Editorial
The pandemic taught us a lot about what it takes to work well together from different physical locations. Now, with hybrid work at an all-time high, it’s worth revisiting some of those lessons to understand how hybrid teams can collaborate more effectively.
While many pandemic-era best practices for hybrid and remote collaboration still hold true today, new technological innovations, macroeconomic changes, and an end to Covid-induced workplace restrictions have altered the long- and short-term outlook for collaboration in the workplace. In this article, I’ll share some practical strategies to help you improve hybrid collaboration at your organization in 2024 and in years to come.
Transform Data Into Actionable Insights
With today’s technology, leaders can gather data on nearly every aspect of the workplace experience, from employee productivity to employee interaction with physical space. But even as opportunities for data collection continue to increase, it’s important to remember that too much data is not necessarily a good thing. Forbes has reported, for example, that 80% of organizations are collecting too much data to act on.
Data can help leaders improve the workplace experience, but they should be careful not to collect more data than they can use. They should focus on data that leads to actionable insights and evaluate how they collect, analyze and present it.
Hybrid work has led to new ways of measuring employee engagement and workplace experience with technology. For example, engagement software can tell you when and how meeting attendees participate or tune out, whether they are in the office or remote. This gives you hard data to replace or enhance your intuition and help you create a better hybrid collaboration environment. Technology like this often works with common productivity tools like Teams, SharePoint and more so you can understand how these tools are being used.
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Be Strategic About In-Person Interaction
While overall worker productivity is up since the beginning of the return-to-office push, there's still room to improve. Research firm Leesman, for example, reports that about 40% of hybrid employees find it difficult to participate in hybrid meetings, 24% say that they sometimes or frequently feel left out of important discussions, and 28% say that they’d like more opportunities to socialize with fellow workers. In spite of these challenges, most employees say that they’re satisfied with hybrid work. Eighty percent report that they’ve had a good hybrid working experience, while only 3% rate their hybrid experience as poor. This emerging body of research suggests that, while hybrid work has largely been successful, organizations need to do more to secure collaboration, and support collaborative work.
As a leader of globally distributed hybrid teams, I know that in-person interaction can strengthen remote and hybrid collaboration. That’s why I make sure to regularly visit my teams in different countries and states. Meeting with team members in-person helps build rapport, which makes it easier for colleagues to speak up in hybrid meetings and collaborate remotely.
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Evolve Your Internal Communications
With employees distributed all around the world, internal communications are more important than ever, particularly when it comes to securing collaboration in a hybrid environment. But adopting successful internal communications strategies after the switch to hybrid work isn’t as easy as simply expanding what you were doing before. Like so many other aspects of the hybrid workplace, internal communications need to be optimized to account for hybrid work's unique challenges.Instead of thinking of ways that you can add a digital component to large in-person events like company town halls, for example, you should try to think of ways that you can engage all of your internal audiences by creating physical- and digital-first programming. Digital-first activities could include a virtual book club, online trivia, or asynchronous activities like fitness challenges. Remote and hybrid work can make informal socializing difficult, since it’s generally harder to “drop in” on colleagues or socialize in a more unstructured way. That’s why leaders must be deliberate about creating engaging, structured programming that allows remote and in-person workers to interact and grow.
For more standard internal communications like memos or company-wide messages, you should make sure that your company’s intranet or internal communications platform is user-friendly and modern. Before the pandemic, some companies didn’t view investments in internal engagement tools like intranet as a high priority, but that’s all changed with the switch to hybrid work. Today, there’s broad acceptance that it’s worth investing in people, software and analytics that keep your hybrid workforce satisfied and engaged.
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