6 minute read
In this article, I address eight challenges posed by hybrid working, and some solutions you can implement to help simulate working together in the office. The closer you can simulate the office environment, the more your team members will keep working relationships strong, collaborate well and keep up their continuous learning.
I’m sure you’ve heard this ad nauseum … but let me say it one more time. Hybrid working is here to stay. By hybrid working, I mean having mix of working from home and the office. If you are not offering flexibility in working hours and location, you will lose talent to your competitors. In some cases, you need to let people work from home 100% of the time to keep them.
Like everything people-related, it’s “different strokes for different folks”, and each person will have their own reasons for wanting to work from home. There are new family timetables that work better than before, hobbies and clubs to get to, new pets to hang out with, money and time to be saved.
In some cases, it’s a matter of business survival, stripping out the cost of office space, to keep your numbers in the black.
Working from home can have its drawbacks: isolation, physical wellbeing being compromised (sitting is the new smoking), and of course that whole social aspect of work – office banter, learning from each other in the flow of work, collaboration, and just having human contact in general.
You might be a bit tired of hearing the same advice over again, with regards to how to engage people in a hybrid world of work. Or you’ve attended a few webinars but are still none-the wiser about what you must actually do to engage people. So, let’s look at the problem differently – how do we simulate the office environment, when everyone is working from home?
Challenge – we perceive less ability to have spontaneous discussions, so find ourselves scheduling more meetings, making the day very stop-start.
Solutions
- Virtual drop-in sessions with you, managers, team leaders, or senior people who are often asked for advice or input. Have a Teams meeting in everyone’s calendar for one or two hours per day (not consecutive hours). The person on whom people can drop in on, stays on the call for the whole hour, continuing with work. Anyone can join and leave the call during the allotted time to ask questions or get help.
- Have an embargo on meetings at specified 2-3 hours timeslots in the week where the whole team is available. During this time, and everyone is “interruptible” so that anyone can call a colleague at any time.
- Encourage people to use the status message in Teams –
- people can show they are open to interruptions by using a custom message, eg “available for calls”
- if you do need focus time, use the “do not disturb” function on Teams (or other tool you are using).
Challenge – we have something we are stuck on and cannot just walk around everyone until we find someone who can help. In the office, others can listen in on these conversations. How can we simulate that?
Solutions
- Use the Teams chat function. Create a new chat for your question and include the people who you think might have the solution or might have an interest in the answer. Once someone says they can help, continue through the chat as long as you can, so that others in the chat who didn’t have the solution, can follow the chat and also learn from it.
- Use other collaboration technology, eg Yammer.
Challenge – team meetings don’t have the same energy as they did before; it’s just me talking and everyone might be listening but I’m not sure.
Ideas
- Have an agenda and rotate through the team for who chairs the meeting and who takes notes and sends them out
- Everyone should have their camera on!
- Use collaborative functions in your video calling software, like:
- whiteboards
- breakout rooms
- reactions
- chat
- polls
- Add some humanising agenda items, such as sharing epic fails, funny working from home stories
- If you do an “around the room”, make sure you acknowledge what each person has said, give credit or recognition.
- Connect people by using an agenda item – “what I need help with” – with the purpose of someone who has the right knowledge, to volunteer to help that person.
Challenge – the social banter, socialising and fun that we have in the office … it’s all missing. Where has the fun gone?
Solutions
- Put aside time for some fun. It could be something like –
- pub quiz
- get to know each other quiz, eg “which team member …”
- Add an informal channel to your Teams site, where people can post personal photos and fun things, eg pets, what’s for dinner, outfit of the day, holiday photos, cooking fails.
- Group people into threes and set them up with a virtual coffee break, changing the groups each week. It could be a 15-minute chat about what they did on the weekend, what their kids are up to, a hobby, film they’ve seen recently.
- Use virtual conversation starter cards if the conversation isn’t flowing.
Challenge – all you can see is what work is getting done. You can’t see behaviour and body language to know when there’s something wrong with one of your staff.
Solution
- This isn’t an easy one, because it is much harder to build trust when you have less face-to-face contact with people
- Demonstrate that it’s OK to be vulnerable by sharing your own struggles
- Keep repeating the message, I need to know that you are OK
- Assign buddies – it could be pairs or groups of 3 – they need to check in with each other two to three times per week.
Challenge – my one-on-one meetings feel like they’ve lost their value – I’m not really getting much from my team member.
Ideas
- Make the meeting employee-led – what do they want to talk about?
- You might send a loose agenda, and send it to them the day before – give them some thinking points, asking for what’s going well and why, and what barriers they need you to help to remove
- Challenge them to produce an agenda item for the meeting
- Use your questioning techniques and active listening skills to ensure that it’s a true two-way conversation, and not just a one-way flow of information that feels like a box-ticking exercise.
Challenge – I need to make sure that my team members feel valued, and their accomplishments are shared with the team.
Ideas
- Have an informal catch up with the team after lunch late on a Friday (eg around 4.30) – wine, beer, grape juice, cocktail, mocktail optional! – to wrap up the week
- Ask people to share achievements (it might take people a while to get used to this)
- Give recognition to anyone that you feel deserves it
- Have a collaborative whiteboard where people can leave a note of thanks to someone prior to the call, then read them out and ask questions.
- Finish with some informal chat, what are people up to on the weekend, fun polls, quiz.
- Award a weekly virtual trophy – something fun and something serious.
- Nominate someone different each week to “get the party started”.
Challenge – I have no visibility of my team members physical wellbeing. Even for me, I feel like I’m not moving enough when I work from home.
Solution
- Have a weekly wellbeing/movement challenge – this can work well when people have smartphones or apps where you can share data and progress
- Walking is great for health and creativity – here are two ways you can encourage more (and do more!)
- “thinking walks”, where people take 30-60 minutes to take a walk on their own to ponder a problem; record voice notes in their phone as you go
- walking meetings, where you have a phone call, or converse via your collaboration tools and record the conversation so that you can grab notes from it later
- Encourage people who live near each other to talk walks together or meet for coffee.
I hope that this article has give you some ideas for things you can do to bring back the office spirit. Let us know in the comment box below if you have any other ideas and solutions. Or if you try any of ours, let us know!
