Building Hybrid Connections for Innovation Teams

Too many articles are talking about the challenges of a hybrid office. Especially for innovation teams where idea flow and collaboration are the fuel of the future.

Hybrid doesn’t have to mean “disconnected” – to the contrary this moment is a great opportunity to reinvent relationships for your team. As people transition to hybrid office arrangements they expect change so why not change with the times and reinvent how your team collaborates in this new age?

For innovation, communication and connection are key. Team members need to be unafraid to speak their crazy ideas and challenge each other to explore new models of thinking. To do this, you need strong relationships. Here are three books to help any innovation team (or any team) build stronger relationships at work. I also provide suggestions to extend the books for the hybrid workplace based on what I’m seeing in teams I’m working with.

The Foundation

Relationships are complex things. They constantly are in flux and ready to grow (or collapse) at any moment. To build a strong foundation for professional relationships I often recommend Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi. This book clearly outlines a model for connecting with other humans using examples and exercises. I really like how Keith conveys the concepts of the book through his own experiences and the experiences of his connections.

For Innovation teams, Never Eat Alone enables you to do two critical things: establish the network effect and build stronger relationships within your team.

The network effect is harvesting ideas from across a large group of people. This behavior allows you to combine thoughts that would not meet otherwise. As I say with the “Idea Store”, creativity happens when two ideas enable a third useful idea. Use Ferrazzi’s ideas to build a large network with many perspectives and foster it to have the relationships that create the mental safety for people to honestly share their thoughts without reservation of “being wrong”.

For hybrid teams, use Never Eat Alone’s concepts to encourage team members to connect online and off. A hybrid team can fall into the trap of impersonal communication and brief email/text messages that don’t build connection. Encourage your team to connect outside of their normal communications. At Mind Over Machines, we use Yammer feeds to talk about our pets and love of food. Create connection by enabling people to talk about topics outside of work. That connection will then resonate in meetings and emails when collaboration is needed.

The Basics

The ability to build a relationship is the foundation and now you need tools to make that foundation useful. Over the past year many of us have learned how to use Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Hangouts, and sometimes a mix of all these depending on the meeting. The good news is that you've been building your Digital Confidence this past year but the bad news is you were thrown in the deep end with (probably) little support.

Fortunately, there is an excellent book to help you understand how to be a leader in this hybrid office world…and it was written almost 10 years ago. Virtual Executive by D.A. Benton is an excellent manual on how to work in a world that spans conference calls, chats, email and the growing palette of digital communication tools. This book covers topics like when to use chats vs. email, how to leverage a voice channel vs. online community for engagement and the power of video as a communication medium.

Innovation teams can use this book to set a baseline of how to engage each other with the appropriate medium. No, the answer isn’t always to jump on a Zoom. Sometimes the answer is to use Zoom for voice only or perhaps a text message will suffice. With my team, I use the phone a lot. It is generally known that I’ll just call to chat instead of using chat. This connection helps me feel more connected to my team and allows for riffing into new ideas. Using Benton’s materials will help you and your team use the right tool at the right time to avoid Zoom Fatigue and the drain to engagement (and thus creativity) that comes from being on calls non-stop.

Did you mean…?

Only 7% of what we communicate is through words. Body language, tone, expressions, gestures, all amass to the majority of how we communicate. In a hybrid world where some people are virtual and some are physical, it is easy to lose these signals. To make matters more complex, anyone who has hosted a meeting where some people are virtual and some are physical knows that balancing communication in the room is a significant challenge.

In Digital Body Language, author Erica Dhawan provides guidance on how to convey context and meaning through our digital media. Erica provides many familiar examples of ambiguous communications and how to improve them. I appreciate her “Do this not that” approach provided throughout the book which helped me look at my own communications with a new lens.

A staple to any Innovation team is the ability to collaborate online. These collaborations can get fast and sometimes how ideas are communicated don’t represent the real meaning or intention of the communicator. In a brainstorming session, nods and smiles send signals of engagement but what about the person who just called in and you can’t see? How can they show engagement? How can you read their digital signals to know what they are really thinking? Digital Body Language doesn’t just show you how to read signals but also shows you how to send them appropriately for the context of the situation. 

Progression

I encourage any team who is going to be hybrid to pick up these books. Read them in order for best impact: Never Eat Alone -> Virtual Executive -> Digital Body Language. This allows you to setup a strong Foundation, understand the right tools to use for the right situation, and master those tools to communicate what you mean when you mean it.

Innovation teams are facing a great opportunity as the world goes Hybrid. This is our chance to rethink creativity and how we can work together to build the best world possible. I am excited to be on this journey and hope that you use these books to fuel your own hybrid journey.