Organize Your Team in a Hybrid Workplace
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Organize Your Team in a Hybrid Workplace
In his new Rise Course, our MDI trainer and partner Peter Grabuschnig shares all his knowledge on Hybrid Leadership.
It offers a reflective look at your leadership behavior in times of new work, work location, and increasing flexibility. In this blog article, he will introduce you to the second pillar of the 3P model – People.
Peter will present you with a few questions regarding People and hybrid work that you can reflect on to improve as a leader. Enjoy reading!
Organization Pre-Considerations
What can you as a leader do to adapt with your team to the realities of hybrid work? I would recommend that you first analyze the current situation of your team. You can answer the following questions:
- How is your team currently structured?
- Who are the team members?
- What work areas are there in the team?
- How would you describe the team in regards to belonging, knowledge levels, motivation, loyalty,…
- How do you function as a team? What’s going well and what is going not well?
- How well do you support each other?
- What tasks do you handle together as a team?
- What work is currently done in the office or the home office?
- What work do you think needs to be done in the office?
- Who is open to change and who is more skeptical about hybrid leadership?
This will give you an overview of where you currently stand. Continue with the other steps when you’re done with your analysis.
Expectations
As a second step, I want you to think about your expectations. Ask yourself questions such as:
- What do your employees expect from you and vice versa when it comes to hybrid work?
- What objections can arise or have already arisen?
- What advantages have resulted for the team from hybrid working?
- What are your go’s and no-go’s?
The clearer you are about what you want to expect from your team, the better you can communicate your expectations and achieve your goals.
General Collaboration Setup
Lastly, we look at the General Collaboration Setup. Deal with the following issues:
- What formal and informal rules are there?
- Are they all known, intentional, and communicated? (For example, is an employee allowed to go to the supermarket in the afternoon? Or can a father come to the office later because his child is sick?)
These questions show us some of the things that should be clarified. In a hybrid setup, there needs to be much more communication and coordination on things that may never have been an issue in a normal office routine.
Hybrid working also means that there are new tasks and responsibilities, at least in some teams. As a leader, do you sometimes feel like you have to take care of everything on your own? This can quickly become overwhelming.
Think about this:
- Are there new or changed tasks or responsibilities? Is there someone in the team who can take on this task or perhaps even wants to do it? By delegating smartly, you will save yourself some time. This includes how we organize our work.
- What processes already exist and are these suitable for hybrid working? Check that those processes that have been changed are working well.
The final area that we will cover in this section is legal frameworks. Our laws are still made for our industrially driven system and as we know, new laws take time. As attractive as it may sound, not every company can offer its employees third-place-working, for example.
This has to do with country-specific labor laws. The country you work in also has insurance and tax implications. Before promising any freedom, you should take a close look at the legal situation and also keep a good eye on it to react quickly in case of any changes.
We hope you have enjoyed this snippet from Peter’s Rise course! You can contact us if you are interested in this course or follow along on our blog, where we will share other content of the course as well.
Peter Grabuschnig
Trainer, Coach & MDI Partner
Peter is a partner and trainer at MDI, advising major international corporations on implementing hybrid work policies and building a hybrid work and leadership culture.
He is considered an expert in training design. With his Webinar Guru Framework he has developed a tool that helps to design training content for successful and activating virtual learning.