How to optimize in-person time with your team in the hybrid workplace

How do you optimize in-person time with your team while navigating the new normal of hybrid? ??

Last month, we held our third quarterly hybrid offsite called Team Week, where we tried to be mindful and intentional about how we spent our limited in-person time together. ?

For me, it was about focusing on shared values - Growth, Empathy, and Connection - while creating space where we can bond as a team.

Here are some learnings and practical tips and examples based on our offsite to help you plan in-person time with your team.

?? One of our main values is continuous growth and learning. We strive to stretch ourselves, build new skills, and embrace big challenges, supporting each other along the way. But let’s be honest – our day-to-day jobs can get hectic, leaving little room for professional development and mentorship. That’s why I wanted to dedicate a significant amount of time at our last offsite to learning.

?We hired a theater company to organize an interactive workshop that helped us dig deep into world-class storytelling, a critical skill for a marketing team. This workshop pushed us out of our comfort zone and challenged our assumptions about creating B2B product narratives. ?It also encouraged us to be more vulnerable and connect in deeper, more meaningful ways to our colleagues.

?There is also so much that we can learn from each other – after all, each of us has unique backgrounds, experiences, and talents.?In remote work, we’ve missed stopping by someone’s desk to get impromptu help with a specific task or project. So, we asked our team leads to conduct a series of micro-learning sessions, unpacking some of the most common daily challenges—from writing an email to an executive to creating a killer presentation. While these sessions were especially valuable for early in career team members, we all learned something new!

?? Empathy is king - especially in the hybrid workplace. We need diverse perspectives that help us better understand our customers to prioritize our investments and to build trusted partnerships. It is also essential when it comes to innovation - we want our customers’ needs to influence our product development and marketing initiatives.

? At each Team Week, we aim to bring diverse speakers to widen our understanding of the Teams business and challenge our habitual way of thinking. We invited our customer REI to talk about their digital transformation journey. Hosting an open dialogue with the IT leader who led the deployment and running of Teams in his organization helped our team build a shared understanding of a customer’s challenges and opportunities.

?? There is no denying that the last two years have fundamentally weakened our social capital - the bonds that connect us, that allow us to have confidence in our co-workers, and motivates us to love our jobs. Creating a sense of community now requires greater intentionality than ever - our research found that over 40% of leaders consider relationship building to be the greatest challenge in hybrid or remote work.

? Nothing brings people together quite like food! We provided lunch throughout the week to encourage everyone to stick around, share a bite and get to know each other better. We also know that teams have become more siloed, and we were intentional about inviting people outside of our immediate work group to happy hours and coffee breaks. These relationships are essential to spark new ideas, create synergies, and drive scale across the organization.

Do you have other ideas for how to nurture in-person time together? Would love to read them in the comments!?