Five Practical Approaches to Prepare You and Your Teams for a Hybrid World of Work

The “future of work” may simply mean adapting to each “next phase.”

Photo by Vlada Karpovich from Pexels

We’ve spent most of our careers working at the office and nearly two years working remote, but how will we learn to lead in a hybrid world?

While we cross our fingers for a post-pandemic future, the disruption to our way of work is irreversible. We know now that work will be spread across a spectrum from onsite to hybrid to fully remote.

As organizations continue to revise their approaches and push back their plans to return to the office, your organization may already know where it lands on the spectrum. Lyft employees — who were planning to be back onsite in February — won’t return until 2023, Ford Motors postponed a January return to the office until March, and Google and Uber have paused their plans indefinitely to see how the omicron variant plays out.

No matter where you and your teams do their work, there is a huge chance it will be distributed across place and time. Our ecosystem of partners, customers, vendors, and employees must work together to adapt and thrive in a hybrid world. The jury is still out on when and how we will work beyond this year, but we must prepare for a very different future.

New imperatives for leaders and teams

While it’s hard to prepare for a future that’s so uncertain, one thing is clear: the new world of work is a fast-moving transformation. And like all major transitions, we’ll need a new mindset, skillset, and toolkit to be effective and engaged in a hybrid model and a flexible world of work.

• Mindset: Adopting a learner’s mindset is a crucial aspect of adapting to the new world of work, allowing us to become more responsive to the needs and experiences of others.
• Skillset: We need to be able to lead and grow a distributed team with varying needs and preferences.
• Toolkit: Harnessing the power of actionable approaches and resources is essential to better understand and collaborate with our people in order to create experiences that inspire our teams.

Mindset: Courageous leaders of the future

In our ever-changing world, risk is high and opportunity is imminent. Traditional, business-centered leadership practices aren’t good enough and effective leaders must have the courage to grow and change. To embrace a flexible future, we need to adopt a more human-centered leadership approach, enabling us to learn new skills and become more open to the shifting needs of our talent and teams.

Enabling this type of meaningful change requires:

Empathy.

Being an empathetic leader during the pandemic has been essential. It became mandatory — possibly for the first time — to check in and understand our people. We learned to appreciate and acknowledge their circumstances, whether it be helping their children with digital learning while working at the kitchen table or the sense of isolation and disconnection that comes with working from home. We learned what it looks like to radically care for our people — not just their performance and progress, but their personal needs and well-being. To enable the new world of work, that level of empathy in leadership is what truly matters.

Inclusivity.

Intentional inclusivity is no longer the job of the DEI team. In the future of work, it’s every leader’s job to ensure that those furthest away from us feel as close to us as they’d be in the office next door, and those on a screen feel as close as those working together in the conference room. As “tiles” in our virtual world, we may have all struggled for the floor, but at least we all felt similarly challenged in using the hand raise function. In a hybrid world, the risks of proximity bias and inequal access are high. As leaders, our job is to empower our teams with the aptitude to facilitate real conversations and reach out to those who may be disengaged or marginalized. These are no longer nice-to-haves in an environment where fairness and equity are expectations.

Listening and Learning.

With our teams distributed and our gatherings focused on work priorities, we need to design intentional methods for employee listening to increase our understanding, learning, and adapting. The pace of the annual survey and employee focus groups won’t meet the need to capture today’s employee signals and feedback. To be effective, every leader must build a curiosity muscle. This requires being eager to listen and open to what is working what isn’t, as well as what truly matters to our people. We’ll need to continuously adapt our cadence, methods, and expectations to create an experience that meets the diverse needs of our teams.

The expectations of all leaders have evolved, but the appetite for learning and adapting is also high. That means you don’t have to “be right,” but instead simply work with others to “get it right.” Being highly self-aware combined with a willingness to learn and openness to change are the competencies that will differentiate leaders who can inspire their teams into an evolving future.

Skillset: Empowering hybrid teams

In the virtual world, connection and collaboration have been hard on our teams. Nonetheless, we’ve been resilient, adopting a slate of new technology tools along the way. We’ve developed “water cooler” channels in our collaboration platforms to mimic lunch time chatter, designed both large group all-hands and breakout sessions for discussions, and hosted happy hours that helped us learn about each other in a more social way. We’ve seen each other’s kitchens, children, and furry friends. In some ways, we became closer — maybe even more human humans.

