’s environment of constant change can be a challenge at the best of times. The pandemic and its aftermath presented managers with a whole new set of challenges.

Fortunately, there are best practices for leading hybrid and remote teams that can make it a lot easier. Below are some tried and true ways to ensure your team members feel connected, supported, and empowered to do their best work.

Note: My use of the term “hybrid” refers to a team in which some team members work from home and others in the office. It can also mean that employees work a hybrid schedule, part-time remote and part-time onsite. Even before the pandemic, many teams included employees working in various locations, both in company-provided and home offices. This is sometimes called a distributed team.

Make Sure That Employees Have the Necessary Equipment

Every company handles equipment for hybrid teams differently. Some choose to provide funds to support working at home. Others do not. In any case, to work effectively, each team member needs to have the right equipment to do their job, whether working in the office, remotely, or on a hybrid schedule.

In addition to necessary computer equipment and monitors, at minimum, every employee needs:

• a comfortable desk and chair in each work location,
• a web camera,
• suitable lighting, and
• a headset.

Each employee must ensure that their video and audio are clear. This might mean using the headset instead of the built-in mic when attending online meetings.

Surely, you say, everyone has figured this out by now. Well, yes, hopefully so. But it’s best to set these expectations clearly, especially when someone new joins the team.

Provide Informal Opportunities to Connect

It's easy to feel disconnected from your coworkers without the option to go for lunch together or chitchat in the breakroom. We are social animals and genuinely do need to connect.

When the pandemic first hit and traditional in-office opportunities for building relationships were gone, I scheduled 30-minute check-ins three times a week for our learning design and development team.

But wait, that’s a lot of time! Yes, it is a lot of time. But that’s how critical close relationships are to building and maintaining a high-performing, collaborative team.

On the other side of the time equation, check-ins were completely optional; not everyone joined every time, and not everyone turned their camera on every time. In these cases, they were likely multi-tasking (task-switching!) and enjoyed the comfort of listening to the team as time allowed.

Over time, we reduced the meetings to twice a week. These opportunities to connect continue to be essential for the team. I know because team members continue to attend and attest to their value.

Model Online Behavior and Flexibility

Normalize turning on your camera for video calls. Seeing others is an essential part of staying connected.

At the same time, give your team permission to be authentically themselves by modeling what is acceptable and when. For informal check-ins, your background doesn’t need to be perfectly curated. There might be some clutter. Kids and pets might appear. Setting a tone of acceptance for all of us to be human supports a very positive team culture and occasionally interjects some humor into our work life. (None of us will forget the moment Professor Robert Kelly’s children interrupted a rather serious BBC News interview.)

Of course, not all online meetings can or should be relaxed. You will model using attractive backgrounds or a curated space when meeting more formally across the organization or with customers.

Above all, be flexible. There will be times when you or others are not “camera-ready.” That’s ok, too.

Make the Most of Technology

Enriching the technological landscape with advanced collaboration tools such as video conferencing, document management, chat tools, and next-generation interfaces contribute to crafting a collaborative culture. The pandemic has accelerated the need and adoption of such tools, which help people feel more engaged and nurture their sense of belonging.

The Josh Bersin Company, The Big Reset Playbook: Organizational Culture and Performance, retrieved from The Big Reset Research: Big Reset Playbooks

Whether you use Microsoft Teams, Slack, Confluence, or other communications and collaboration applications, take time to learn their capabilities and ingrain their use into your team’s everyday processes.

Initially, our team used the Teams chat associated with our check-in meetings for informal communications, whether the topic was business process, a technical problem, or breakroom chitchat. Over time, we learned to have dedicated communications channels (in our case, Teams group chats) for specific purposes. This eliminated team members missing or wasting time searching for specific information.

As time passed, we used numerous additional capabilities in Teams for various tasks, including managing projects and collaborating with subject matter experts, editors, and production teams. This was especially important when collaborating with teams and individuals in radically different time zones. Figuring out how to collaborate well with far-flung colleagues asynchronously will enhance your productivity. For example, we took advantage of differences in time zones to build in review time on content development projects.

Asynchronous work modes are just as important to achieving team innovation as synchronous modes.

Mary Baker , 4 Modes of Collaboration Are Key to Success in Hybrid Work

Above all, when you’re experimenting with new technologies and ways of working, make it OK to fail. Not everything your team tries will succeed.

Schedule Opportunities for Team Building

Teambuilding is even more critical when you’re part of a hybrid or remote team. There are many creative ways to go about it, even entirely virtual. Here are some options:

• Meet online to play a game. Our team played trivia challenge games, "2 Truths and a Lie," and "Who Dunnit?" on Kahoot, and Make it Meme was also a lot of fun! These games are especially beneficial for new members to get to know the team.
• Participate in a Book Club. My manager started a book club, polling team members for book ideas and hosting quarterly hybrid meetings. These events inspired us to read compelling books that we likely would never have read otherwise. Plus, we had genuinely engaging discussions that reinforced our learning.
• If you can, also meet in person for more traditional team building. Your company’s Learning and Development team likely has options available. Anything that requires you to collaborate to solve puzzles or problems is a good option, especially if you add competition to the mix. My team tackled the challenge of building a chicken out of Legos when only one person could see the model. We learned much about communicating concisely and clearly as part of a collaborative effort.
• If enough of the team is located in one area, arrange volunteer events, lunches, and other social events. Our team worked at the local food bank once every quarter. This was an opportunity to do good for the community, get to know one another better, and flex our collaboration muscles simultaneously. (Sometimes, it was also a workout for our other muscles!)

