The shift toward hybrid work exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic and has since become a staple in all types of organizations. Professor Brad Bell, director of the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies at Cornell’s ILR School, shares strategies for managing hybrid teams.
Although hybrid teams can offer a number of benefits, leaders often find that the practices they have come to depend on for managing in-person teams do not translate well to the hybrid context. And with hybrid team management being the responsibility of both leaders and team members alike, where can you look for opportunities for improvement?
Join professor Brad Bell, director of the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies at Cornell’s ILR School, as he reviews the top five ways that hybrid teams are mismanaged and presents strategies for creating a high-functioning work mode for all team members.
What You'll Learn
The Cornell Keynotes podcast is brought to you by eCornell, which offers more than 200 online certificate programs to help professionals advance their careers and organizations. Brad Bell is an author of seven programs:
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Chris Wofford: Today on Cornell Keynotes, we are looking at ways that hybrid teams are often mismanaged, and how best in practice organizations are overcoming those challenges. What makes this episode a standout for me is how our guest, Brad Bell, from Cornell's ILR School, provides actionable steps toward hybrid team success that you can apply to your practice right away, including developing a shared understanding among your team, bringing clarity and unity to the mission, how to establish and maintain a hybrid team identity while creating an inclusive social climate, how to bring more people into the leadership process, and finally, how technology can make your hybrid team more agile and responsive. So check out the episode notes for a link to eCornell's online hybrid work strategy certificate. And now here's my conversation with Brad bell.
Chris Wofford: You say that managing in person teams involves something very different than managing teams in a hybrid environment, for the obvious reasons. But beyond that, what are the material differences? How do we think about this philosophically? What's the, what's the difference?
Brad Bell: Sure. Yeah, I think it's important to highlight upfront, Chris, first, this isn't entirely different, right? And we've been doing virtual teams for decades. People have been working remotely, telecommuting, you know, doing remote work for decades as well.
Brad Bell: So some of the foundations were in place well before the pandemic, but I think what's really changed post pandemic is this explosion in these hybrid work arrangements, so it's no longer just the kind of mix of in person and remote, but it's also these people that are really kind of oscillating back and forth between these two different types of work arrangements.
Brad Bell: And I think that really leads to kind of three key differences that we've been looking at in our research and we refer to as the three V's. So the first is variety. What you find in these hybrid teams is much more variety in terms of the nature of different types of work arrangements that people have.
Brad Bell: Of course, some people are going to be fully in person. Some may be fully remote. But then again, you have these people that are in these hybrid arrangements. And even within that bucket, you have a lot of variety. Some people might be in the office one day a week. Other people might be in the office four days a week and everything in between.
Brad Bell: So much more variety. Second is volatility. What you get when you have these hybrid arrangements is now I don't know where people are necessarily going to be on a given day. In the past, I knew you were a remote worker, so I'd have to connect with you via technology. I knew these other people I'd see in the office. Now with hybrid work, I don't know. Where these hybrid workers are necessarily going to be on a particular day, unless a company has things like anchor days or specified days for in office versus remote. And so that's a, that unpredictability of these arrangements is a new kind of challenge that I think we're wrestling with.
Chris Wofford: Can I ask you something about that? So what that involves is a certain diligence on the part of management, how is that perceived, right? So then suddenly you have people kind of micromanaging your, your whereabouts. I mean, ideally a high functioning team, there's trust involved. You're going to get the work done. That's cool. We'll figure it out, right? Has this introduced any new problems for, people not being used to this? Oh, I feel like I'm constantly being asked where I am right now.
Brad Bell: It can lead potentially to this kind of monitoring effect, right, where you feel like you're kind of always being watched. Again, I think some organizations have addressed this by saying we're going to have those specific days where people are going to be in the office and these days are going to be at home. I've also seen technology solutions. I've worked with companies that now have it where you can go and you can see through a dashboard, here's where my team members are today, right? Are they in the office? And increasingly companies are even going to these flexible seating arrangements, so it might be there in the office and they're at this workstation today. So I think there's ways to get around it where it's not, Hey, I need to check in every day and, you know, tell my boss where I am that can provide that transparency or that clarity around people where people are sitting.
Chris Wofford: And that unburdens management to I mean, let's be honest, right? I'm gonna be out for an eye doctor appointment. I'll be back in 45 sure doesn't take much to do that, right?
