How Managers Can Lead Effectively in The Hybrid Workplace

by Al Dea | Oct 23, 2023 | Leadership, The Future of Work

How Managers Can Lead Hybrid Teams

Managers today have a tall order. While they have traditionally always had to navigate being “in the middle” the evolving workplace and shift to hybrid/remote work has required them to think and work in new ways.

Whether it’s navigating the diverse need and desires of employees, enforcing work policies that they did not decide on, or trying to construct and coordinate how work gets done with people everywhere, it can seem like a never ending tug of war for managers in figuring out how to lead effectively in a way that gets things done and keeps people engaged.

Doing this well, especially with the realities of our knowledge worker workplace, of distributed teams, meetings, digital technology, and lots of interruptions is not always easy. To be sure, this was true before the pandemic. Interruptions in your work day before the pandemic. And meetings have long been the bane of existence for companies for decades. But it’s clear, today, we need to find ways to improve the ways in which we work, in our global, connected, and distributed working world.

Challenges of the role of a leading in a Distributed/Remote Team

While some of these challenges are not new, there are several unique challenges of leading remote and distributed teams.

According to a 2021 Survey from Robert Half of 2800 Managers, managers rated the top five things as their biggest challenges with leading hybrid and remote teams:

Communicating Effectively
Trusting employees to get work done
Gauging Workloads and preventing burnout
Recognizing accomplishments
Supporting professional Development

Getting teams to work effectively in hybrid environments is critical to performance and engagement. Managers have a role in this, but often struggle on what to do, or how to be effective, especially when it comes to things like creating a team environment where people do feel connected and engaged.

The following are six specific things a manager can do in order to lead a remote or hybrid team effectively:

1)Have a Meaningful Conversation With Each of Your Employees

In their research on remote and hybrid work, Gallup found that employees who went into the office 2-3 times a week who worked in collaborative jobs were both more engaged and had higher levels of well-being. But when they dug into what was driving this, they actually found a surprise. While the number of days someone was in the office mattered, there was something that mattered even more that led to higher engagement: 80% of employees who say they have received meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged — regardless of how many days they worked in the office.

In fact, the boost from meaningful feedback gives four times the lift in engagement than having the “right number” of days in the office. The problem is, in a follow up study of 15,000 employees, only 16% believe the last conversation with their manager was meaningful.

After I got engaged, a longtime married friend of mine told me that “attention is the highest form of love.” I think this directionally tracks with the sentiment from Gallup’s research: paying attention to your employees in the form of your communications and connection is critical to their own engagement and well-being, especially in a remote, or distributed setting.

So what constitutes a meaningful conversation? According to Gallup, the following are examples of elements of a meaningful conversation

Recognizing or appreciation for work – If your employee does something well, thank them and tell them you appreciate them:
Collaboration and relationships: In a hybrid workplace, collaboration and loneliness are at risk. Being able to use this time to connect and build a relationship can help drive engagement
Current Priorities and Goals: Providing clarity around the most important projects and goals

Example of This You Can Try: Incorporate this into your 1:1 meetings. Gallup found that the right amount of time was 15-30 minutes. In addition to this, for each of your employees, find 1 way each week, or every other week to send a quick message to your employees to either recognize their work, ask them if they have made time to connect with other employees, or to ask them if there is anything you can do to help provide clarity or direction.

2)Find opportunities to provide clarity (even when it’s unclear)

There’s a popular saying which is “If you want to communicate a message you have to say it seven times.” The repetition drives clarity, and removes ambiguity which is what employees need.

Gallup found that clarity of expectations is the fundamental employee need that is vital to their performance. For example, imagine you get a Slack message from your boss that says “We need to talk” and nothing else. That message could mean a lot of things, but what do you think your mind is immediately going to tell you it means? That is why being able to provide clarity is critical to building trust and fostering connection with your employees. This matters even more, when you are not physically next to someone, or when some people are close to each other (in the office) while others are remote. In the absence of clarity, we tend to make up stuff and as Brene Brown often says, “tell ourselves stories.”

Example of this You Can Try: In your communications with your team members (ex: digital via email or Slack, live via spoken word) remind your team of your overall vision and goal, and how that drives impact for your organization. In individual conversations in 1v1’s with your direct reports when you are reviewing a project, make sure to let your employees know how this project specifically impacts the organization or end customer in a positive and meaningful way.

#3)Open up doors and social capital

As a manager, your vantage point and perspective by the very nature of your role is broader and wider than your employees. And in many cases, you probably have more expertise, and relationships with your organization and how it works. One way to use this to help your employees is by opening doors for them by using your own social capital to help your employees develop their own social capital.

The definition, as defined by Pierre Bourdieu, refers to the resources and advantages an individual can access through their network of social relationships. It is the collective value of all social networks and the benefits that arise from these networks.

