The New Workspace: Best Practices for Fostering Collaboration and Community in Remote or Hybrid Teams

By Christy Uffelman

Are you struggling to curate inclusion and foster a sense of community within your remote or hybrid team?

In 2020, the world experienced a rapid and dramatic shift to remote work, shifting the traditional concept of workPLACE into one of workSPACE and leaving many leaders unsure of how to navigate this new normal. The tradition

• Language: English
• Publisher: StoryBuilders, LLC
• Release date: Oct 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781954521186

Book preview

THE REMOTE AND HYBRID CHALLENGE AS PEOPLE LEADERS

Iwill never forget the day I received a phone call from one of my direct reports, Nicole (not her real name), when she told me I was a punitive leader. To say I was dumbfounded would be a considerable understatement.

She listed all the negative characteristics I had as a leader, ending with her (very angry) resignation. Before this interaction, Nicole and I had never had any issues. So what went so incredibly wrong?

Nicole was a group coach for our EDGE Leadership team, and across our two years of working together, our relationship had always been 100% remote. She had been recommended to me by a mutual colleague, so I didn’t question her abilities when I brought her on to the team, and up until this devastating conversation, I had very few challenges with her as a direct report. Our relationship happened primarily at a distance as we weren’t actually in the room together all that often; in fact, most of the time we didn’t even share client engagements.

Nicole was tasked with leading group coaching sessions with a cohort of high-potential leaders at one of our largest corporate clients. Her reports back to me were always extremely positive, talking about how much she loved this work, even to the point of enthusiastically sharing that she felt like her cohort group members had become like her family.

As I came to find out when I did a check-in with the client, Nicole was not meeting expectations—so much so that they didn’t want to renew the contract with her.

In short, the coaching relationship with this client was not working, and in the conversation one week prior to the fateful day of this extremely uncomfortable phone call, I told her exactly that. As I said, things seemed to be just fine between the two of us up to that point. So, what had caused Nicole to take my feedback so negatively? And more importantly, where had I gone wrong as a leader?

To be perfectly transparent, while it would be easy to say that Nicole couldn’t handle constructive feedback (since this was really the first significant example of such feedback I had given her), her quitting was mine to own. As I heard her list out multiple grievances against me, (each one the first time I had ever heard it), I knew that even though we had our monthly 1:1s consistently, I hadn’t created a strong personal connection with Nicole. She was a well-trained coach who knew how to do her job, and I allowed her the freedom to practice from a distance—in retrospect, too far of a distance. So much so that I assumed everything was okay since her report-outs never mentioned a challenge and struggle more than a simple, surface one. And I busied myself, as many of us managers do, with all the other much louder and more intense fires going on with my other team members, with my peers, and, of course, those fires occupying my own life.

Without that authentic connection, I had no way of knowing what truly went wrong. Not only was I unaware of the degree of the situation with Nicole and the client, but I also had no idea if there was something humming in the background of her life that had contributed to her less-than-stellar results. The fact that I had no way of knowing how best to approach the constructive feedback with her put a spotlight on my lack of curating a sense of belonging where Nicole felt safe to share her struggles and imperfections.

So, in the end, my professional relationship with Nicole ended, and she quickly saw to it that all connections between us were severed. It was an unfortunate experience I carry with me yet today as an example of what I can never allow to happen again with any direct report on my team, remote or otherwise.

THE MISSING CONNECTION

Why do I tell you this story? I believe it is time for leaders to ensure that employees working remotely—and that’s nearly one in four of us at the time of the writing of this book—receive the authentic connection and sense of belonging in the workspace we all need.

Having a remote or hybrid team makes it difficult to connect. A team can go days, maybe even weeks, without talking one on one with anyone else on the team, if they are even allowed to do so. How can they possibly feel like they belong, let alone have a connection?

Without regular in-person meetings and interactions, our team members can feel like they are all alone on an island. If they don’t have a connection, especially with you as their leader, what kind of sustained commitment can they have to the organization? What kind of engagement will they have with the projects they’re assigned?

How can you, as a leader, ensure that your team understands the organization’s goals and purpose when you don’t have regular authentic connections with them? And with that, how can you know that they are giving you their very best work and using their work time productively and effectively?

The simple answer to all of these situations: you can’t. What got us here won’t get us there! If there is no concerted effort made by you, the leader, to create the connection and sense