Brad Bell: And I've heard from a lot of managers and HR professionals that say they're just getting tired of kind of policing this and it's not viewed as high value added work. So yes, we need, you know, again, it's important for a team to know where their members are, but the ways we can do that seamlessly and without much kind of, manual tracking, the better.
Chris Wofford: In your research and interactions with, industry partners, I imagine at this point, right, we're four years out of COVID, taking place. You've probably got some historical data to report on any big picture things that you observe that's kind of beyond what the obvious stuff that we all kind of collectively know.
Chris Wofford: What have you seen recently?
Brad Bell: I think one is just how rapid and dramatic a change this has been for organizations and employees. You know, prior to the pandemic data shows that about, you know, employees are spending 5 percent of their days on average working from home, and so that meant most people were working in the office most of the time. That jumped to 60 percent during the pandemic, and it's leveled out at about 30 percent of all full time days are now spent working from home. That's equivalent to about, you know, kind of look at the way remote work was gradually lead. You know, ticking up over the years. That's 40 years of growth in remote and working from home in a couple of years.
Brad Bell: So that's been a dramatic shift for everybody to deal with. I think the second big kind of change or leveling out we've seen is, early in the pandemic it was what was going to be the new normal as we, you know, beyond this, you know, was it going to be full time remote work? Was it going to be bringing everybody back in the office or something else?
Brad Bell: And it's clear now it's just something else. It's a hybrid work model has emerged. It's a dominant model. You know, 45 percent of employees are spending are in that arrangement. About 35 percent are back in the office full time and 20 percent are fully remote. So I think that hybrid model is clearly where we're going to be, you know, going forward.
Brad Bell: And I think the last one is. This continues to evolve uh, think as organizations experiment as they figure out what works, what doesn't work, how much kind of structure there needs to be around this they continue to modify their policies and practices. And some of this honestly changes based on the prerogatives of who's in charge.
Brad Bell: There's a great example I saw recently in the media where. A new mayor came on board in Philadelphia, and she decided that she wanted all city workers back in the office and mandated that set a date. It was challenged in court, but was determined to be management prerogative. So now all these employees have to come back when they thought they were going to be, you know, working from home full or part time. And so that happens in corporations as well, where a leader kind of drives the change.
Chris Wofford: You've devised a list of five things that we can do to address some of these shortcomings, some of these areas where we can get some wins. Number one is shared understanding. So what are we talking about? How might that help what we see here?
Brad Bell: Sure. So, you know, we know that one of the keys to success of any team is to have what we often refer to as a clear course, right?
Brad Bell: Everybody needs to know what we're trying to achieve, what are our goals, what are our mission, how we're going to get there. And I think in traditional in person teams sometimes that just occurs or emerges organically right through discussion through interaction through shared experience. But that again, because of all the issues we just saw in the word cloud, you know, challenges with communication challenges with connection, it can be difficult to build that shared understanding.
Brad Bell: And so hybrid team leaders really need to be purposeful about doing that, taking the time with their team to really sit down and make sure everybody's on the same page in terms of, Here's where we're going, Here's how we're going to get there, Here's a role that you're going to play and revisiting that and making sure everybody stays on the same page throughout the process.
Brad Bell: Cause if you don't do that, what you're going to get is people that have different views of what is the team's goals, how are we trying to do it. And the team's going to be going in a million different directions and ultimately probably won't achieve its objectives.
Chris Wofford: So I don't want to get too tactically in the weeds, but I have a certain experience with this kind of thing.
Chris Wofford: We revisit our objectives and our mission quite often. I think if you were to do it more than quarterly, would that be weird? Like, how are people doing this?
Brad Bell: I think it varies on the team in terms of, you know, just how, how dynamic is the environment that the team's operating in. I mean, it might be for some teams, they need to do it weekly because they're just working quickly and things are changing so rapidly.
Brad Bell: Other teams that maybe have a longer time scope on the work they're doing or a more stable environment, it might be quarterly. It might be once or twice a year. So it's hard to specify a specific timeline, but the important thing is to really establish it up front, make sure everybody's clear on it and come back and revisit it in particular once when new team members come on board, right?
Brad Bell: When you have those changes in your team membership and dynamic, you need to recognize those people aren't on the same page as the rest of the team. And you really need to take the time to do that and to do it in a purposeful manner because it's not going to happen through osmosis as it might in a traditional in person team.
