Tips to personalize your hybrid work approach

Remote and hybrid working situations continue to teach us a lot about what effective and efficient collaboration truly looks like. Over the years we’ve been introduced to new technologies and different ways teams can better work together to align and execute on shared goals. As companies continue to refine their hybrid work approach, adapting the in-office experience to incorporate the great things we learned from working remotely will be key. 

I’ve learned three big lessons from remote and hybrid work. I’ll share tips here on how to incorporate them into your company’s hybrid approach. 

Collaboration styles: There’s no one-size-fits-all approach

As teams transitioned to virtual environments, there was more freedom to explore different ways of working and it showed that flexibility and a strong tech stack can supercharge team collaboration and alignment. Solutions like virtual whiteboards, instant messaging tools, and work management software became necessary for teams that went fully remote in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. And since then, it’s proven to be more effective in most cases than traditional in-office collaboration styles, with 30% of employees believing that visuals are the key to increased alignment and quicker task completion.

Team collaboration is elevated through virtual spaces. For example, with a virtual whiteboard, teammates can prepare ideas ahead of a brainstorm and then join the conversation from anywhere. They can then take action on those ideas by voting on their favorite ones, tagging, organizing, and summarizing main points, which enable faster alignment on goals and decisions. 

In meetings, certain individuals sometimes dominate the conversation, unintentionally marginalizing others. With this type of visual collaboration, all team members are empowered to participate and share ideas in a way that makes their insight heard and valued. And when teams are aligned at the end of a brainstorm, instead of taking a photo of a physical whiteboard and trying to figure out how to record and share the info with the team, the virtual whiteboard serves as a living blueprint of their discussion and ideas can be modified and built upon in real time.

While digital-first collaboration has proven to be just as, if not more effective than the in-person alternatives, it’s also showed us the importance of understanding individual collaboration styles and how people prefer to work. 

Asking your team about their comfort working with others, using new technology, and how they navigate meetings can help you better understand their unique collaboration styles. Their responses to these questions can serve as a guide to personalize the way your team collaborates to ensure everyone can contribute in a way that works best for them. Research has shown that many people fall under three main collaboration styles: introspective, relational, and expressive. Here’s how leaders can empower people to do their best work:

• Introspective collaborators: Give this grouptime and space to ideate independently and do the pre-work before the group discussion begins. 
• Relational collaborators: Make time before jumping into the content to personally connect with each other.
• Expressive collaborators: Ensure the group has time and freedom to make those visual connections, and to bounce ideas off each other during meetings.

Schedule meetings with intention

Today’s workers spend 85% of their time in meetings. The notion of “this could have been an email” has been around for a while but it wasn’t until teams were hybrid and experienced Zoom fatigue that we realized just how taxing meetings can be on our productivity and wellbeing. 

When deciding if a meeting is needed, start by evaluating your goal and desired outcome of getting together with your team. Ask yourself: Can accomplishing these goals and outcomes be done in other ways? For example, would it be better to have teams spend some time asynchronously prepping to save on time needed in a meeting? 

By leveraging asynchronous collaboration, teams can utilize the brainwriting technique to contribute their thoughts and ideas at a time that works best for them through a shared document. This is especially beneficial to sparking innovation as different perspectives can be captured and utilized. After sharing their ideas, teams can then decide when it is best to discuss live. In turn, they will come to meetings feeling prepared to discuss the topic at hand which will lead to faster alignment and decision-making and shorter meetings.

Prioritize intentional team connections

Over the last four years of ever-changing hybrid work schedules, it’s no secret that employees lost out on opportunities to connect on more personal levels while at the office together. And for fully remote employees, that opportunity was taken from them completely. Those personal connections are important for boosting team morale and employee engagement. 

There are so many simple ways to connect with your team that can have a meaningful impact on how you collaborate. For example, take time to facilitate intentional connection for your hybrid teams by doing activities together that aren’t directly related to the work. This can be as easy as starting off all-hands meetings with fun ice-breakers or as in-depth as annual off-sites. 

Some of the fun ways we do this at Lucid include Visual Activities, which are brief and interactive activities that can be used for fueling collaborative decisions within projects and also for icebreakers and team building. Some of the team building starter activities include rating your favorite foods or sharing a bucket list activity. Another way to connect with your team can be through hosting a collaborative story time where one team member tells a story of their choosing while the others “illustrate” the story with GIFs, images, drawings, and quotes along the way. We even have teams who have built impressive and elaborate digital Dungeons and Dragons campaigns in our products to help facilitate team connection. 

Investing just a few minutes fostering connections with your team at the beginning of a meeting can make a meaningful difference. When we take that time to do so, whether through activities or a casual conversation, it unlocks a whole new level of comfort, creativity and collaboration among everyone in the room. By making these simple investments over time, you’ll notice these small connections will compound into something greater than any objectives and key results (OKR) could quantify—and that’s a strong team bond and positive synergy. 

Final words

As more companies continue streamlining their hybrid work approach, it’s crucial to continually evaluate the different ways to enable employees to optimize their time and do their best work. By fostering a supportive working environment, teams are able to connect with each other intentionally and collaborate seamlessly, regardless of location. 

Dave Grow is CEO of Lucid Software.

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