Strategies for successfully managing a hybrid team

Set clear expectations

While working from home brings new challenges and benefits for employees, it is unchartered territory for many of us. As a manager, this is your opportunity to set clear expectations of what is required of your hybrid team and how best to work in a relatively novel set up. Remember, this is new for you too, so don’t feel like you need to know all the answers. It is best to clarify to your team how you want to work, when daily meetings are and how they are to be held, when office days are, and how information is to be conveyed for home or overseas members of your team.

Build and maintain relationships

It can be challenging to build and maintain a relationship with your hybrid team, especially when you have team members working from home or in different countries and time zones. Working from home can be isolating, so it is important to set aside some time to give regular feedback to individual members of your team. It would be a good idea to schedule regular meetings over Zoom or Microsoft Teams, so that remote workers feel engaged and involved. To strengthen relationships, it can also be useful to arrange team building exercises or away days where all members of your team are present in-person.

Foster collaboration

Many people think that collaboration is more difficult in a hybrid work environment, but there are ways that you can foster it. As a manager, it is your job to seek out creative and new digital tools that can transform the way you work. You could set up dedicated workspaces online, for example, where you use innovative digital tools to connect and exchange ideas. Alternatively, you could schedule specific days dedicated to collaborative work. In this way, your team, whether they are remote or in-office, will feel involved and connected with one another.

Encourage regular breaks

There are a lot of benefits to working in a flexible hybrid work environment, but working from home can become tiring and intense. Many people have a tendency to work additional hours due to blurred boundaries between work and leisure time. Be sure to pay close attention to your team members’ stress levels in order to prevent burnout.

As part of this, encourage your team to take breaks away from their desks – after all, nobody is designed to sit in one place for eight hours straight! This also applies to team members working in the office – remind your employees to take breaks to make a drink in the kitchen or go on a walk, and to take their full lunch hour away from their desk. This can help to promote mental clarity, making the time they do spend working a lot more productive.

Provide the right tools

Make sure that your employees have the right tools and work environment to do their job effectively. This means providing office equipment so that they can work comfortably, both in the office and at home (e.g. a laptop that can run the required software and programmes, a good-quality chair with back support, a headset and webcam, and an extra screen to reduce eye strain from working on a laptop), as well as providing software for aspects such as collaborative working, online communication, and safe ways to access work from a distance.

But having the right tools is not enough – it’s also crucial to teach your employees how to use them. Run training sessions for new and existing employees on the skills they need to effectively utilise the equipment and software you provide to ensure that no one feels left behind.

Interested in other tips on successfully manging a team? Check out our article on ‘Building a stronger team: How to effectively manage disputes between your employees’.

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