Hybrid is here to stay — 6 tips to make it work for you
Up your productivity, increase inclusion and keep your team working happy
As the coronavirus pandemic loosens its grip, people are returning to the office. Some of them are keen to get back, while others are wary, unwilling to give up the flexibility they’ve gained from working from home.
Hybrid work can keep both groups happy, though the reality can be hard to manage. There’s a risk that at-home colleagues will resent in-office colleagues, and vice-versa, and that communication lines begin to fail. But done well, hybrid work allows individuals the work-life balance they need (and have come to expect) while allowing organisations to meet their business needs.
Studies [see references] show that most employees expect hybrid work and flexibility as the new normal, and organisations that don’t allow remote and hybrid options without good reason are likely to find their staff turnover climbs, as employees vote with their feet.
I’ve put together these 6 tips to help you support successful hybrid work.
1. Make a ‘hybrid agreement’
A hybrid agreement sets the terms for hybrid collaboration in your team. During the pandemic remote working was rushed in and teams struggled to adapt any way they could. Now, there’s time to really think about what you and your team want from hybrid work and how it can meet everyone’s needs.
I recently developed the above Hybrid Blueprint for a client to help guide their team on the question: “How do we create a container for our collaboration now that our work isn’t centered around the physical office?”
Get your team together and talk through:
- How you can collaborate effectively, even when you’re not all physically together.
- Whether your existing remote tools are meeting your needs, or whether you need to experiment. (Is MS Teams/Zoom enough, or do you need to look at using SpatialChat or Welo, for example?)
- Is it OK for everyone to choose when they come into the office, or do you need to have certain days where everyone must be in?
- How can you avoid video fatigue, and facilitate more informal interactions alongside planned meetings? When teams work remotely, informal interactions (the equivalent of the watercooler chat) often don’t happen…but they can be incredibly valuable. What informal places to we need to setup?
- How can you coordinate. Maybe use a shared calendar so it’s easy to see who’s where and how they can be contacted.
When you’ve talked through all this, you’ll have the basis for your hybrid collaboration agreement. This should guide how you’re going to work and what’s expected of each team member.
2. Look beyond Zoom and Microsoft Teams
Zoom and Teams quickly became the pandemic-friendly go-to tools in 2020. And while they’re still incredibly useful in 2021, they’re not the only tools in town.
If you’re running hybrid meetings, with some attending in-person and some remotely, then think about how you include everyone on equal terms. It’s easy for in-person bias to slip in, with those who are physically in the meeting room having their voices heard more easily than those joining virtually.
Hybrid pioneers have long used Meeting Owl to help remote attendees take a full part in meetings. This owl-shaped video conferencing camera and microphone can turn 360 degrees, automatically zooming in on each speaker while also showing a panoramic image of the entire meeting room. This makes it easier for those on the other end of a laptop to feel part of the meeting and join the discussion on equal terms.
When you’re brainstorming and sharing ideas , the online whiteboard platform Miro comes into its own to visualize your discussion. An online board allows everyone to physically collaborate and contribute to creative processes, rather than simply having verbal discussion.
Worried about budgets? Neither Miro nor Meeting Owl are excessively costly (like many other SaaS tools Miro has an entry-level free version).
3. Think remote participants first
When running hybrid meetings, there can be a natural tendency to make the in-person meeting the focus, with remote attendees simply along for the ride.
Let’s look at an imaginary example:
Jürgen, Feray and Susanna sit together in a meeting room at company HQ in Frankfurt. Azim, Martina and Ivan log in from Bangalore, Madrid, and Skolkovo.
While the colleagues in the meeting room are chatting away, grabbing coffees and carrying on as if they were the only ones in the room, the remote attendees find it difficult to interact and feel like spectators.
Worse, the in-person attendees at HQ are all German speakers, and rather than sticking to English throughout to include everyone, tend to slip into German occasionally, forgetting that this leaves their remote colleagues even more excluded.
I have seen this sitiation play out many times over the years, and while there’s never any malicious intent, it’s almost inevitable unless you take active steps to counter it.
That’s why thinking remote participants first is the only way to achieve equality between remote and in-person attendees.
This means, for example:
- Making sure remote attendees can see and hear everything that’s going on in the room.
- If physical documents are distributed, email a PDF to remote attendees.
