“Do we need pants?” and other big questions about Hybrid Work

Picture this. A team of 15 people has a weekly project meeting. The purpose of the meeting is to share updates, exchange ideas, collaborate, and make decisions. The team has 3 “pockets” of people.

Pocket 1: Five people who go to the main office and live close enough to make the daily commute.

Pocket 2: Six people who work remotely and are not in a location that allows for an easy commute to an office.

Pocket 3: Four people who go to a different office location (than Pocket 1) which is closer to where they live.

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Ramon, from Pocket 1 reserves a conference room on the floor that Pocket 1 works on. Noelle plugs their laptop into the AV system in the room so everyone can see the video conference on the big screen.

The members of Pocket 2 all join from their remote locations. Some at home, some in coffee shops or co-working spaces.

Pocket 3 goes to a conference room in their local office, but there’s no plug for the AV system so they each join from their laptops while sitting in the same room.

Carl, from Pocket 3 suggests to his group that the others go on mute and just use the mic from his computer, while still keeping cameras on so everyone can see faces. Everyone nods in agreement. Smart thinking, Carl!

The meeting begins. LeeAnn, from Pocket 1, shares the agenda on her screen and in the video conference. So far, so good. Everyone in all pockets hears LeeAnn and sees the agenda. Then someone from Pocket 3 asks a question.

“Wha, wha, waaa, waaa, waaa, waaa the quarterly waa quarterly waaa?”

“Was that you, Carl?” LeeAnn asks since Carl’s headsquare had flashed at the time of the question.

“No, that was Omar. Sorry, we’re just using my mic so Zoom thought it was me,” replies Carl.

“Oh, OK, Omar. What was the question again?”

“Wha, wha, waaa, waaa, waaa, waaa the quarterly waa quarterly waaa?” shouts Omar.

“Umm… What was that, Omar?” asks Selena, from Pocket 2. “We couldn’t really hear that.”

Carl jumps in, “Apologies, team. My mic isn’t great and Omar’s on the other side of the room. Give us a second.”

Everyone waits.

“OK! OK! Is that! Is that! Better! Better!?” comes blaring out of everyone’s speakers, creating a cave-like echo.

“Sorry! Sorry!” Carl echo shouts. “We switched to Omar’s mic, but I forgot to turn mine off. We’re good now!”

“It’s OK. So what was the question?” replies LeeAnn.

Finally, Omar asks “Will we have a chance to look at the quarterly numbers in this meeting?”

“Oh, yes, it’s the third agenda item on the agenda I’m screen sharing now.” LeeAnn replies, clearly frustrated.

Meanwhile, a chat thread has broken out across Pocket 2.

Damien: “This is going well…. 🤦”

Rosa: Live view of this meeting:

Roberta: “Why didn’t everyone just stay at their desks??? We’ve been doing this for over a year remotely and it’s been fine..”

And the meeting continues to spiral. Very little gets done. Everyone leaves feeling annoyed. And 15 employees just wasted an expensive hour of their day.

Unfortunately, this is the Hybrid experience for many companies today. Not thoughtful. Not intentional. Not optimized for success.

The chaos described above is a business problem.

Many companies will have at least the first two pockets. Some will have all three or more.

The remote ones may want to keep collaborating the way they have been for the past two years, through Zoom meetings and digital collaboration tools like Slack, Mural, or Miro.

The in-person ones may want to dust off some of those in-person skills such as sitting in a room and discussing something, high-fiving, adding sticky notes to a white board, grabbing lunch together between meetings.

The problem is: Those remote and in-person tactics are at odds with each other.

Without a thoughtful Hybrid strategy, team members have to battle obstacle after obstacle to be useful contributors. Ideas get lost. Time gets wasted. People become apathetic. Everyone defaults to doing the same old, same old. Not because it was effective, but because it’s easier than trying to collaborate.

Remote collaboration was forced to evolve over the past two years. Some companies even found it to be more effective.

Pre-pandemic, few companies or employees needed to figure out a Hybrid collaboration model. It just wasn’t a high priority. If something big needed to be figured out, it probably meant an “off-site” where everyone traveled to the same location. If there was a Hybrid model, it probably existed only to offer employees work-life balance and flexibility.

Today’s challenges go beyond offering flexibility and balance. Now you need an operational Hybrid model that maximizes productivity, employee engagement, customer retention, revenue.

Adding to the complexity is the fact that over the past two years many companies hired differently, prioritizing skills over location in a world where location became irrelevant. With offices opening and the option to go to them, recent hiring practices combined with that tasty bite of pants-free, remote work have created pockets like the team I described earlier.

Here’s the good news. Hybrid optimized companies can absolutely thrive. In fact, there are many well known examples of successful Hybrid, collaborative teams we can look to for inspiration.

In all three of the following examples, Hybrid had to be a priority. In some cases, people’s lives literally depend on it.

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(1) Military teams: Military missions are a great example of where Hybrid work absolutely has to be thoughtful and intentional. A military mission may involve a team on the ground communicating with one another through a variety of carefully rehearsed verbal and hand signals. There may also be a team at a centralized base or headquarters communicating information over a radio, using specific, intentional language. There may also be a third team in the air carrying out their part of a mission, communicating intentionally with the other teams. These teams all share a mission, but have very different access to information, environmental queues and tools. I’ve never been in the military and my description is admittedly drawn from friend’s experiences and, of course, the movies. But the point is there.

