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The Teamraderie Checklist for Hybrid Work

Are you preparing your team for a hybrid work model later this year?

We are at the precipice of a disruption as great as last year’s sudden shift to remote work. Experts cite ten practices to start now to ensure success in hybrid work.

1. Increase Your Attention to Planning

What changes with hybrid:

  • Hybrid teams work with less synchronous interaction. While hybrid yields more hours for work, it requires managers take a more explicit role in coordination.

Practices to start now:

  • Conduct a 60-minute team launch (or relaunch) every six weeks to revisit shared goals, shared roles, shared resources and shared norms for collaboration. 

Expert perspectives:

  • “The concept of talking about teamwork instead of actually doing [work] may seem like an extravagance…but this thinking could not be more misguided.”
    Tsedal Neeley – Harvard Business School

How the best managers do it:

  • A popular manager at Google conducts a “Team Refresh/Reset” every six (6) weeks on every team in which she is a leader or member.

2. Create Frequent Interactions with Outsiders

What changes with hybrid:

  • Hybrid teams work with less distraction– but also with less stimulus, particularly from outside your organization. A central role of the manager is to create perspective, particularly shared perspective. 

Practices to start now:

  • Introduce a new person– with entirely different perspective on the world– to expose your team to new ways of thinking about problems. This person can be external to the company or someone from a different department. 

Expert perspectives:

  • “People don’t evolve their views by interacting with the same people. They evolve when they explore their own assumptions.”
    Adam Grant – Wharton

How the best managers do it:

  • A Pinterest executive known for creating high-performing sales teams brings an external view– an athlete, an author, a poet, or a choreographer – to challenge his team’s perspective at least once each quarter. 

3. Identify and Remove Friction

What changes with hybrid:

  • The change in work mode will render many meetings purposeless. Unnecessary meetings plague organizations. But the shift in work mode creates need for leaders to revisit how to work together in new era.

Practices to start now:

Even while your team is remote, revisit which meetings and processes remain necessary amidst the change in work.

Expert perspectives:

“People leave bosses, not companies. And people leave environments where friction prevents them from doing their best work.”
Bob Sutton – Stanford University

How the best managers do it:

Dropbox, inspired by removing friction for employees, took a bold step– on one evening, the company deleted all recurring calendar invitations and required managers to recreate any meetings that were necessary. Only ~30% of meetings were rescheduled. 

4. Start Creating Thriving Social Bonds

What changes with hybrid:

Employees will visit offices less and feel fewer ties to colleagues. The absence of close identity to company and team will raise risk of attrition. Managers are now at the front-line of connection to mission, vision and values. At companies that have restarted office work, employees report feeling no more connected than they did pre-pandemic.

Practices to start now:

  • Shared rhythms are NOT there in office– so must be created. Create hybrid experiences together. Set up virtual experiences now for your team so they develop an effective rapport across Zoom or other platforms. 
  •  
  • Shared virtual experiences will mitigate one of the central challenges of hybrid work– the risk that employees perceive an “in” and “out” group.

Expert perspectives:

  • “Productive and satisfying working relationships are not dependent on physical proximity…A common location is not a prerequisite for a cohesive team.”
    Tsedal Neeley – Harvard Business School

How the best managers do it:

  • A highly-valued software company has purchased a subscription to Teamraderie so that managers have easy access to effective virtual experiences, such Olympic Parable and Whiskey Tasting. Team members report feeling more close (amidst remote work) than they did working from offices pre-pandemic.

5. Pay Attention to the Factorial Imperative

What changes with hybrid:

  • With less time in an office to catalyze communication, managers must take an active effort to not only connect with each team member, but also to ensure each employee team member feels connection to each other.
  •  
  • Employees are not “grafted” to an office five days per week. Existing employees may have fewer opportunities for connecting with a highly-distributed or remote team. New employees establish a point-to-point relationship with colleagues with deliberate motion.
  •  

Practices to start now:

Conduct bonding and onboarding activities that pay explicit attention to need to create (n+1)! relationships (not just 1, not just n) when new people are added.

Expert perspectives:

  • “Honor the definition of a team by explicitly creating bonds between members. The leader — whose role is to “build others up” — must help a new team member requires a new motion — one in which there.”
    Frances Frei – Harvard Business School

  • “A team acts cohesively to accomplish work. Many teams act like a group of individuals — more ‘group dental practice’ than ‘cohesive group’.
    Bob Sutton – Stanford University

How the best managers do it:

  • The CHRO (with support of the CFO) at a private equity-based software firm created a separate budget to relaunch teams each time a new member is added. Learn more. They recognize that adding one member impacts the entire team.

Leadership will be very valuable when transitioning to hybrid work.

“In the full-time office environment, you can probably survive with an average leader. When you’re out of the office, you really have to depend on a leader that is inspiring, a leader that’s engaged, a leader that’s communicating and accessible.”
Hybrid Work Checklist
Sean Woodroffe
CEO

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