Cultivating Meaningful Hybrid Team Connection
How do we cultivate inclusivity in the hybrid workplace and make it feel meaningful?
How well are you connected with your colleagues? In today’s hybrid workplace, building a team community is challenging — we are all striving to fill different roles, find our own balance between work and life, and connect virtually. Over the past few years, our hours have felt longer, the workload feels heavier, and we struggle to define “meaningful work.” In the Harvard Business Review article “Fostering a Culture of Belonging in the Hybrid Workplace,” Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Katarina Berg talk about how hybrid workers miss “the camaraderie and spontaneous socialization … [that] help them rekindle relationships, feel a stronger connection, and remain an active part of the cultur[e].” We feel out of practice in how to build bonds with our colleagues yet still get the work done.
How do we cultivate inclusivity in the hybrid workplace and make it feel meaningful? We need to humanize our work relationships and simplify our interactions to build trust and inspire personal vulnerability and authenticity. How? By carving out space every day for the team to be able to shift away from work mode and get to know each other and build connection as a team. It takes rethinking something we might do regularly during the workday, simplifying it, and adding a personal spin. In my teams, I’ve found a way to do this with the P.Y.T. stand-up.
No, I am not talking about Michael Jackson’s “Pretty Young Thing” (great song, though). P.Y.T. represents “Personal fact, Yesterday, Today.” As someone who has utilized Agile daily stand-ups for years, I appreciate the daily team huddle to discuss a project’s progress at a high level. But over time, I’ve seen the daily stand-up turn into a dreaded meeting where participants join only to share their update and then tune out or multitask.
The P.Y.T. stand-up simplifies the purpose of the meeting — giving a quick update on what you worked on yesterday and what your plan for today is — and adds a rapport-building opportunity to make the huddle more interesting by everyone sharing a personal fact. It requires that the team bring a question every day for everyone to answer before sharing their Yesterday and Today, for example:
- What are your hobbies outside of work?
- Are you a morning person or a night owl?
- What was your first job?
- What skill — useful or random — would you like to learn?
The P.Y.T. stand up encourages everyone to listen out of curiosity for what teammates will share for their personal fact. The daily stand-up starts to become something they look forward to instead of “just another meeting” because they get to learn what makes each of their teammates unique. They share business updates, but also humanize their relationships with each other by learning so many authentic details, ultimately fostering trust and inclusivity and making the team’s interactions more meaningful.
At Slalom, two of our core values (Drive connection and teamwork, Celebrate authenticity) encourage us to feel like we belong to a team and that our values and identity are crucial components of our culture. We are urged to think with our heads and our hearts and take a fiercely human approach to our daily work. By simplifying a part of the workday to create space to be our most authentic selves, we bring meaning to our work relationships and drive stronger team collaboration and outcomes.
Whether you choose to implement P.Y.T. stand ups or devise your own explicit way to build camaraderie into your daily work routine, know that making room for your team to build rapport and feel included will make the hybrid workplace more personal and connected.
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