The Coronavirus threat seems to be subsiding, making a return to the office more realistic for managers. However, employees enjoying increased work flexibility and autonomy may not share the same opinion and are willing to change jobs if this newly-gained freedom is endangered.
Research from April 2021. showed that 29% of employees were ready to make this critical step.
The changed workplace perspective has changed business leaders’ expectations when it comes to office-based work. While in 2019. Managers expected employees to spend 80% of their work hours in the office, this rate has plummeted to 10% in the post-Covid era.
Hybrid work came as the compromising solution and the chance for employees and managers to make the most of remote and on-site work. While employees are reveling in enhanced work/life balance, many managers still face numerous challenges when it comes to running hybrid teams.
- Fever opportunities for spontaneous communication
- Inability to stay on track with employees’ progress on tasks and projects
- Difficulty to create strong interpersonal relationships and efficient cross-team collaboration
The good news is that you can solve these problems with the help of advanced solutions for activity monitoring. These apps will show you how your employees use every minute at work, tracking their productivity and progress on different projects.
Besides relying on technology, here are some strategies you can use to become a successful leader of hybrid teams.
Empower Your Employees to Control Their Workload
If you want your hybrid teams to be highly productive try to ensure seamless communication and set priorities straight. This means that you need to set attainable objectives with clear responsibilities and expectations. Once you finish this, use employee tracking app records to delegate the right tasks to the right people and track progress made.
By allowing your employees access to their monitoring data, they’ll be able to see how their productivity fluctuates during the day and manage their workload accordingly.
This will enhance the level of autonomy and employees’ self-esteem leading to higher engagement and quality of outcomes.
More importantly, with easy access to employee monitoring data, you won’t have to micromanage your teams, checking what they are working on every now and then.
Build Strong Relationships and a Sense of Belonging
Creating tight-knit teams committed to a shared vision and goals can be tricky. Remote workers may often feel detached and isolated from the rest of the team leading to increased anxiety levels and disengagement. They also may think that they are left out of the decision-making processes and that managers favor office-based employees because they are more approachable.
You need to address these serious concerns if you want to foster a culture based on equity, mutual respect, and trust. A significant trait of every successful leader is that they lead by example. So if you want to build trustful relationships with your hybrid employees, especially remote ones, do your best to show them that:
- They can rely on you. Be ready to offer support and guidance whenever needed. Also, provide frequent feedback focusing on employees’ strong sides and helping them overcome specific work-related issues.
- That you accept and appreciate them. Foster open and honest communication encouraging your employees to speak their minds. Then listen carefully to what they say and include everyone in the decision-making process.
- That you are open to feedback. Besides delivering objective feedback frequently, show your employees that you are open to getting feedback. This attitude will bring you closer to your employees and help you build mutual trust.
- That you will deliver. You can’t just promise to change your leadership style. You need to walk the talk and show effort and enthusiasm to deliver promised results. If you fail to do this, you’ll lose employees’ trust. So make sure to create team rituals, letting your employees know each other and you better.
Help Employees Avoid Hybrid Workplace Pitfalls
Distractions, multitasking, and spending time on unnecessary meetings can ruin employee productivity and cross-team collaboration. This is why you need to keep a close eye on employees’ time management.
You can help them be more efficient by redefining meeting policies and hosting meetings only when you need to share critical information with the entire team. This said you may choose to host one weekly team meeting and limit all other meetings to 10 minutes. Numerous tools can help you keep your meetings shorter but more effective.
Distractions are eating up your employees’ time whether they work from home or the office. You may not eliminate all of them but you can use activity monitoring data to see what apps and websites your employees are spending most of their time on, and indicate how this behavior affects their productivity, leaving it to them to find the right solution to this issue.
