Communication Challenges on Hybrid Teams

It seems wrong to spend a whole month delving into team effectiveness and not give particular thought to building a healthy, happy, and productive team when team members are regularly apart. So, let’s talk remote and hybrid teams!

Definition of Remote and Hybrid Teams

I define a remote team as one where the team members are physically separate from one another in their ordinary course of business (e.g., a team where each of you lives in a different city or country). A hybrid team is a team where some members are co-located while others are not. To add complications, some hybrid teams are always in the same mode (e.g., five people in the office in Tulsa and three people spread out throughout the country). In contrast, others are intermittently hybrid (e.g., eight people who work together in Louisville but come into the office only three days a week and often on different days).

So, let’s tl/dr that…

Remote team: always all apart

Full-time hybrid team: always some together and some apart

Intermittent hybrid team: sometimes together, sometimes apart

Challenges on Remote and Hybrid Teams

Teamwork is hard whether you’re far-flung across the planet or sitting in one another’s laps (okay, that’s inappropriate, but you know what I mean). But there are some significant advantages when you’re within sight of one another.

Indirect Communication

When you’re sitting near a colleague, you have a significant communication advantage because you don’t have to depend on the messages they intend to send (i.e., what they say in a meeting or type in an email); you get volumes of valuable information they don’t have to send deliberately. Here are a few examples:

You see them walk into the office whistling, and you know they’re in a good mood, and it might be a good time to ask for their helpYou notice them sighing, pulling their hair, and dropping their head in their hands, and you know they are struggling and might value some help.You notice out of the corner of your eye that they’re in a meeting with the boss, and it’s getting heated, so you give them some space and save your constructive feedback until tomorrow.You realize they were at the office before you arrived, didn’t get up for lunch, and are working through the afternoon without a break. You stop thinking that they haven’t responded to your email because they a) don’t like you, b) are a slacker, c) don’t know what they’re doing, or d) all of the above.

Now, imagine some of you are together and benefit from indirect communication while others are working remotely. The remote team members are in the dark about what’s going on for their teammates and can’t modify their interactions accordingly. They don’t ask for help because they’re worried it’s not a good time; they don’t know that you should offer support, pile on feedback when the teammate is already feeling vulnerable, and they jump to conclusions about what colleagues they can’t see are thinking, feeling, or doing without any context.

Written Communication

When you’re ten feet away from your teammate, you can do most of your communication verbally. You don’t have to infer their emotional tenor from the words they choose; you’re getting reams of information from everything coming with their words, including hearing their pitch, tone, and volume and seeing their facial expression, body language, and gestures. Here are some examples of the difference:

They say, “Drafting this presentation is killing me,” but as they say it, they’re chuckling and miming humorous, over-the-top actions, so you don’t respond with an overly dramatic expression of concern.They say, “I don’t think your draft is ready for prime time yet. It needs work,” but they are smiling at you and friendly, and they gesture toward a desk to sit down so they can help you with it so you don’t feel like you disappointed them.They say, “Everything is moving forward on the project plan,” but their volume is abnormally quiet, and they’re looking at the floor as they say it. You don’t have to trust the words, you know, to ask for more insight about what’s going on.”They say, “We need to accelerate the ship date on this new release by two weeks.” As they say it, they see the pained look on your face and ask what it would take to make that happen.

Now, imagine some of you are getting the low down in person while others are getting messages over email, Slack, or text. They’d be unsure how to take the sender’s points. They might respond with something overly negative, which could start a downward communication spiral. Written communications are more susceptible to negativity bias, so that’s not a far-fetched suggestion. Alternatively, they might be casual or cavalier about something the person needs them to take seriously. That’s a problem, too.

Timely Communication

When you’re sitting near each other, it’s easy to grab five minutes (or 1 minute) that will help you clarify, inform, or question in a way that enables you to make more efficient progress; you can have high-frequency, low-impact communication. Here are some scenarios where that makes a difference.

The definition of a word in an email is unclear, so you prairie dog over the cubicle and ask, “Hey, what did you mean by “agile” in this bit?” You don’t have to send an email and wait an hour for a response before you can carry on working.You’re learning how to use Salesforce, and you’ve forgotten how to attach a proposal to the client file. You wander over to watch another admin enter data instead of scheduling an appointment with the help desk.You overhear two colleagues talking about this morning’s meeting where the timelines for the new performance management system got pushed. You can immediately follow up on what that means for your team rather than waiting until it’s announced at the team meeting on Thursday.A client calls you to share some concerns and changes they need on your latest iteration of the blueprints. You wave your colleague over and put on the speakerphone so you can hear it simultaneously rather than having to summarize everything later.

Now, imagine some of you are getting a steady stream of intel all day while others need to wait for a team meeting, send an email and hope for a response, or schedule a formal meeting that might take two days or expand to fill 30 minutes instead of being a quick connection. Adding that formality might slow their progress and make accomplishing even the most minor task feel like running through thigh-high molasses.

None of these communication challenges of hybrid teams is insurmountable, but they’re worth considering. How will you help remote teammates overcome the deficit of communication that lacks the richness of facial expressions and body language? What will you do to bolster the accuracy and compensate for the negativity bias of too much communication in writing? How will you address the inefficiencies of asynchronous communication, where you must wait to convey the information you need to be effective?

How will you take into account the challenges that hybrid teams create?

Additional Resources

Check out my Ultimate Guide to Hybrid Teams here.

Watch this quick set of tips on Running a Great Hybrid Meeting

Building Trust in Remote and Hybrid Teams

How to Improve Hybrid Meetings

 

The post Communication Challenges on Hybrid Teams appeared first on Liane Davey.