Given the mission above, one can’t even fathom a scenario where that team would just “wing it”. It’s unimaginable to think a military team would hop into a helicopter, sit down at a desk in HQ and enter a dangerous ground location and just figure it out along the way.

Military teams work to develop norms and systems that prioritize the success of a Hybrid team.

That includes specific ways of communicating, practiced over and over again. Optimizing each team member’s experience based on an acknowledgement of the tools, queues and information each has access to is critical.

(2) Sports Teams: Many sports teams, American football as an example, will have parts of the team collaborating from very different settings. The coaching staff stands on the sidelines, off the field of play, constantly reviewing the information available such as the score, the formations, the game clock, the playbook. The team on the field is making decisions in the moment, carrying out plays called by a coach and communicating with each other on the field. There may also be a coach who sits high above the field, in the stands, watching from a different vantage point, relaying information to the sideline coaches or field players over a radio.

Certainly the stakes are lower than the military example above, but still respectively high. Teams compete to win games, to win championships, to be the most successful team. In order to do that, they need to acknowledge that Hybrid is the norm. Different parts of the team need to act as one, despite having different access to information and tools. It’s practiced over and over until it becomes second nature. Because it has to be. Hybrid work is a priority for a football team.

Sure, a group of kids can form some ad hoc teams on a playground and play a game of football. But it will look like a group of kids playing on a playground.

Companies can throw a date and a video conference on the calendar and hope for the best across a hybrid team with pockets of people. But, it will probably look like a meeting thrown together, with no plan.

(3) Air Travel: Another place where Hybrid collaboration has existed for a long time is air travel. In this working environment, you have gate agents who have access to environmental queues going on inside the airport. You have air traffic controllers monitoring flight patterns, coordinating take off and landing. You have pilots in the cockpit, sharing what they see, reacting to information from the other teams. You have flight attendants communicating flight information to the passengers.

Safe and successful air travel requires highly coordinated efforts among all of these teams. Work is carefully planned and practiced because it has to be. Would you get on a flight that was managed by a group of people who planned to just “wing it” (pun intended)?

Hybrid teams are the norm in all of these examples. It’s simply part of how they plan and manage the team’s activities. It’s intentional and never an afterthought.

Unless your company can go all remote or all in person, Hybrid needs to be just as integral to how you plan your company strategy as it is for any of the examples above.

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Here’s how you can get started, today.

Rather than assigning a task force, or scheduling weekly meetings to discuss your Hybrid strategy, start by identifying one meeting, anywhere in the organization that has “pockets” of people like the example above. Then, follow these three steps:

(1) Use the Buddy System: This one is so simple to implement and has huge benefits. When you are planning your next Hybrid meeting, look at the attendee list and pair up every remote person with someone who will be at the meeting in person. Meet with the buddy teams in advance to set buddy expectations.

Those expectations are simple — to advocate for your buddy. To have your buddy’s back. That may look like an in-person buddy letting their remote buddy know over chat that someone has just stepped out of the room and to hold onto a particular point until they return. Or a remote buddy letting their in person buddy know that a slide they are sharing isn’t coming up on screen share.

The idea is to have everyone, one buddy at a time, advocating for someone else who is operating with different access. It also has the added benefit of building buddy empathy.

(2) Consider working in a shared digital space: Regardless of where people are, level the playing field by collaborating in a digital space. A remote person can’t write on the whiteboard in the room. Use a tool like MURAL that provides a virtual whiteboard space for collaboration.

This part will take planning and practice. Don’t just show up and send around a link. In advance, you need to thoughtfully build that virtual space, define roles and tasks in that virtual space.

Aside from leveling the participation field, it also serves as a digital reference for future meetings or decisions.

(3) Use Asynchronous Communication wherever possible: Does everything need to be shared live, in real time? Probably not. We tend to default to that method because it’s easier to just get everyone together to share and do all the things. But it’s a lazy approach. In advance of your meeting, take a look at what you plan to share, what you plan to do and what kinds of outcomes you hope to achieve. Maybe some of that can be done asynchronously before or after the live component. It’s all about being intentional and optimizing for the outcome.

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It’s a start. Try those three things and do not try to be perfect. See how it goes. Be intentional about what you do afterwards. Determine what worked and didn’t work. Then iterate and do it again for your next Hybrid meeting!

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Hybrid is here to stay. It needs to be part of your business strategy. In fact, I’d argue that unless you are going all remote or all in person, it should be the only thing you focus on when it comes to ways of working.

Companies have decades of examples to lean on for how to collaborate in person. We have the longest 3 years ever to lean on for examples of how to collaborate in a remote setting. And though you may need to hunt for them, there are examples of highly effective Hybrid teams. Maybe just not in the traditional corporate environment.

So don’t leave Hybrid to chance. If you can figure out Hybrid, the rest will come!

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Oh, and pants! We should probably just all wear them, regardless of where you are when you are working. Don’t be weird.