Since everyone needs the help, buy-in and support from others in order to effectively do their jobs and to advance in their careers, when you as a manager, can help your employees out by either helping them build new relationships, or getting them access to relationships you can put them in a position to succeed. This can be as simple as making introductions on their behalf, or simply making other people, such as influential leaders or employees, aware of your employees and their work.

Doing this A) helps you increase your connection with your employees, it helps your employees do their jobs better, and it also models to your employees the importance of building relationships. This also opens up your team, as well as your employees to more opportunities.

Example of this: During career conversations with my team members, I would always make sure to ask each team member who were 1-2 people that they wanted to get to meet that could help them grow as a person or advance their career. When possible, I would then make a warm introduction to that person so that they could build their network and get more exposure. In the event that the team member didn’t know who they wanted to meet, we would brainstorm a topic, niche, or area of expertise they wanted to explore, identify 1-2 people within it, and then I would make an introduction to that person.

#4) Encourage employees to teach and learn from each other

As a manager, you cannot be everywhere at once. One way to do this is to model and empower your employees to model behaviors you want to do but can’t always be around to do. For example, social learning. Since nobody knows how to do everything, but everyone knows how to do something. On your team, your people all have complementary strengths and skills. You can put them to use, by A) identifying what strengths and skills people have, and B) encouraging them to teach each and help each other. Instead of everyone then asking you for help on how to do something, you can start to encourage people to teach one another. This not only helps scale your efforts, it promotes collaboration and connection, and it also helps improve the skills and expertise of your team.

Example of this you can try: Once a quarter, ask everyone on your team, to identify one thing in their current role that they know very well that is A) useful and B) they could teach to someone else. Have them put together a short presentation on how to do that thing, and then have everyone present and share. Next time someone has a question about that specific thing, they now know who to go to for help and advice.

Employees whose managers are open and approachable are more engaged

5) Help Your Employees Build Connection With Others By Building Connection With Them

In their State of Remote Work report in 2023, Buffer found that the top two barriers for those working remotely were 1) collaboration and 2) loneliness. When you’re at a distance, it can be hard to feel connected to work and other people. And when you’re working on projects with other teammates who are in other places, sometimes it can be hard to have the sense of trust and collaboration, especially if you don’t know these people very well.

If you go out of your way to build trust and connection with your employees, they will in turn have the permission to go out and to do the same.

One way to do this is to proactively and intentionally build a sense of connection with your team, and then to encourage them to do it with one another.

Example of this that you can try:

During a previous consulting engagement I was leading a distributed team that was predominantly going to work remote for 4 months. In the beginning of the engagement, I facilitated a discussion with the team to talk about things they did that helped them feel more connected when they were working remotely. In addition, I also shared some suggestions that I had seen work well on other teams. The result of this was a crowdsourced list of about 15-20 different activities that people could rely on to build connections with one another.

6) Help Your Employees Improve How They Work

If you decide to work with a trainer, most likely, before they do anything with you, they will teach you how to properly stretch and do the exercises and activities before you jump into them. They do this so that A) you don’t get hurt and B) When you do the exercises you can do them the proper way so you can improve your strength and develop good habits.

Unfortunately, we don’t really use that approach in the workplace. We all kind of freestyle it, and hit the outcomes but don’t really think about the process and “how” of work. In the exercise analogy, it’s like jumping into the bench press without ever having learned how to do them.

This is also why I think we have so many issues with the “infrastructure” of work. Namely, communications, meetings, interruptions, and fire drills that are constant in our knowledge worker lives.

As a manager, one thing that you can do is to help your employees work better. In this case, you are the trainer, helping teach them the form, techniques and behaviors for how work gets done. I will admit, this is a bit of a tall order (which is why I saved it for last) but I think the best place to start, is by focusing on helping your employees A) focus on the right things to do and B) helping them take some agency and autonomy over their work. Finding ways to help them get back time, and to work on the right things is a good first start.

Example of this you can try: In your next team meeting, encourage everyone on your team to take the time to go through A) their calendar and B) their to do list from the past two weeks. Tell them to identify the following:

The things they worked on that were critical priorities
The things they worked on that were not critical priorities
The meetings they went to that they actually needed to be in
The meetings they went to do that they didn’t need to be a part of

Finally, also encourage them to write down (honestly) anything that they didn’t get to that they wanted to that was a priority.

Encourage them to remove any future meetings that are not important, as well as any tasks they worked on that are not important, and tell them that they just found more time. Encourage them to use that time, on what they think are the most important priorities, and then to do this exercise once a month.

In this new world of work, managers have to think and work differently in order to build trust and connection with their teams to drive performance and engagement. These are six places where they can start.

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