Hybrid Teams Communication Challenges
How do you effectively communicate with your contractors, sub-contractors, clients, and staff in a hybrid workplace? Perhaps you’ve worked in a hybrid environment for some time, or perhaps your team is still getting used to it. When many of the team are located on site or working flexibly with time in their home offices, being able to collaborate through technology is an important skill for project leaders.
However good your intentions, juggling project communications in a hybrid team is a challenge. How do you balance giving information to those you are seeing in the office that day with sending out the same information on email to people who weren’t on site? Making sure everyone has timely access to what they need to work together effectively can feel like a full-time job.
Here are five ways to help hybrid teams overcome communication challenges.
1. Talk about expectations
Manage people’s expectations about when they should be in the office or on the job site. Research by Microsoft says nearly 40% of hybrid workers find it hard to know when they should be coming into work and why they should be there.
If you have regular project team meetings, make it clear whether you need people to be there in-person or whether joining remotely is an option. For some meetings, like requirements workshops, legal negotiations or client meetings, being on site can make the conversation easier. Face-to-face meetings help build trust and can resolve some of the niggling tensions on large scale projects.
However, if you don’t need people to be in the office, don’t call them in ‘just because’. Help team members share their calendars and let colleagues know when they will be in the office. It’s advantageous for the team to be in at the same time, if they are going to come to site at all. There’s not really much difference between sitting alone in a corporate site and sitting alone at home.
2. Use presence indicators on your software
Tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack and Skype show a presence indicator: a colored dot that shows whether you are available, busy, out of the office and so on. Get used to updating your out of office message when you are away from work and encourage colleagues to do the same.
These features are designed to cut down the messages you get while you are unable to respond. They prompt colleagues to go to someone else for a quick response, and manage expectations if they do need you – specifically – to respond.
If team members are often out and about, consider accessing app-based versions of the tools you use in the office so they can stay in touch while they are on site. Be mindful of setting clear boundaries about working during non-working hours though, as apps can often lead to people logging in from home and putting in extra hours.
3. Delay sending messages
If you know that someone is out of the office, or you want to plan your emails and messages ahead of time, check out the features in your communication tools that allow you to delay sending.
Many software products have options to schedule emails and chat messages to be delivered at a certain time. This can help manage the flow of messages to your colleagues and also gives you a greater chance that your message will land at the top of their inbox when they are back!
One of the big issues with hybrid and virtual working is that sometimes there is the unspoken expectation that people will reply instantly. By using the delay features, you are supporting a work culture that enables people to set appropriate boundaries for their time.
4. Change up the cadence of meetings
Most project management guides will tell you to schedule regular team meetings so that everyone knows to join the weekly call at, say, every Tuesday at 9.15am. However, sometimes it’s worth breaking that routine.
When a project team is made up of many different entities: contractors, sub-contractors, subject matter experts from a range of teams, it can be difficult to find a time that works for everyone. Changing up the meeting schedule can make it easier for team members to attend.
Talk to your colleagues about what would work best for them and try to land on one or two meeting slots that could be used where the majority of the hybrid team would be able to join, either in person or virtually.
5. Use collaborative software for project management
Enterprise project management tools like Primavera P6, Primavera EPPM or Microsoft Project give you the option of having multiple users accessing scheduling information at any time. Given the past few years’ experience of working remotely, most colleagues will be familiar with the interfaces for online tools, so logging into scheduling software for timesheets, updating project progress or accessing dashboards should not be a problem.
However, if the team doesn’t have someone on board who is expertly able to ‘drive’ the scheduling software, hybrid working makes it even easier to outsource project scheduling. Whether you need someone to be hands-on with the schedule, or simply convert it to another tool to make it easier for everyone to use, then expert schedulers can manage that for you.
More project meetings and teams are using the hybrid model and it is already proven to be effective. We work remotely with many of our clients, managing project schedules, providing expertise on earned value management certification and compliance and delivering training. It doesn’t take much to get hybrid communications to work well, so why not consider how you can best make them work for you.