How do you maintain the motivation and productivity of your hybrid teams?
Hybrid team working is a concept whereby teams work both from an office and anywhere else (work from anywhere – WFA).
Many businesses are struggling with the question of how to maintain the motivation of their hybrid teams. This question is key as we transition, slowly, into a post-Covid world.
“74% of CFOs expect to transition some portion of their workforce to permanent remote work post-Covid”
– Ron Carucci, Harvard Business Review.
Is your midsize company for a post-pandemic future?
11th Feb 2021
Organisations across the globe have been forced to accelerate their digital strategies to adapt. Years of modernisation and digital transformation has occurred within months. Paradigms have shifted. Fixed minds have been moved. The possibilities for designing new work practices are endless.
Your hybrid team needs support. The scale and pace of change that has been sustained is radical.
Employers and employees have sustained change at a radical pace and scale. It is almost impossible to see how we could go completely back to pre-Covid work habits.
For us, hybrid working will be the way forward. Hybrid working will help us to balance the opportunities that technology has presented with the benefits and needs of our people.
We know that our people need to connect with other human beings. They thrive when they can physically coexist with their colleagues. This connection is crucial to the social cohesion of our organisation.
When home working was thrust upon us, we lost and gained so much. On one hand we gained valuable time not commuting, on the other we lost our commuting downtime leaving us with no transition between work and home life.
Working in the office or onsite offers us face to face contact. The office gives us a place to go to practice the skills that make us employable. It provides us with the opportunity to collaborate with each other and exchange ideas.
By contrast, home working offers us more flexible working hours, time saved not travelling to meetings and a chance to embrace new technologies.
How can organisations get the best from their hybrid teams? Here are our 3 tips:
1. Forums to connect and collaborate
We are social creatures and need to collaborate in order to ensure social cohesion and effective work practices.
Virtual facilitation solutions such as RapidConsenus, are workshops designed to build capability within organisations in order to collaborate and co-design better outcomes. It is a perfect fit for resilient and engaging decision-making practices.
Waterfield Consulting are publishers of RapidConsensus™ and experts in organisational strategy and facilitation. Holst – Workplace Effectiveness in the UK also offers RapidConsensus™ as part of their portfolio.
A virtual RapidConsensus™ workshop will give your people the skills to run sessions inhouse. This will build a valuable inhouse capability for whatever comes next in this journey.
2. Supporting your people to transition
Jo Emmerson from Holst-Workplace Effectiveness recently spoke on a webinar about the personality traits required to be a successful remoter worker.
Every person has different needs and a personal touch from employers will make all the difference.
Diagnostic assessments such as the McQuaig Psychometric System and flowprofiler® are perfect as they help identify signs of negative stress and to what extent a person is stretching or scrunching their behaviours.
Assessments such as these also provide key insights into states of high and low morale within your teams.
Previously, you may have got a sense of how your people are coping in the office kitchen. Now online diagnostic tools can help inform our thinking.
3. Motivation and engagement
Adapting to the motivational and engagement needs of your people is key during periods of sustained change.
Diagnostic tools such as motivationflow® provide you with a real-time snapshot of what your people need right now.
motivationflow® allows leaders to adapt to the requirements of their people and ensure the can manage the motivational needs of their team.
With this information Leaders can find solutions to support and meet the needs of the employees they are responsible for.
motivationflow® offers a full range of development, management and team reports. The reports are supported with virtual or face-to-face team and personal development sessions.
These sessions are facilitated by fully certified trainers.
If a 1:1 approach is preferred, then our extensive network of executive coaches can offer individuals rich development opportunities tailored to their immediate needs.
Please reach out to us if we can assist you to build your future people strategy. Our network is extensive!
