With more than 40% of employees around the world interested in changing jobs this year, leaders need to go out of their way to ensure their remote team members feel included as they adjust to managing hybrid in-person and remote teams.
We offer these five tips for organizations to help their remote workers feel valued and included:
Up-skill managers with cyber team-building skills.
Because social interactions don’t happen organically with dispersed team members, managers need to learn how to create authentic opportunities for team members to build trust and social bonds that reinforce trust and build empathy for one another. These skills require training, practice and reinforcement through accountability.
Amplify, exhibit and celebrate cultural values at all levels of the organization in internal communications campaigns.
Articulating the vision and mission of the organization creates a transcendent purpose in which individual employees can see themselves being a part of something larger than themselves. Moreover, showing an organization’s values in action reinforce their importance as cultural currency, especially when they’re both modeled by senior leaders and recognized and celebrated by pointing out employees who embody those values.
Regional team meetups for networking and building social bonds.
Creating opportunities for people to bond in person once it is safe to do so will help inject some of the social glue that binds people together.
Take a page from your favorite college professor’s playbook and create a weekly “office hours” block on the calendar.
The aim of this standing time on your team calendar is to allow employees to meet with fellow team members for a chat at a set time that doesn’t have a formal agenda. Informal, social interactions need to be adapted to a hybrid environment, which requires intentionality, but the time itself needn’t be structured. The goal is to provide a space where informal, social interactions can spark social bonds and build trust among team members over time.
Model empathy.
Managers should show and state their desire for and support of their team members’ success and personal wellbeing. This reinforces a sense of trust over time, which makes employees feel more engaged and valued.
If you’d like to read about some of the scientific insights behind these recommendations, please read our previous blog post. If you’d like to discuss how we might be able to help you or your leadership team adapt to managing a hybrid workforce, please contact us; we’d love to hear from you.