The work culture is now shifting to a new normal of Hybrid Structure. Organizations opening up their physical offices and asking employees to return to the same have met with mixed views from both the employees as well as the corporate decision-makers. Nevertheless, the Hybrid model is here to stay and has worked positively for growth and it is time to set a systematic structure on how to take it forward as organizational culture.

Many companies have adopted a pattern where their employees can attend the office for a limited number of days in a week, and the rest of the time they can work from home. To work effectively and productively, this model has to have acceptance from the employees in the long run. Some of the challenges cited included the inability to leave their young children in daycare centers as the pandemic is still in force, online education at home and parental supervision is a necessity, and health conditions to name a few.

This is a transition phase and organizations can help their employees navigate this challenge by keeping in mind certain factors that can retain the energy, efficiency, and productivity of the work output.

The essence of the Leadership Team

Leaders hold the responsibility for their teams performing their work duties irrespective of whether they are working from home or at the office. Hybrid teams can be of three categories:

1. Teams working in Onsite client Location
2. Teams working from Home
3. Teams working from Physical Office; maybe in other locations.

Factors to keep in mind when nurturing Hybrid teams:

Commit to Building Trust and ensure that your teams can understand that irrespective of their work location their growth is not hampered. Leaders should maintain that they are unbiased when it comes to the handling of their teams. Trust and a sense of security once lost make teams vulnerable to changing organizations or a drop in their productivity. A simple scenario can be such as this: The manager and a few team members are working from the physical office and they resenting people working from home is major disarray of positivity at the workplace. The culture that the organization builds and the implementation of the same is a direct responsibility of the managers to build oneness in the acceptability of a hybrid model.

Setting Clear expectations is one way of ensuring clarity of communication concerning teamwork despite different locations. The time zones may be different but irrespective of the same teams can work comfortably once they know what role each of the members plays in ensuring the calls, meetings, and deadlines are adhered to. The people working from home may request different working hours and flexibility and people working at the office may bet looking for a more organized structure. The leaders have to make this work by aligning everybody to a set pattern that is working.

Manage Burnout It is a sign that a person or the team is unable to take the workload due to various reasons personal or professional. Such situations can be avoided if the leaders can watch for those signs beforehand. Maybe the leader himself is burned out due to the stress levels. Notice the signs and solve them for the team. You may not solve their challenge but you can help navigate by listening and prioritizing their day to be able to handle their life. We never know completely what people go through and while building a remote team it is all the more challenging to identify. Communication and understanding resolve the challenge and build more rapport and trust with the team.

Team Building Activities and Weekly Fun have turned online too. Not just zoom video calls or Microsoft teams but many platforms now offer fun and team bonding activities online. Office meetings have become creatively interactive and fun engaging the whole team by making them communicate more effectively through platforms and mediums such as Retrospectives with Trello for team communication, Team Canvas, Miro for brainstorming, and Helpjuice for knowledge sharing, Donut for online gatherings, and many more. Understanding people and bringing inclusion from all the people from diverse backgrounds can be done through technological tools that are fun and creative and most importantly- enhance productivity and enthusiasm across hybrid teams.

Inclusiveness is a feeling that is cultivated through effective communication and most importantly how the leader perceives their team members. Nothing is more important than a team member feeling belonged and that is consistently built and maintained by the leader. In a hybrid team, one may be working with people from diverse backgrounds. Favoritism and bias due to various factors such as gender, age, nationalities, and language are some of the behavioral patterns that affect hybrid teams adversely. As human beings, leaders may err in handling people negatively. But that does not discount the fact that the damage is voluminous. Irrespective of the location of the team member, be it from home or client location, or physical office he or she needs to be treated with equity and included in all the communications as per their respective protocols.

Challenges bring with them a call for change and the new change is the Hybrid Team Structure. The culture has to be built from the top bottom. The organization’s responsibility is to have its leadership at all levels be effective so that the hybrid structure is part of the work culture and the future for workability. The going may not be easy but the consistent implementation practices for building and maintaining a Hybrid Team create an established workable pattern for the future. In essence, leadership plays the most important role in the success of a Hybrid model of functioning.