A guide to leading teams in hybrid and remote environments

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I hope you're having a good week so far.

This week's edition of our newsletter outlines the crucial skills and knowledge needed to lead teams effectively when adopting new ways of working.

This issue is a guest post from Annika Hart, Managing Director of Futureproofing at Hoxby. Hoxby is a pioneering organization of 700 freelancers delivering impactful creative and professional services to clients around the globe. Hoxby have been working remotely for over seven years; they have extensively reviewed the academic literature and industry best practice, experimented on themselves, and supported clients who have transitioned to working this way. Now they are sharing their experience and expertise to help others navigate these new ways of working.?

?Read on to find out why;

• receiving over a thousand bits of feedback is the best thing that can happen to a business
• a polar expedition is relevant to organizational resilience
• communication is the ‘do or die’ of virtual leadership

?Annika writes;

Even before the era of coronavirus, organizations were starting to evolve their business models to enable more agile and flexible ways of working. Now, as the pandemic recedes, what was previously seen as optional has become essential. Lockdowns have proved that it is possible to work this way (even in extremely stressful circumstances), and people are being drawn to organizations that promote an autonomous, empowering work culture. While statistics vary, the trend is crystal clear: anywhere from 70% ?to 97% ?of people want to continue working from home, or at least to have the choice of when they come into the office.?

Being a great leader is as important as ever in these changing circumstances. Research shows that by far, the most significant factor in work relationships is the relationship with your boss. The happier leaders make their employees, the more productive they are, the fewer sick days they take, and the more they delight customers.?

But, today’s new ways of working require a much greater emphasis on leading teams remotely or semi-remotely – and this requires a whole new set of skills and knowledge. That’s why we have created the Hoxby Model of Remote Leadership?. We mapped more than 200 leadership ideas referenced by our sample of effective remote leaders using a structured psychological interviewing technique. These were categorized and peer-reviewed by our psychologists to identify the 14 domains in which effective leaders excel;

To bring the model to life, we also wanted to share examples of brilliant leadership and work practices from Hoxby and other organizations we work with, as well as key takeaways and suggested actions leaders can take in each area. We take a deep dive into the first three domains in this newsletter. You can request the full article with all 14 domains here.

Agile experimentation

A leader who excels in agile experimentation is decisive and can take risks, question assumptions, and show quick progress. She embraces feedback and is OK with failure for the purpose of learning. Through their leadership, this is something Alex Hirst and Lizzie Penny (co-founders of Hoxby) have built into the culture and structure of Hoxby. They described an example of when they felt they had failed as leaders and what they learned as a result.?

At the beginning of the Hoxby journey, Alex and Lizzie believed in allowing Hoxbies complete freedom to choose collaboration tools, methods of document creation, and ways to manage projects. But they quickly discovered that some defined working practices were needed for consistency and efficiency. So they moved to mandating specific ways of communicating (for example, we don’t use email for any internal messages, everything must be on Slack) and collaborating (we use Google Workspace). This vastly improved productivity and wellbeing. By experimenting, they realized some areas were non-negotiable to enable their working model.?

Alex and Lizzie identified that this experimentation had been crucial to designing successful working practices and therefore built innovation into Hoxby’s culture from the early days of the company. At Hoxby, we have an #AlwaysImproving tool and process, which has received more than 1,100 suggestions for how we can improve the Hoxby way of doing things. In this way, the remote leadership at Hoxby is underpinned by everyone in the community playing their part.?

With a globally distributed, asynchronous workforce and flat structure (no managers to pass on messages to their teams), one area we are continually experimenting with is the sharing of vital information. As leaders, Alex and Lizzie try to be transparent and share as much information about the business as possible. But they don’t always know whether that information has been received at the other end. For example, has the Slack message been read? Did the newsletter go out at a time when people would read it? Did the video update get lost on Youtube? The #AlwaysImproving process is incredibly helpful in highlighting what’s being missed or the ways we can do better in providing information. Off the back of this feedback, we have been able to develop a dashboard of key data from across the business that Hoxbies can access at any time. And we continue to evolve this as more feedback comes in.?

Key takeaways:?

• Consider where there might be an opportunity to experiment in your leadership. The next time you decide to make a change to your team's way of working, you can test two different approaches before deciding which works best.
• Read about and get inspired by booking.com’s approach to experimentation.

Building resilience

Resilient employees are better able to adapt to change and the demands of work. They report higher levels of well-being, creativity, and innovation. By reducing stress, resilience increases productivity and reduces staff turnover. And an organization’s resilience is directly linked to its employees’ individual physical, mental, and emotional resilience.? So it is crucial for leaders to build resilience in their teams, especially in times of volatility (such as a global pandemic).?

