Improving Hybrid Teamwork
Many people are back to working at the office while others are still working from home. Experts have identified a host of problems caused by operating with a hybrid workforce. These include loss of corporate culture and remote workers feeling like second class citizens as on-site employees unintentionally hold inaudible side conversations in a meeting. Here’s my advice.
Hybrid Problems

Just like separate departments can develop distinctive departmental cultures through shared experiences and management styles, the disconnected parts of your hybrid team can lose some of the style that used to be normal when everyone was in the office.
For example:
- Your team may have had a collaborative culture but you now see a drift into pockets of different styles such as staff competing for attention and recognition or the dreaded bureaucratic “not my job” style.
- Onboarding new employees can also be a challenge as they may not naturally pick up the right social approach to work.
- Bonding between on-site staff makes them less likely to seek input from remote staff.
- Information sharing through casual hallway meetups never reaches remote staff.
Tech Helps
Technology, properly planned and used, can make a big difference:
- Require everyone to use your video app (Zoom, Teams, Webex…) whether they’re in the office or not. Alternately, make sure that every meeting room is set up so that every person can be clearly seen and heard.
- Enterprise social software, a catch-all term that encompasses all business social networking and collaboration tools, usually includes some level of team messaging, project management, task management, and collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams. It can be used for project questions, project file access, updates to schedules, and even callouts—who’s up for lunch at Pino’s?
Team Building
You, as a manager, can make a hybrid team work more like an on-site team. First, you need to be aware of the potential problems that a hybrid team might experience. You then need to observe your team in action, finding out which problems exist in your team, then create an action plan to reduce each problem.
For example, you might:
- Call out behaviour that you want to encourage, like on a video call— ”Thanks, Robert, that’s how we keep on track.”
- Enforce prompt project updates on your collaboration system.
- Schedule informal one-on-one chats with every team member to check in and see how they’re doing and what might be bugging them.
- Book ten minute coffee meetings as part of the onboarding process for new staff, letting them meet other team members one at a time.
- Encourage bonding by scheduling informal virtual lunches where people can talk about their outside interests. You might “prime the pump” with a trivia contest.
- Organize off-site social meetups.
If you’d like to comment on this article or explore these ideas further, contact me at ellen.
This article was published in the
September 2022
edition of The TMC Advisor
- ISSN 2369-663X Volume:9 Issue:4
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