Chris Wofford: And any manager worth their salt can kind of look around and say, they're not doing what's strategically required of them right now. So maybe I need to set them straight.
Brad Bell: But that's an interesting point, Chris, because yes, that happens in a traditional team, a manager can walk around, look and talk to people and know when the team's going off the rails as you know, I think we're going to touch on a little bit, that's harder to do in a virtual and hybrid context again, because people are out kind of working on their own a good chunk of the time. So even more reason why you need to set that clear course for the team, because as a manager, you're not going to be able to constantly be kind of bumping people to get them, you know, online. So I think that's why it's really one of the foundations for successful hybrid work.
Chris Wofford: So, number two, hybrid team identity. What do you recommend here? What's the problem that we're solving? How useful is identity? What's the point?
Brad Bell: One of the big risks, one of the challenges we find with hybrid teams, virtual teams as well, is that they can easily fragment, right?
Brad Bell: So what we end up with is we end up with clicks, we end up with silos, we end up with people that are sitting out on an island by themselves and aren't really integrated into the team. And that can again, create conflict. It can lead to people having different viewpoints on what we should be doing or accomplishing as a team.
Brad Bell: And so again, part of the reason why setting that course, having that shared understanding is so critical is so that we have that clear team identity. This is, this is our team. Here's what we're doing and trying to accomplish. This is our mission. Because if you don't have that, it's very easy for these teams to bifurcate and and it can be very hard to get everybody back on the same page.
Brad Bell: The other thing we also find with hybrid teams is they tend to be more diverse because we're often pulling in people from all over. They might have different backgrounds. I might be sitting in different countries so that diversity can also make it harder to establish a common identity. And so having kind of what we often refer to as a third culture, so everybody might have their own individual cultures and backgrounds where that's functional uh, geographical, but raising that up to have a third culture for the team that everybody identifies with and that creates the unity within the team.
Chris Wofford: I'm also thinking about this from a bigger picture internal kind of thing, right? So I'm on a product management team. I think we do a pretty good job with our team identity and it's very useful for all of us internally, but we have a pretty strong brand within the organization so that everybody else understands very clearly what we do and I think that's probably useful.
Brad Bell: Yeah. No, absolutely and there's fascinating research that's done a decade or so ago that found that a lot of people don't even know who's on their team and people outside of the team certainly don't know who's on the team, right? So having that clear identity and knowing this is our team and making sure that's clear to others in the organization, I think to your point, is really essential.
Chris Wofford: I have my org chart on my desktop.
Brad Bell: That's one way to do it.
Chris Wofford: Yeah, it is. So, there's another aspect to this. Something that you call social climate.
Chris Wofford: How is this distinguished from the other two that we just talked about? You had suggested supporting the social climate of your hybrid team. Is the leader or manager's job to build trust, member well-being, and stuff like that. So that's where that responsibility lies.
Brad Bell: I think so. I think what we know about any type of virtual interaction is that it tends to be much more task focused than relationship focus.
Brad Bell: So, you know, we don't have those kind of spontaneous interactions. We don't have the discussions before the meeting starts or after the meeting ends. It tends to be very get down to business, you know, focus on the agenda items at hand and what that can do is really make it difficult to build relationships and social connections.
Brad Bell: Again, going back to that word cloud, we saw connection, social, I mean, communication, cohesion, that's all kind of endemic of this problem that we have in building tight relationships, building a really kind of supportive social climate in these settings. And so this is a place where virtual or hybrid leaders really need to be purposeful about doing that.
Brad Bell: What we've seen is a lot of teams try to do it through these events. You know, we're gonna have a virtual happy hour. We're going to get together and do build a banjo, whatever it might be. And not to say those things aren't valuable in some cases, what we're finding is that actually what's much more valuable is building it into the regular rhythm of your team.
Brad Bell: So take five to 10 minutes of every team meeting. And just have open discussion like you would if you were gathering together in a conference room before the meeting starts. What are people up to? What's going on in your lives? You know, what did you do this weekend? You know, what, what vacation are you going on this summer?
Brad Bell: And by doing that, we get to know each other as people. We get to know people on a personal level beyond just the professional. And that's what builds the social connections and those social relationships.
Chris Wofford: You know, sometimes it's easy to think of that stuff as, as, as corny or cheesy. You know, we're doing another.
Chris Wofford: Yeah, another goofy group activity. What is this all for? But it is. It's not enough to do your job, right?
