Here's how to keep your hybrid team together

If you are struggling to find ways to keep your team united when you’re not all working in the same place look no further 

For many, one of the great positives of the pandemic has been a rise in flexible working arrangements. 

While the switch to remote work was sudden, for some organisations, it’s something they’ve never looked back from. 

Many office workers are now slowly returning to the office, but the majority aren’t coming back full time, splitting their week between home and a dedicated company office.  

But because this means employees are no longer seeing each other face-to-face every day, keeping teams connected and engaged is a trickier task than it used to be. 

It’s an area that Julie McDonald, the CEO of the Funding Network, is quite the expert in. 

With employees across the country, she was already leading a hybrid team before the pandemic hit, but she has used the past couple of years to come up with even more ways of keeping her team connected and supported in this new world of work. 

We sat down to talk about how she’s done it. 

Hey Julie! What are some of the things you’ve done to keep your hybrid team connected and engaged? 

Before we all swapped to remote work at the start of 2020, our team was quite siloed. So when the pandemic broke out, one of the things we introduced was a 20 minute daily team huddle. Initially, the team was quite against the idea of catching up every single day, but we had so much fun with it so we kept it. Every day there’s a different chair, and the agenda is simply a gratitude statement, what yesterday’s big goals and small goals were, what today’s big and small goals are, and what you need help with.

We also have a longer meeting in the middle of the week where we do what we call the “chairs challenge”. We’ve had everything from quizzes to music challenges, and even one where we had to create an infomercial. This has been a great way of not just keeping the team engaged and connected, but getting to know each other. 

How have these activities helped you lead an organisation that isn’t all physically together? 

As the CEO, to hear on a daily basis what everyone’s yesterday looked like and what everyone’s today looks like gives me a real sense of what’s happening and where things are at. The daily huddle in particular, which is not a long or laborious meeting, is a great way to just check in and know where everyone is at. 

What advice do you have for any leaders struggling to keep their teams connected and engaged at the moment? 

I think it’s really important to link back to the reason we’re all sitting at our desks, whether that be from home or in the office. It’s not just about getting things done, it’s about celebrating and understanding why you’re doing it. Something I can also recommend is a wellness survey. We do them every four or five months, and it’s really just a pulse check that people can do anonymously. It’s a good chance for us to help our people feel connected. Is motivation up or down? What can we do to help provide support? It was from those wellness surveys I knew people loved the chair challenges and the warmth of the daily huddles. So I would say, definitely, that’s a great place to start.