There are lots of ways you can build team resilience: by role modeling clear boundaries (at Hoxby, this means leaders are diligent at communicating and respecting workstyles); by protecting your team against increased mental health burdens such as loneliness (we have social interest groups set up on Slack to encourage Hoxbies to support each other); by tapping into lived experiences (for example, Hoxby Victoria Humphries overcame life-threatening adversity on a polar expedition, an experience she now shares through inspirational talks and resilience workshops).?

When the pandemic reduced people’s freedom and flexibility, making it difficult to escape the stress, Richard Grazier, MD of Community Brands, made a real effort to lighten the load, suggesting team members take a sunny afternoon off to get ice cream or use an extra day’s holiday to see family and do something meaningful. Matthew Knight, the creator of freelance community Leapers, points out that this sort of active rest, where you take a break to do something different (daydreaming, chores, going for a walk – all the things that remote work enables employees to do during the day) is so often seen as non-productive ‘downtime.’ However, it is not only required, it accelerates your productivity and creativity. Regular breaks boost our capacity by giving us time to recover from the demands work places on us; research shows that active rest leads to significantly higher levels of recovery between work periods, thereby improving resilience.

At RIBA, CTO Avril Chester actively encourages people to take a break, a learning and well-being initiative she introduced. Every Friday morning, an hour is blocked out for everyone in the technology department. Each individual has complete freedom to decide how they use that time: they can do a module on LinkedIn Learning, do yoga, go for a walk, catch up on emails so they can leave an hour early, or even spend an extra hour in bed. The initiative is underpinned by the trust in each individual that they know how to get the most value out of that hour. Interestingly, some teams have organically started using the time to learn together as a team, running a book club-like structure to explore courses together. Avril’s complete trust allows individuals to flourish in any way they choose.?

Key takeaways:?

• Find someone in your organization that has done something different in their life. Encourage them to consider how it built their resilience and what learnings they might be able to share with others.
• Can you give your team a dedicated time each week where they can do whatever would benefit them most? Try to lead by example and use that time for something non-work-related, demonstrating the benefits of active rest.

Communication

One interesting outcome of our research was the prominence and weighting that the communication-in-leadership domain received. It was usually raised first and talked about repeatedly and in a multifaceted way. The suggestion is that communication is the ‘do or die’ of virtual leadership – it is the one thing you have to do before all else to succeed. Yet data shows 91% of employees feel their boss lacks this crucial skill.

Moving online has changed the way we communicate. In a written format, without body language to imply tone, communications must be considered and explicit. Leaders must demonstrate emotional intelligence, empathy, and authenticity in their writing (we’ll share more on authenticity later). While this may seem laborious, communicating this way comes with huge benefits – you have time to consider how you express yourself and how to make your words truly meaningful.

For Alex Hirst and Lizzie Penny, video is an integral part of how they communicate day to day. Whether they are videos for the whole Hoxby community or one-to-one video exchanges, a huge amount of thought and effort goes into them. As a leader, it is essential to consider how you can encourage engagement. How can you make your content refreshing and exciting? How can you involve people in the discussion? Can you hide ‘easter eggs’ in the background? Run prize draws? At Hoxby, Alex and Lizzie make company announcements in fancy dress, by rapping, or through role play. It is one of the most fun aspects of their leadership! At Community Brands, MD Richard Grazier sits in a different place in his house for each company meeting – in the kitchen, by the piano, anywhere that might provide interest and is distinct from the previous meeting.?

Rachel Watson, MD of Finance at Hoxby, also highlighted how one lousy piece of communication can undo months of good work. There is lots of evidence that humans recall bad experiences more than positive ones. Almost everyone remembers negative things more strongly and in more detail – in fact, it takes three positive experiences to offset one negative one. So it is critical to consider and carefully phrase communications that could be interpreted negatively.?

Rachel pointed to a recent experience where she rushed the writing of a message and was dismayed to find that the team instantly felt demotivated and unvalued. Fortunately (because she’s such a fab leader), Rachel was able to recognize her mistake, and by apologizing to the team and explaining her intentions better, she was able to rectify the situation.?

Key takeaways:??

• Take some time to reflect on your own communication style. How can you make it more engaging and memorable? Do you communicate enough? Ask your team if there is anything they would like more information or regular updates on.

That’s all we’ve got space for in this newsletter, but you can request the full article with all 14 domains here.

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