Leading Hybrid Teams

A hybrid team is a team of employees who work remotely and in person regularly throughout the week. They can work in person four days a week or once a week. As long as they are expected to work in person at some point during the week, they are considered a hybrid team.

The pandemic accelerated the evolution of work and brought great innovation in collaborative tools and systems, which demonstrated that remote work can be just as effective or even more effective than in-person work.

I have seen many teams lose key players or organizations failing to fill roles simply because employees are expected to work in the office when they could be working at home.

The hybrid working model is the new normal, and leaders must be aware of the challenges that come with it.

Challenges to Leading a Hybrid Team

Leading a hybrid team brings new challenges that leaders have not faced before.

Proximity Bias

We tend to believe that ‘if I can see you working, you are working harder than if I can’t see you working.’ Leaders tend to praise in-person team members more than those working from home (the Wall Street Journal found 90% of CEOs favour in-office employees for promotions in Remote Workers Are Losing Out on Promotions).

From Psychology, we know that when our brains miss information, they make up stories to fill the void. These stories often come from a bias, past experience, or fear.

We fill in the blanks between messages from remote workers, imagining that they are doing ‘other things.’ We are less willing to accept reasons for being late or missing deadlines from remote workers than workers we can see, because we experience the context of their lives and have developed trust and empathy for them.

How Do You Stop a Proximity Bias?

Gleb Tsipursky wrote a great article in Harvard Business Review, What Is Proximity Bias and How Can Managers Prevent It? he suggests:

1. Educate managers on what proximity bias is and how it occurs in the workplace.
2. Openly acknowledge proximity bias between team members.
3. Mitigate face-time concerns with more performance evaluations with remote workers.
4. Put in practices for equal treatment, especially when decisions are being made without remote workers present.
5. Put in place practices to ensure members of meetings on video have the chance to speak and do not have technological obstacles.

Informal Communication

When I worked at a Fortune 500 company, the office was one large room with cubicles. This arrangement allowed junior employees to learn important lessons through thin walls and participate in conversations that do not happen online.

Online communication requires intentionality to include everyone. Important dialogue that offers more than just task completion, focusing on benefits like learning, trust-building, teaching, and connecting with others who share similar experiences or contexts, is challenging to facilitate online.

Onboarding

It’s challenging to immerse someone into a team or work culture remotely. Companies run into turnover issues when new hires don’t get plugged in. Traditional onboarding practices like sitting new hires near senior employees or department heads do not directly translate to the online space, and it takes careful planning to ensure remote hires get up to speed.

Silos

Siloing in the business context refers to a situation where individuals or groups within an organization work in isolation from each other, typically focusing solely on their own tasks or objectives without much interaction or collaboration with other parts of the organization. 

When employees can choose when to come in, teams can become siloed because they only coordinate their days to align with those in their department or the specific project they are working on. This can limit cross-department brainstorming and prevent creative problem-solving.

Creating Connection

It’s harder to create connections between remote workers, and teams often lack trust when connections are weak. We’ve learned that teams working remotely for a long time can corrode trust in each other, and further research has shown that trust is required for hybrid teams to perform and grow.

Remember to approach challenges with humility and a growth mindset, listen to your direct reports, try new techniques, and commit to learning to lead better.

Mindset Shifts Required

Hybrid Work Culture

Work culture has rapidly developed since the start of 2020. Today, as we approach a new era of hybrid teams, we still use the same perception of ‘working’ we did during the Global Pandemic—that work is sitting in front of a computer with mouse activity and a constant ‘online’ status.

During the pandemic, people found themselves at home with their schedules wiped clear, filling their hours with work to meet their employers’ increased expectations.

As a result, they could focus solely on work, and the boundaries between work and personal life became blurred. There was also a fear that if people didn’t appear to be constantly working, they may lose their jobs or fall behind in their work. This led to people feeling pressured to work longer hours and being less likely to take breaks, leading to burnout and other negative consequences.

