Team Performance In The New Hybrid Age

Post-pandemic, whilst some sectors have more or less returned to normal in terms of their working patterns and norms, many others have used the opportunity to navigate their way through to a more settled, and different, way of working.

With this comes opportunities as well as challenges, with one of the key challenges being around team performance. I have kept an eye on much of the literature and research during this period because I have found it fascinating. My conclusion? All the usual recommendations and guidance around how to drive the best team performance apply; it’s just that some of them require considerably more effort in the hybrid world.

I’m going to highlight three areas where this is the case. And before I do so, I’m going to re-share one of the best articulations of what makes a ‘team’ that I have come across.

What makes a ‘Team’?

The word ‘team’ is bandied around a lot in the workplace. And we can all find ourselves part of a large number of teams. My experience has shown me however that the right thought and intent doesn’t always go into the creation or labelling of these teams. It’s often too easy just to call a group of individuals a ‘team’ without thinking why they are a team, or indeed working hard to ensure the right conditions are in place to give them the best chance of working well as a team.

Adam Grant is one of my favourite authors. Grant is an organisational psychologist, Professor at the Wharton Management School of the University of Pennsylvania, and author of books including Give and Take and Think Again. Grant contends that putting people in a group doesn’t make them a team. He believes that a team is a collection of people with a shared identity who collaborate to achieve a common mission. With each team member making a unique contribution. Further, he says that turning a group into a team starts with clarifying core values, goals and roles.

With this critical context in mind, what are the three areas that you need to be working even harder at in the hybrid age, in order to drive the best team performance possible?

Belonging

Number one is a sense of belonging.

One of the things that has always stayed with me since the GB Women’s Hockey team won Gold at the Rio Olympics are the words shared by Alex Danson, top goal scorer at the tournament. Danson was part of the GB team, and Rio was her third Olympics; her third attempt to win Gold. And yet, having finally done so, what did she highlight? Not the winning, not the medal, but this: ‘It’s not the winning. It’s how you win. The people you win with, the group of people you are connected to. I think that human connection is the ultimate marker of success.’ And it’s not just athletes. See what you think of this, articulated by Steve Kerr, head coach of the Golden State Warriors in the NBA. In a clip posted on twitter, Kerr stated that the first order of business with any new player is to get to know them on a personal level. He went on to say that every person he had ever known responds to that human connection.

And this, as we know, can be so much harder to achieve and foster in the hybrid world.

Along with human connection, as we can see from Grant’s words above, a shared identity is critical to being a ‘team’. This feeds into the feeling of belonging, and as with human connection, can be more of a challenge in the hybrid world.

So what can help?

Firstly, think effortfully about how you engineer and facilitate human connection in your team(s). Plan it, and be proactive. This goes beyond team meetings and away days. Do you encourage team members to have informal catch ups? Do you have a buddy system in place? What about your onboarding of new recruits? What do you do, mindfully and proactively, to make sure human connections are made sooner rather than later?

Turning then to team identity, look at Grant’s reference above to core values. Have you defined the purpose of your team? Why it is in fact a team? And how you go about things - what are the values and behaviours that you all ascribe to? What’s important to you? And how an outsider would describe your team? Doing this can work wonders in strengthening the binds, and coherence, of a team in this hybrid age.

Feeling Valued

Lots of studies, across industries, are reinforcing the importance of feeling valued at work. Again, working remotely, and being part of a hybrid team, can put barriers in the way of this.

There are a number of factors that go into this, and I am going to highlight three key areas for hybrid teams.

First, team leaders have a responsibility to provide the right direction and clarity. Gone are the days of command and control. Instead, provide direction (this is what we need to do…), give clarity around expectations, support, timeframes etc, and then let the team get on with it. Second, and again connecting to Grant’s point above, make sure everyone is clear on their own roles and responsibilities, and how their contribution fits in with the whole. Third, make sure the team environment is one which not just permits, but actively encourages everyone in the team to speak up. To share, to contribute, to challenge, to ask questions. One practical tip on this: where you are chairing a hybrid meeting, ask those attending remotely for their thoughts first. That way you proactively counteract the possible tendency for everyone in the meeting to think their presence is less powerful/useful.

Learning and Development

We all know that for sustained team performance, your team needs to be constantly developing and improving. Whilst some of that happens formally, a lot happens informally, through daily interactions - chats in the corridor, listening in to phone calls with clients, being taken to meetings etc. Much of this is harder in the hybrid world. The teams who have been counteracting this best are the ones who have been thinking proactively and effortfully about how to replicate, in the hybrid world, what used to happen when everyone was in the same room or building. For example - I know of one Head of Department who has a post-it note on her screen which reads ‘who should I be including in this meeting/conversation?’ It worked for her so well that she has now asked all of her team members to do the same. Another organisation has implemented a weekly half hour L&D call, chaired by a different team member each week, for which everyone has to do some reading/watching in advance. In another organisation, juniors are actively encouraged to ask to be joined into meetings and calls and rewarded (appropriately) with praise and recognition when they do so.

As noted above, these are all areas that are critical for team performance in any circumstance. There is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and suddenly assume that a whole different set of ‘rules’ apply for team performance. But there are some elements which the research and literature suggest you need to be working even harder at in a hybrid world, and in this piece of I have highlighted three of them. More information on all these areas can be found in my Book, Staying the Distance: The Lessons From Sport That Business Leaders Have Been Missing.