While it might not be the same as high-fives in the hallway or swinging by someone’s office to see if they’ve “got a quick minute,” two years of physical distancing has shown us what’s essential for the teams of tomorrow. Our employees want flexibility without compromising connection or engagement.

The reality is that we are entering a new chapter of experimentation. And it’s a lot to take in. How will you help your teams build the skills to jump in? Are they ready to learn and do they have the tools to increase their success?

Addressing these key questions can help hybrid team leaders get started:

• Does your team have a method for forming and running hybrid teams?
• How will you decide when to gather in person?
• Can your team run an effective hybrid meeting?
• What will your norms be for digital, in-person, and remote collaboration?
• How can your team enable greater transparency?
• How will you be inclusive and equitable?
• How will you engage and check in on the well-being of each team member?
• What experiences do you want to create for each other?
• Does your team have the technology tools it needs to succeed?

While few people may like or even know how to conduct a hybrid meeting, each team is comprised of people with wildly different preferences, style differences, and values. Making those preferences explicit and aligning on your team’s approach is the key.

Toolkit: Practical approaches to enable hybrid teams

Like many leaders, you may feel unprepared. So how do you lead and help your teams navigate the hybrid world?

We created a Hybrid Leader and Team toolkit with templates and deeper dives that can help leaders guide their teams through these rapid changes. While there are no silver bullets, there are a few key “accelerators” that can help you get a jump-start on the new demands (and change course when you need to):

1. Develop new team norms.

Norms are the drivers of culture and the employee experience. They govern how a team interacts, prioritizes, and holds people accountable. They can be logistical or aspirational, but consciously creating specific and actionable hybrid team norms help make the implicit explicit, can reduce friction and greatly improve team alignment. Which meetings will be in person or remote? How will you make decisions, collaborate on new ideas, deliver feedback, and develop new strategies in a hybrid workplace? How will you manage personal preferences, team needs and client needs? Design norms as an entire team, post them where they’re visible to all, and revisit them regularly.

2. Get the hybrid meeting right.

Reset why and when you gather, including being more intentional about the types of team collaboration. Be more diligent in meeting preparation and firm up a clear purpose for your meetings in advance. (This includes considering whether the meeting outcome can be achieved via another method, whether it be an email or separate sync.) Clearly communicate meeting expectations for in person and remote attendees, considering the experience of all. Align on expectations regarding how you will ask questions, democratize the discussion, and use the whiteboard. Lastly, dedicate the last few minutes of each meeting to address how team norms can be adjusted and how to enhance the experience for everyone.

3. Know your employee personas.

One size doesn’t fit all, which means your organization’s chosen hybrid model may not work for everyone all the time, making it tough to deliver a meaningful experience. As a leader, you’ll need to develop an understanding of the unique needs, values, aspirations, and circumstances of the individuals on your team to best support them and keep them engaged. This means developing an understanding of both those who are more office-centric as well as those who prefer digital-by-default or have personal commitments that require location flexibility.

4. Prepare hybrid managers.

With remote and hybrid work shifts, the role of the manager is rapidly changing. They are the employee’s connection to the organization, the drivers of organizational culture, and they must balance the needs for performance and productivity against employee desires for flexibility, engagement, and career development. Since each employee has different values and needs, they’ll also have unique preferences for how they want to work and the experience they want as a part of your organization. Learn techniques for managing common hybrid employee engagement scenarios and practice important conversations for each of your employee personas. Consider training your people managers and providing them with the tools to better understand and have crucial conversations with their teams, as well as support them through shifts and navigate competing needs.

5. Drive retrospectives.

As a team, it’s important to come together and reflect on how the new model is working. That can be as simple as celebrating what’s been accomplished or generating new ideas about working better together. Even as lightweight discussions, retrospectives and check-ins can help teams excel (and build trust) by addressing questions such as:

• What’s working well? What are we doing effectively together? What can we celebrate?
• What needs improvement? What opportunities do we see for working better together as a team?
• Are there new ideas? What can we try to enhance our experience or effectiveness together?
• What are the next steps? What actions will we take and who will be responsible for communicating back to the team?

At the end of the day, we want our people to see themselves in our organizations both now and far into the future. We want our teams to feel connected and to be able to easily engage. We want to strengthen our customers’ loyalty and confidence in our brands. To do that, we need to emerge as innovative and prepared leaders capable of guiding our teams through an uncertain and evolving future.

Learn more about Slalom’s ETHOS guide to the future of work or download a copy of the Hybrid Leader and Team toolkit here.

Slalom is a global consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation. Learn more and reach out today.