The Blueprint for your Hybrid Teamwork
How to move from ad-hoc hybrid work practices, to a flexible, team centered approach
Everyone’s talking about hybrid work, and we all know that hybrid means a combination of working remotely (maybe from home or a coffee shop), and working in the office. But whether your people work from their suburban spare bedroom or your city centre office location is just one of the questions that need to be answered when we define hybrid work.
It’s one thing to state that you’re moving to hybrid, but quite another to determine how you do it. Some might want to work mostly from home, with just the occasional day in the office, and others the opposite. Those in client-facing roles might need to be in the office much more than their colleagues, even if they’d rather not be. New starters, especially those at the beginning of their career, might be keen to grab as much in-office time as they can to network. Others might have moved house in anticipation of long-term remote working, and be very unwilling to be in the office any more than the bare minimum.
It feels complicated, but the reality is that most organizations have had some form of hybrid working for years. Even pre-pandemic, many people worked at least an occasional day at home or worked flexibly to cover childcare. The systems and compromises we need are there, but the pandemic has meant that we now need to make them central to the way we do things, rather than an add-on.
How do you move from patchy, ad-hoc hybrid work practices, to a systematized, strategic approach that allows the business and individuals the flexibility they need?
The Hybrid Blueprint
By creating a hybrid working agreement — a Hybrid Blueprint, you provide yourself with the tools and structure needed to navigate the construction of your hybrid teamwork. Using it, you can establish where you are now, how you feel about that and where you could go next.
Perhaps you’ve been winging it up until now — most organizations have. You might have been trying out different tools to see what worked, and experimenting with different work patterns.
So it’s time to ask yourself: What is it that you want out of hybrid work?
The Hybrid Blueprint can provide the map you need to find your answer, in a way that is both inclusive and effective.
The blueprint has four corners/areas:
1Hybrid Values: What do you value as a team, and how does that translate to your view on hybrid work?
2 Digital Inclusiveness: What does this look like? Where is your collective work housed, what communication channels do you use as a team, and how do you make sure no-one is left behind?
3 Time & Place Synergy: Where do you work physically and how do you communicate? What asynchronous communication (such as brainstorming on an online board) takes place, and what synchronous communication (such as hybrid meetings)?
4 Team Growth: What team rituals do you have to make hybrid successful? How do you judge when things are going well, and when they’re not? Do you need to experiment with different processes?
Chances are what you want is a combination of things. Greater freedom and flexibility for individuals to meet their personal commitments and live where they choose without a hefty daily commute. The ability for the business to recruit and retain staff. The development and maintenance of a strong organizational culture (because we all know what culture eats for breakfast…)
The big hybrid mental shift
For hybrid to be successful, you need to stop seeing work as a physical location, but instead a series of connections that can be made in multiple ways. Unlike the sudden remote working the pandemic forced us into, hybrid work can be an intentional choice that you make and build on together. That’s where the Hybrid Blueprint comes in.
Together, you can decide what hybrid success will look like — with every voice valued equally, and buy-in baked into the process. And it’s not just about now: the Hybrid Blueprint is intended to be a living document that can adapt as you continue to learn, expand your team or take on new areas of work.
Your Hybrid Blueprint discussion
Here’s how I suggest you organize your Hybrid Blueprint discussion. The goals here are openness and progress: There’s plenty of space for everyone to be heard, while keeping the discussion focused on creating action.
1: Set clear parameters
Hybrid is potentially a huge subject, and in order to make progress, you’re likely to need to limit discussion to 5 or 6 of the topics in the Hybrid Blueprint. If you have more topics than that, keep them on the agenda, but be clear about what you want to prioritize so that nothing essential gets missed. You can always return another day if need be.
2: Agree collective language and values
Hybrid working may mean different things to different people, and there’s potential for language to be confusing. Avoid this by discussing what you value and how you collectively view hybrid work. This gives you an agreed starting point for your discussion, allowing you to navigate disagreements without distraction.
3: Allow plenty of brainstorming … but make sure the decisions get made
Brainstorming is a highly valuable tool, but only when it’s used to feed decision-making. Give space for brainstorming, but anchor that time with small group decisions on which topics are most important and what suggestions should be taken forward. Individuals can then be tasked with following up on those suggestions.
4: Keep up the collective momentum
At the end of your discussion, you should have a clear agreement on what hybrid success will look like for you and how you’re going to achieve it. So what’s next? Make sure you have a process for checking in and seeing how well you’re doing (collectively and individually) with hybrid working.
5: Remember that the Hybrid Blueprint is a living document
This isn’t the end, but the beginning. It’s inevitable that things will change, and important that every team member feels able to suggest adjustments to the hybrid work practices and tools as time goes on.
Hybrid is the Future
While most of us were doing some kind of hybrid working pre-pandemic, post-pandemic, hybrid has become expected, rather than an occasional break from the norm.
If hybrid is the future, the future is now here, and it’s time to stop experimenting and start laying real foundations.
Ready to start creating your Hybrid Blueprint? Grab your copy here.
Need a deeper level of support? Join Hybrid Team Synergy. The Hybrid Team Synergy workshop is a three week process of deep collaboration, giving you a full hybrid work toolbox. You can dive in with your intact team or join an open-enrollment workshop. Find out about the next workshop here.
