From the course: Making Hybrid Teams Work

Three keys to hybrid team effectiveness

From the course: Making Hybrid Teams Work

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Three keys to hybrid team effectiveness

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- There are a lot of things we can do to improve how well our hybrid teams operate. I'm going to give you three of the most impactful ways we can lift barriers for these teams and it will require zero budget and less time than you might think. First, let's honor the fact that hybrid teams are different than traditional teams and demand focused attention. This requires us to step back and assess the true impact that being hybrid has on our team. Are your working hours truncated because of time zones? Are some of your teammates less capable of embracing the tech tools you use? Are you seeing an unhelpful behavior, like teammates showing up to client meetings from the treadmill? Ask yourself, and this is critically important, to what degree do these things impact your results as a team? You might not have tech-savvy teammates, but at the end of the day, does it really matter? If you think your team might suffer because they're hybrid, later we'll go deeper into assessing which of your team's pain points truly make a difference and which ones you should be spending your effort improving. Next, we've got to focus more on building clarity within hybrid teams. Clarity is important to all teams, but there's something about distance between teammates that makes things foggy and confusing. Hybrid teams frequently complain about a lack of transparency and needing access to more information and spoiler alert, the answer is not adding more meetings. In what situations are your hybrid teammates confused or frustrated? What information or connection point could have relieved them of this confusion in the moment? You'll likely need to get clearer on what we're trying to achieve, what the correct process should be, who should be doing what, what needs the teammates have, or how and when we should be engaging with other stakeholders. Do a post-mortem on specific instances where teammates felt a lack of transparency. This will help you identify what kind of clarity was needed. Start there and you'll probably isolate at least a few ways you and your teammates should be building more clarity in the way you work together. Finally, and I would argue, most importantly, you need to evaluate your team norms. All teams unconsciously build patterns for how they operate over time, these are team norms, and they can create success for our team or they can hold us back. When we identify a norm that isn't working for us, we need to call it out, describe the behavior we want to see instead, for example, we tend to talk about taking action, but we rarely establish who's going to do what and by when. And once a desired norm is identified, we all commit to moving in that direction, get buy-in from every single member of the team, and track progress as we move forward as a unified front. After thinking big picture about what issues truly get in our way, how you need to build in clarity, and what norms to reinforce, you're ready to think about the tactics that will help your team be its best.

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