23.08.2021 Kerstin Kuchmetzki 8704

5 tips on how to lead hybrid teams

5 tips from leadership trainer Mario Müller on how to promote good collaboration in virtual teams.

The new corona normality has changed our working world. Some employees are working from home, while others are in the office. Depending on the project, tasks and distance of the team, the ratio of on-site and remote collaboration can vary

Leading hybrid teams is a new challenge for managers. Our leadership trainer Mario Müller gives you five tips on what you should bear in mind with this new way of working and how you can promote good collaboration in your team.

Snapshot: What has the coronavirus crisis changed?

Torsten Voigt, a sociologist at RWTH Aachen University, says that now is the time (1). The moment in which we check how our employees are doing after the stress and changes caused by the crisis, and in which we look at how great the psychological stress really was and how things look on the burnout front.

But we don't just look at the individuals, we also look at how our company, our organization and our culture have proven themselves in the crisis - and what needs to be adapted to prepare the company for future crises.

Investment in corporate culture is a necessary measure

In 2020, more children were born in Germany than in 1998 (2). Torn out of the routine of their daily commute to work, people were thrown back to fundamental, existential questions. How do I want to live? What is important to me? And they are finding answers: 41% of the global workforce want to look for a new employer in the next twelve months, 48% want to shift their career to a completely different field (3).

Due to the pressure of digitalization, companies have finally really entered into international competition for the best talent. And an attractive salary is no longer enough to attract and retain this talent. In a survey of employees' priorities, this criterion was only ranked seventh in the top ten (4).

The mobilized workforce ranked "good management culture", followed by "appreciation of employees" and "nice colleagues and team spirit" - in German: Kultur. Companies that do not invest enough here will have no chance of attracting new talent in the coming months and years and will lose the majority of their talent to the competition.

Companies have become transparent thanks to review platforms; it is no longer possible to hide how things really are in a company. The burnt-out among those who have given their all for their company between homeschooling and working from home know that time out is useless if you then return to a stressful or even toxic environment. That's why persistent investment in culture is part of strategic risk management from now on at the very latest.

Strategic positioning and the end of the work-life balance

Burnout is an individual fate. But whether it happens depends only to a fraction on the workload. Voigt's research also suggests that burnout is best tackled at an organizational and systemic level. This means that the company must also adapt to the people, not just the other way around. Companies no longer choose people. People choose companies. Competencies continue to shift from managers to teams. First and foremost, managers must optimize the cooperation of their teams and only understand enough about the matter at hand to be able to (co-)make decisions. C-level management must exemplify values in order to remain credible.

The younger generation in particular "doesn't have a work-life balance and doesn't want one," says management trainer Mario Müller. Young people see work and productivity as an integral part of their lives, they "also live at work" and are not prepared to endure arbitrary torment in order to live between office hours.

As a result of global selection, companies will experience unprecedented selection pressure in the coming years, which, as we have just seen, relates above all to the culture that is practiced and whether people who can choose to do so want to be part of it. Companies that do not adapt and remain competitive will disappear.

Why hybrid working?

There will be no return to traditional face-to-face work, says Microsoft (5). The benefits of mobile or virtual collaboration for employees and productivity are too great to give up. On average, Germans worked 24 days longer per year during the crisis - namely the time they would otherwise have spent commuting on the road (6). At the same time, direct human contact is also essential for building trust and loyalty. This is why the future of collaborative work will invariably be hybrid. And the question of the right ratio cannot be answered with a blanket "50:50" or "60:40" shot from the hip without causing new problems. The proportion must be flexible and depend on individual preferences, the field of activity and the team, and it must also be possible to adapt it to changing requirements. 

Five tips on how to lead hybrid teams

To help you make this adjustment and skip key mistakes, here are our five most important tips for hybrid collaboration:

1. increase networking density

The bonding forces that prevent your employees from leaving at the first attractive offer from the competition are created through contacts and informal exchanges. To prevent people in mobile or home offices from being left behind and becoming emotionally disconnected, they need regular video calls and conferences where they can see and hear each other.

Also set up online team events where private topics are also discussed. A private bond with the company can only develop if people there are also interested in private people and their lives and not just their work. Set up a virtual coffee break in the weekly schedule where employees from the office and home office can meet regularly and exchange ideas informally so that there is no rift between those present and those absent.

2. hybrid working: Ensuring the flow of information

When all employees were working from home, the information channels were clear because everything took place virtually. Now, office grapevine, coffee-table conversations and information from video calls and (virtual) team meetings are mixed together. The risk of important information being assumed but never reaching its destination is now particularly high.

Introduce a status round in your meetings in which key information is repeated and recorded so that nothing gets lost. Take inspiration from the Spotify method. Here, people are not only networked by team, but also by project, expertise, skills and interests. This allows experts to exchange information and keep each other up to date, prevents silos from forming and strengthens the sense of unity. 