But humans are not robots. We know that ‘work’ disguised as constant activity is not beneficial to deep work and can lead to burnout and mistrust between team members. A new generation of workers is swinging the pendulum towards a more balanced view of working at home.

Work is not measured by the number of hours you have an active status on Slack or Teams. (shadow box) 

Before, when we were all in person, work involved getting coffee, sitting with colleagues for lunch and lingering at a friend’s desk.

When leading a hybrid team, leaders should not expect all communication to be instant. They should allow for interpersonal connections and offline moments once part of everyday working life.

Need for Individualized Leadership

Though your employee’s needs have always varied, individualized leadership has never been more critical.

As a leader, you need to create space to better understand your individual team members and the challenges they perceive in hybrid working. 

With all the current uncertainty, you must remain open and flexible in your understanding and reactions.

A hybrid team has immense potential for performance and job satisfaction, but it also comes with new challenges that leaders have not faced before.

Change a ‘Me’ Mindset to a ‘We’ Mindset

One of the undoubtable benefits of hybrid work is its efficiency. 

Bryan Robinson, Ph. D., writes for Forbes about three reports that ‘End Debate Over Effectiveness of Hybrid and Remote Work’. We now know that when it comes to getting tasks done, hybrid work works.

But hybrid work researchers and supporters often make the mistake of thinking only through a ‘me’ mindset. That is, they see how it’s easier for ‘me’ to complete tasks at home without considering the impact on the greater team.

Individuals may get through a task list faster, but where can junior employees learn through office osmosis? How can you support others by bringing them on the journey to completing work? Or celebrate others?

By nature, we are social creatures who need interaction and a sense of being part of a team working towards a common goal.

When leaders show individuals the value they bring to someone else on the team, it shifts the ‘me’ mindset to a ‘we’ mindset and we can say. ‘It’s better for us if we work together on this rather than if I just do it at home.’

A lot of problem-solving happens naturally when we bounce ideas off each other. When we learn to see the value we bring to each other, we can see how the individual can do better work with others than alone.

Supporting Leaders

Hybrid work popularity is bringing in a ‘new normal’ for how we work. Are you supporting your leaders in combating the challenges of hybrid work and enabling the mindset shift in your organization?

Training and equipping leaders can help them spot challenges and develop the skills necessary to change their managing practices.

The Lighthouse NINE Hybrid Work Toolkit is a customized resource we developed to help hybrid teams thrive. Working with both high-level executives and middle management, our toolkit assists organizations in making a mindset shift in their work culture. The Hybrid Work Toolkit empowers managers to overcome the challenges of leading hybrid teams.

Connect with our team and learn to think differently about working in hybrid.

Marnie Smith

Marnie Smith serves as Partner & Chair of Lighthouse NINE Group in Toronto, where she heads the High Performing Teams practice. Her expertise encompasses Change Management, Organization Design and Effectiveness, Team Development, Facilitation and Training, as well as Leadership Coaching.Designing consulting solutions that set teams up for success is Marnie’s talent – and passion. It begins with listening intently to clients and understanding their concerns, their needs, and their aspirations. With over 20 years’ experience as an internal and external consultant, Marnie works from initial problem scoping/visioning through to customized solution design and careful implementation.As an internal consultant at Mars Canada and RSA Canada, Marnie developed signature processes that enabled these firms to create resilient team cultures and strengthen employee engagement. Marnie has been a trusted advisor at multinational organizations such as McCain, State Farm, Royal Canin, Corning and OTPP, and has consulted in industries including Financial Services, Insurance, Manufacturing, IT, and Consumer Packaged Goods.At Lighthouse NINE, Marnie collaborates closely with her colleagues, bringing into play their varied expertise ranging from sales leadership to strategic planning to executive development. The Lighthouse NINE team has an extraordinary dedication to making sure clients are thrilled with winning service and solutions that deliver lasting impact.

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