Tips for Successfully Managing Hybrid Teams

Do you want to master your hybrid work leadership skills? I want to share five best practices that any great hybrid work manager can start implementing today.

A great hybrid manager has a command of both digital and traditional body language. They understand how value can be destroyed in a hybrid model and mitigate the problem before it happens, and they understand how to create value for their team members first in order to drive value to other key stakeholders later.

Let’s walk through the five best practices:

1. Align and Communicate Your Needs

Everyone’s schedules have changed, and they have new norms in their professional and personal lives. Understand what those norms are and plan your team’s work around these commitments for both in-person and virtual work. In our hybrid workplace, reading carefully is the new listening and writing and speaking clearly is the new empathy. Further, thriving at work will be much easier if you communicate your expectations and needs with your team and leaders.

Create communication norms around collaboration. Here are some examples:

• For smaller meetings, leaders should review the employees’ availability on their calendar before scheduling a call as a sign of respect
• If someone can’t do a call on Friday afternoons, make sure that is noted in yours or the team’s calendar and respected.
• If you need the daily 15 min touchpoint at 10am ET instead of 4pm ET because you are picking your kids up from school, make that known!
• If you want a response to an urgent message after hours, agree on using a phone call or labeling an email with URGENT to align. But if it’s really urgent, then text and let them know who you are (texts don’t have caller ID) instead of leaving a voicemail.
• If you have 3 reply all emails and haven’t resolved an issue, switch to a phone call.

Be sure to keep in mind the importance of communicating what you need from others to achieve your productivity goals while maintaining a good work-life balance.

2. Create Moments that Matter