Remember that, as a manager, you don’t have to organize everything yourself. We had a small group of volunteers on the team who organized events.

Run Hybrid Meetings Well

Online calls can be exhausting. Zoom fatigue is real, and I think we’ve all experienced it now!

With this in mind, you should take special steps to manage a hybrid or fully remote meeting. Running these events well will promote your team members’ feelings of inclusion and belonging.

Here are the basics:

• Create and circulate an agenda for comment before each meeting. You might not be aware of everything that needs to be addressed.
• Ensure that everyone attending together in a conference room uses their laptop and logs into the meeting individually. This ensures that all attendees can clearly see one another’s faces. (Conference room attendees might need to mute their laptops.)
• Ask for volunteers or designate someone to take notes. Don’t try to “be a hero” and do it all. If you’re facilitating the meeting, focus on that.
• Assign someone to watch the chat and keep an eye out for remote participants who raise their hands. This is especially important for audio-only participants.
• Ensure that you’re taking time to engage remote attendees as well as those in the room.
• Intentionally pause now and then so those attending virtually and more reserved team members can contribute.
• If you’re confident that your team feels comfortable, ask individuals directly for their thoughts. Get them started by validating their opinion: “Jamie – I know that you’ve experienced this issue previously. Can you tell us how you addressed it?”
• Record meetings for those who can’t attend. Reviewing a recording can be a better, more connected experience than simply reading the meeting notes. You can always watch it sped up.
• Experiment with technology to help you brainstorm and collaborate on content.

Running and participating in hybrid meetings effectively takes practice. Discuss the process and how it’s going with the entire team. Sometimes this will mean following up individually with those who might not feel comfortable speaking up in a group setting.

Be Ever More Diligent to Clarify and Document Your Processes

When decisions are made, everyone in each office needs to understand the decision and ideally why it was made. Don't use email. It's too easy to lose important information. Use a content management system like a wiki where team members can easily browse for updates across the team (and get notified of updates via email or Slack group chat tool). You can also use Slack to create channels for individuals and teams to communicate and see updates. Delays caused by team members working on outdated information, hitting a roadblock, and then asking a question costs the team significantly more time than proactively sharing information.

Dan Radigan , Think globally, code locally: the secret to distributed teams

In an in-person environment, it’s easy to pop your head into a colleague’s office or cubicle to ask how to perform a particular task. This can be harder in the virtual world. Even when you have systems that display who on the team is available, some feel uncomfortable tagging someone unannounced.

While it’s always best practice to have clear, well-documented procedures, with a hybrid team, it’s critical. This will help prevent individuals from needing to figure out on a one-off basis how to handle challenges your team encounters repeatedly.

Again, use whatever technology you have available to make this easier. We used a SharePoint library. Overview documents provided an optional starting point and linked to targeted process pages.

For content development projects, we used designated Teams channels with standard file structures and defined processes. Everyone knew what was expected of them, smoothing the way to productive collaboration.

Stay Tuned

I hope you’ve found these practical, proven hybrid team management methods useful. In part 2, I’ll explain additional best practices, including managing one-on-one meetings, onboarding, professional development, recognition, rest and recovery, and continually adjusting your team management.  

Resources to Learn More

Alan Lyons, Inside Hybrid Leadership webinar and handouts

Bob Nelson and Tracey Wik, Managing Virtual Workers in the Era of Hybrid Work webinar and handouts

Dan Radigan, Think globally, code locally: the secret to distributed teams

Devin Partida, Employee Connectedness Among Remote Teams Is Possible

Ilhan Scheer, Psychological safety: Crack the work behavior code

Justin Grossbard, This Communication Issue In Remote Teams Is Affecting The Employee Experience

Learning Guild, The Hybrid Workplace Best Practices & Tips From Managers

Pamela Hogle, Successful Hybrid Teams Turn to Asynchronous Work Tools

Shawn Foley, Remote? Hybrid? 7 Ways to Lead a Successful Transition

Shelly Immel, 3 Must-Have Leadership Competencies For Leading Remote Teams

Tracy Middleton, The importance of teamwork (as proven by science)

Vartika Kashyap, Your Guide To Elevating Employee Engagement In A Hybrid Workplace

Wendy Gates Corbett, MS, CPTD, wendygatescorbett.com

From Gartner:

Gartner for HR, Evolve Culture & Leadership for the Hybrid Workplace: A 12-month roadmap for CHROs and their leadership team

Graham Waller, Think Hybrid Work Doesn’t Work? The Data Disagrees

Jordan Turner, 9 Ways to Manage Hybrid Employees for Better Productivity

Mary Baker, 4 Modes of Collaboration Are Key to Success in Hybrid Work

From The Josh Bersin Company:

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

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

The Big Reset Playbook: Organizational Culture and Performance, retrieved from The Big Reset Research: Big Reset Playbooks

The Definitive Guide: Employee Experience

From ATD (membership required for access)

ATD Research, Developing Hybrid Teams: Combining Office and Remote Work, research report

ATD Research, Developing Hybrid Teams: Combining Office and Remote Work, webinar and slides, presented by Jennifer Homer, April 19, 2022

Ben Lowell, The Secrets of High-Performing Teams in Hybrid/Remote Environments, webinar and slides, February 28, 2023