- Consider using an online whiteboard to make it easy for everyone to contribute to discussions on equal terms.
- If you use a physical whiteboard, check that remote attendees can see it and ask them to add their contributions using the meeting chat.
I would encourage you to be creative. What other small things could you do to make sure that remote attendees feel valued? Maybe set up a name sign, and perhaps a chair, for each remote attendee? Or even include a laptop for each one that streams their video and audio into the room? It might seem silly…but it’s worth giving some real thought to how everyone can feel fully represented and included.
4. Buddy up so everyone gets heard
Even if you’re employing all the tech tricks I’ve suggested to include people, it can still be difficult for some to get their voice heard as a remote attendee — especially if they’re relatively junior or new and haven’t yet built up a reputation or network. It’s often hard to judge when it’s an appropriate time to jump into a discussion if you’re not physically there.
To counter this, pair each remote attendee with someone in the room who’ll take responsibility for seeing that they get their chance to speak.
Here’s how this works:
Azim is joining remotely and you’re his in-room buddy. You can see he’s been on mute for a while, so you ask him: Azim, I know you’re on the road and have been on mute due to traffic noise, but is there anything you want to add?
It could also be that Azim WhatsApps you to say:, I want to add something, but I don’t want to interrupt. Tell me when I can jump in. And when the timing’s right, you can give him the “in” he needs.
In-room buddies work well because in-person attendees are forced to think about the needs of remote attendees — great for building your hybrid work culture.
5. Go 100% Cloud
Your work needs to live in the cloud, and not in your desk drawer.
If you jot down a good idea and put it in your office drawer, you can’t access it the next day when you’re working from home. If you write meeting notes on a physical whiteboard, your remote-working colleagues don’t get to slip into the meeting room and see the whiteboard notes as reminder, as your in-office colleagues can.
It’s time to be thoughtful and intentional about where and how you store and share information: including those informal thoughts that might not make it to the meeting minutes, but are often a vital part of your ongoing discussion.
The breakthrough you had during a brainstorming session in the office gets lost forever if you don’t add it to the cloud. Any resources that aren’t available digitally are not really resources, as they’re not universally usable.
When you hold physical meetings, you can of course write minutes or record the meeting…but minutes are often not read and recordings are rarely watched in full.
Instead, use tech tools to make it easy for everyone to find what they need. If you use a physical whiteboard, you could use Beacons: small plastic triangles that frame the content on the whiteboard. Then, using the dedicated app, you can take a picture of the entire whiteboard, which is automatically uploaded to the cloud.
You can also use Whiteboard Owl, a dedicated whiteboard camera that captures all the activity on the physical whiteboard and shares it real time with remote attendees.
6. Don’t forget the fun!
We’ve all had plenty of video calls in the last pandemic months…but there’s no substitute for a spontaneous chat in the office kitchen or an informal team lunch.
Those who’ve gone back to the office are resuming old social habits and, with them, building their networks and spotting opportunities. Those who aren’t in the office can easily miss out.
Create ways for people to come together and socialise, even if they’re hundreds of miles away. A weekly coffee date or monthly after-work social, with remote attendees included, can work wonders.
And there are digital tools designed to make social events feel like the real thing, such as SpatialChat and Mibo. Inside these apps, people (each with their own video avatar) can mingle freely and naturally. As they move around, conversations get louder or quieter and people further or closer away — just as they would in-person.
Want more help to get your hybrid team collaborating brilliantly?
Upcoming events, workshops, talks — next Hybrid Acceleration workshop
I support international teams as they experiment with tools, reinvent meetings and up their productivity through remote collaboration (drawing on 20+ years’ experience of global working).
References
Studies that shed light on the future of hybrid work from different perspectives:
Plugable Survey: An Employer’s Perspective on the Rise of the Hybrid Office. Data collected April 2021.
Gensler U.S Workplace Survey: Executive Summary — The Hybrid Future of Work. Summer/Fall 2020.
McKinsey Insights: What executives are saying about the future of hybrid work. Published May 17, 2021.
BCG survey results: What 12,000 Employees Have to Say About the Future of Remote Work. Published August 11, 2020
McKinsey Insights: What employees are saying about the future of remote work. Published April 1, 2021.
Buffer: The 2021 State of Remote Work. Based on data collected between Oct 14, 2020 and April 1, 2021.