3. your management style: control is good - trust is better

Managers who rely on control, direct management and micromanagement have had a particularly difficult time during the crisis - and they will find it increasingly difficult in the future to assert their personal need for control against the interests of employees and the company. Why is this the case? Relevant companies solve problems that are too big, unmanageable and complex for individual people. That's why there are teams that pool their expertise. In a good culture, this creates synergy and emergence effects that allow the team to perform beyond what the members could have achieved by working side by side (7). The service is provided by teams. In addition to their own activities as a specialist, the manager is only responsible for enabling the team to achieve largely autonomous and self-determined productivity.

Team members need the competence to make decisions quickly, independently and informally, because control slows down the process incredibly and interrupts the team's dynamic. In any case, a lack of trust and micromanagement mainly lead to work to rule, internal resignation or the departure of people who want to make a difference. So if you haven't already done so, transfer as many competencies as possible to your team(s), overcome your individual fears and ego, and see how other managers inspire their teams to peak performance in an energy-saving way.

In a study published in the Journal of Service Management, Dr. Silke Bartsch and Ariana Huber, together with colleagues, examined leadership behavior and its effects on employees in service companies in times of the corona crisis (8). The survey showed that task-oriented, but especially relationship-oriented leadership behavior maintains employee performance and that individual autonomy in the workplace and team cohesion have a mediating effect in this context. 

The trend is also continuing in post-corona times: The understanding of leadership is increasingly understood as "cooperation-promoting action" that focuses on balance and, above all, creates a framework for productive cooperation. Trust your employees to be willing and motivated to achieve common goals. Because experience shows that this is the case. Talented, motivated people do not leave companies because too much is demanded of them, but because they are not allowed to contribute enough.

4. shared values in hybrid teams 

Does your company also have such a board with values and guiding principles in the entrance area? How many of your employees have read through this board? Have you? Why should they - it would be a waste of time. Within a very short time, every newcomer will realize how the company really works. Yes, a cornerstone of team cohesion, whether hybrid or not, is shared values. But these cannot be dictated or simulated. Honest respect, appreciation, active listening, constructive collaboration on the ideas of others and taking a joint stand when mistakes are made strengthen cohesion. But they are the result of actions, not lip service or dusty badges. And these actions only happen where they are relevant if they are based on an attitude. Behavior comes from attitude. Values as decoration are immediately exposed in a crisis - in other words, when it counts. Managers are often said to be role models. This is a false concept. Managers are role models. What they exemplify is what others look at and draw their conclusions from. 

Teams that are no longer cohesive due to remote working and digitalization most likely already had problems before working from home. Collaboration consisted of working through tasks independently; there was no real teamwork. Managers need to find ways to reinvent and develop the team. How to do this is easy to explain and difficult to implement. When building culture, the most important rule is: look at yourself! Do I deliver what I demand myself? Am I demanding something from myself or from others? Do I also question myself or only others? What is my true opinion of others? How do I talk to people and how do I listen to them? Attitude is a very worthwhile investment, like brushing your teeth every day.

5. introduce the retrospective: try it out and talk about it!

Many managers are now very open to change. As a manager, you can boldly take new steps with your team and find out together what effect certain measures have. Make use of the creative freedom you have. Experiments show that agile islands and value-based leadership can be established even in huge, sluggish hierarchical structures (9). Go into retrospective mode with your team at short intervals, for example once a month - to look back together on the past few weeks. 

It is also important to ask what needs individual employees have for personal exchange and contact, and to balance the form of cooperation accordingly. 

Go into the retrospective with the following questions: 

- How have we experienced the past few weeks of our collaboration? 

- What has proved successful? What do we keep? 

- What do we let go of? 

- What are we adding?

Summary

In the inevitable future of hybrid work and global competition, culture and the strategic shaping of interpersonal factors are of existential importance for companies. Relationships must be actively built, trust must be earned through attitude-based, consistent behavior, employees must be given autonomy and participation - for productivity, and because otherwise they will leave. Model values, invest persistently, give people opportunities to form relationships and influence content and ways of working together. In modern companies, everything is flexible and agile - only relationships and cohesion remain and make companies crisis-proof and efficient.

Sources:

(1) https://www.wired.co.uk/article/burnout-moment 

(2) DeStatis, 16.7.2021 

(3) Work Trend Index, Edelman Data x Intelligence 

(4) Trendence Professional Barometer 2021 

(5) Microsoft Work Lab: Work Trend Index 

(6) 42.4 min. daily - marktundmittelstand.de 

(7) Cloud training (Mario Müller, 2014) 

(8) bwl.uni-muenchen.de