THRIVING IN HYBRID TEAMS
Thanks for having me!
Thank you for inviting me to share my work on Hybrid Teams! I’ve been working remotely for 6 years now, but when I dove into the research to build our course on remote and hybrid teams, I learned so much about what can go wrong. Our human psychology makes hybrid work challenging. The good news is that I’ve got lots of tips and techniques based on research.
RESOURCES
HYBRID TEAMS OVERVIEW: Liane’s Watercooler Psychology Newsletter
I recently devoted an entire issue of my LinkedIn newsletter to hybrid teams. There’s plenty of tips and tools that you can share with your team. (While you’re there, check out my first issue on Toxic Work Environments and subscribe to see April’s issue on making your organization more strategic.)
Reset Your Remote Management Approach
I have put together my best advice for how you can reset your management approach to be more effective with remote and hybrid teams. I have stuffed it full of research, advice, and practical tips to help you and your organization’s leaders to succeed in this environment. It also includes a link to the handy-dandy poster version.
Tool: 3COze Team Check-In Tools
As you’re trying to foster trust and strengthen the connection on your virtual or hybrid team, try one or more of these exercises to increase Mutual Knowledge.
Tool: Unseen Work Exercise
Working remotely means hours spent laboring over tasks that can be physically, cognitively, and emotionally taxing. When you aren’t acknowledged for that effort, it can lead to resentment that is particularly toxic to virtual or hybrid teams. Use this exercise to expose and address the unseen work on your team.
TOOL: WR Communication Planner
This communication planner will help you clarify your intent and reduce the likelihood that your message will fall victim to negativity bias.
ARTICLE: Are you using the right virtual collaboration tools?
How to determine whether you need rich vs. lean and synchronous vs. asynchronous collaboration… and examples of each of the four collaboration technologies.
ARTICLE: Building Trust in Remote and Hybrid Teams
This article provides ideas on how to build trust at each of the four levels: connection, competence, reliability, and integrity. Building trust can be harder in a remote team but it’s worth it!
ARTICLE: How to Stop Email from Being a Soul-Destroying Task
Improving your email is really critical when you’re on a hybrid team. This article will give you a few techniques to implement across your team in hopes of making email more efficient and effective.
ARTICLE: How to Strengthen Connection on Remote and Hybrid Teams
Forging a strong hybrid team requires more than just being efficient and getting tasks done. Great hybrid teams complement the structured, on-task time with unstructured work time and also with structured and unstructured social time.
TOOL: Office or Virtual?
Use this tool to determine whether your interaction would be best-suited to being in-person in the office or whether it’s a good candidate for your remote days. (Click the checklist to download.)
VIDEO: If your team is only together in the office on select days, how do you decide what goes on those precious office days and what can be done just as effectively when folks are remote? Here are the criteria you can use to decide what interactions should be a priority for office time.
VIDEO: Having conflict productively is especially important on virtual and hybrid teams. That said, it’s easy to procrastinate an uncomfortable conversation when you don’t see one another all the time. Use these tips to have healthy conflict on your remote team. 
VIDEO: Managing attention is critical in today’s frenetic environment. That means more than being a good prioritize. It means being a great DEprioritizer!! The 1 Yes, 3 Less technique is the antidote to our natural human tendency to add and add and add. Try it with your team and see how much more focused they become. (Use the Decision Tree below to identify things people can spend less time on.)
TOOL: 4Ds Decision Tree
Watch the 1 Yes and 3 Less video and then use this decision tree to identify tasks that your team can spend LESS time on. Can they delete a task? Delay it? Distribute to someone else? Or just diminish it to something that takes less time?