Articles

The Future is "Hybrid" - Back to School for Hybrid Collaboration Skills

The Covid Pandemic has accelerated the ‘work from anywhere’ trend, and most experts believe we won’t return to previous levels of in-office work. To reduce expenses and meet employee requests for flexible work arrangements, a large majority of employers predict they will allow many employees to work away from the office, at least part-time. But leading a hybrid team is NOT the same as if everyone is remote. Facilitators and participants will need to be trained on the unique challenges of a hybrid work environment.

Hybrid collaboration tends to be even more difficult because remote participants are not on an equal playing field with in-person team members. Remote team members can be at a disadvantage with fewer opportunities to “be heard” and less access to leadership, development opportunities, and company culture. But with intentional actions, your teams can overcome these possible disadvantages.

Everyone has experienced ineffective remote meetings, both as a participant and facilitator. An important reason for this is that most workers haven’t been trained for this new hybrid landscape. Pre-pandemic surveys found that only 5% had been trained on how to run a remote meeting and only 25% of workers had been formally trained on how to run meetings in general*.

WHERE TO BEGIN
Before you design solutions and training, first gather some data to determine the current pain points of your hybrid collaboration. Here are some sample questions to consider:

 
TOP HYBRID COLLABORATION CHALLENGES
Next, look for the lowest scoring areas and notice emerging themes. You may even want to enhance the survey by interviewing remote team members to add commentary to the data. For hybrid and fully remote meetings, challenges tend to fall into five categories:

• Gaining and maintaining full participation of attendees
• Hearing from all team members and sensing their level of alignment
• Preparing so that essential meeting outcome is consistently met
• Achieving high levels of community and trust across the team
• Fully utilizing all features of video conferencing and other collaboration technology

TRAINING FOR HYBRID FACILITATORS
Over the last year, we’ve all facilitated remote meetings where attendees don’t respond as energetically as they would in the office. If cameras are off, you literally can’t see everyone’s body language, non-verbal cues, and engagement level. However, now that you understand your team’s main issues, you can begin to train your facilitators and leaders to overcome these challenges. Here are some examples of facilitation areas to include in your training:

• How to run engaging meetings from opening to close to consistently achieve desired outcomes
• Establishing roles and setting expectations for participants
• Methods for sensing alignment and creating accountability
• Engagement strategies to involve team members during and after the meeting
• Techniques to promote productive and focused discussions

TRAINING FOR HYBRID TEAM PARTICIPANTS
It’s everyone’s job to ensure the team collaborates at high levels – not just the facilitator or leader. To guarantee active participation by all team members, everyone must agree with this principle - no matter if they are remote or in the office. Here are some important skills to build in participants of hybrid meetings:

• Proficiency in using features of video conferencing software
• Methods of staying engaged and avoiding distractions
• How to be “heard” as a minority remote and techniques to encourage remotes to share input
• Using hybrid and remote meeting etiquette and principles

 
TECHNIQUES TO MAINTAIN FULL ENGAGEMENT
If your organization is like most, a top frustration will be the challenge of keeping remote participants consistently engaged in hybrid or fully remote meetings. You want to hear their input and be able to read their reactions just like you do with in-person participants through body language and facial expressions. But remote participants won’t feel like they’re an integral part of the team if you don’t use intentional strategies to include them. Here are a few sample techniques to try:

• At the start of the meeting, clearly state the output you want to get from the meeting and specific expectations of participants to achieve it.
• Designate a local participant to be the “buddy” for each remote participant. This person serves as a liaison between locations and ensures that remote attendees’ needs are met, and their ideas are being heard.
• Fully use video conferencing features such as whiteboarding, polls, and annotation. A whiteboard allows visual learners to “see” notes being captured in the meeting space. When brainstorming and gathering input, annotation, polling, or chat features help you gather input from more people simultaneously (faster than round robins).
• Favor remote participants by asking for their comments early and often. By literally checking off when you’ve heard from remotes, you ensure remotes are being heard and are in alignment.
• In his book, Brain Rules, John Medina suggests interacting or planning a new activity with participants about every three to five minutes.
• Give more people a role in the meeting. Examples include designating a timekeeper, note-taker, technical support, chat scanner, and/or co-presenters.

COMMIT TO TRYING SOME NEW TECHNIQUES
Start by offering some basic training to facilitators and provide a small menu of techniques, strategies, and best practices for improving remote meetings. Facilitators can try one or two new techniques and then observe if team collaboration improves. It could be as simple as designating someone to keep a connection with remote participants during the meeting, committing to do a post-meeting review to understand how a recurring meeting can be improved, or training meeting facilitators on how to use more functions of your video conferencing software.

Once employees start to feel the effects of better hybrid and remote meetings, they’ll be ready to improve across more issue areas. Over time, they’ll be less likely to multitask when meetings are crisp and remote participants feel fully included.

SUMMARY
As children go back to school, we too can learn some new skills! If your organization is considering a hybrid workforce, you’ll want to learn together and “upskill” your teams. With this focus, you’ll ensure the organization continues to collaborate effectively, stay competitive in attracting talent, and reach all its goals.

If you’d like more training ideas for your hybrid leaders and teams, you can connect with Beth Matteotti on LinkedIn.

*Sources: Atlassian.com, Forbes.com