Brad Bell: Yeah, but I think that's also the point of building it into the regular rhythm of the team. Because I think when it's, hey, we're going to carve out this time and we're all going to have a virtual happy hour, coffee hour.
Brad Bell: That seems forced sometimes, and it seems artificial, but if it's what we do as a team is we spend five minutes at the beginning of every meeting, checking in. How's everybody doing? What are you up to? Then it just becomes part of our natural operating procedures. And I think that reduces that ickiness that sometimes people get about those kind of team building types of activities.
Chris Wofford: Next point. So this is number four leadership process.
Chris Wofford: You had suggested that a leader should encourage team members to participate in the process, maybe a little more delegation of duty. What do you mean by this? I like this one.
Brad Bell: Yeah, so, I think a knee jerk reaction of many leaders when they get in the context of leading a virtual hybrid team is, well, I can't see people like I normally would.
Brad Bell: I can't do management by walk around. So I really need to I need to micromanage. I need to really get my hands on this team and make sure I really kind of monitor. And you even see some organizations go as far as putting into place monitoring technology where we're tracking employees, keystrokes and things to know if they're working throughout the day.
Brad Bell: That's a whole nother topic. But what evidence shows is that that's actually the wrong approach for managers as teams become more virtual, as they become more hybrid, they actually perform much better when members feel empowered. They feel like they have autonomy. They feel like they could make decisions.
Brad Bell: And in part, that's because leaders, as we talked about earlier, can't be as hands on in this context. They can't monitor in the same way. They can't intervene on a daily basis. So what they really need is kind of eyes on and hands off. They need to be kind of watching how things are going, stepping in when needed, but really need to encourage their employees to make decisions.
Brad Bell: They need to solicit their input actively. They need to give them responsibilities, you know, in terms of managing the team and taking on different parts of the teamwork, you know, two caveats though Chris, one is we don't do this on day one. This is as a team develops and matures and gets to a point you do this gradually, right?
Brad Bell: And the second is I alluded to is it doesn't mean that all of a sudden I get to a point where as a leader, I'm, I'm totally laissez faire. I'm monitoring, I'm making sure things are kind of going in the right direction and stepping in as needed. But the point is to encourage the team to take on more and more of that self management role.
Chris Wofford: Hybridization of a team, from what I understand, what I've experienced is we've got a lot more tasks all of a sudden, right? There's a lot more digital organization of people building meetings, sharing docs, getting our workspace going, all that stuff that would normally take place. But that it's been my experience that's kind of a good quick win, right?
Chris Wofford: Once there's been trust established, the leader has, you know, done all the right things with the team just to relieve themselves of some of that stuff must make an impact.
Brad Bell: Absolutely. And I think that builds confidence among the team members, but it also helps build trust between different team members.
Brad Bell: Cause they see different people stepping up, taking accountability, taking responsibility, and they know, Hey, I can depend on Chris. I've seen Chris take on these tasks, perform them at the standard that we would expect, and now that starts to build that trust, which is really critical because we don't have that line of sight always into what each other is doing in this virtual context.
Chris Wofford: Number five, agile technology. What are we talking about here? We all use the tools, right? We're all online. Where is the agile? Why is that so critical?
Brad Bell: I think the agile is important because we know that teams, what they're working on at any given time, their environment, these things are going to change.
Brad Bell: And so we need to be careful not to have our pet tool or technology that we go to in every situation and every time we need to be aware that we might adopt the tool or technology that turns out not to work so great for our team and be willing to change that you know, we often have people across maybe different generations or different levels of comfort with technology.
Brad Bell: So really kind of, making sure as a leader, you're kind of monitoring how these tools are being used, setting clear parameters and expectations about how they should be used effectively. For example, if conflict emerges in the team, do we want people trying to resolve that through email or slack?
Brad Bell: Probably not. We want them to jump on a zoom call or if possible to get together the next time in their office and resolve that because we know that face to face communication is much better for resolving things like conflict. So having as a leader kind of clear guardrails for how the technology should be used and thinking about how you might need to modify the technologies themselves over time is really critical.
Chris Wofford: You know, Peter asks maybe the most complicated question of the day, but you alluded to it just a moment ago. Peter asks, how do you handle staff conflict in a virtual setting? Now let me back up a little bit. Are there certain types of conflicts that do emerge within a hybrid setting just because of the nature of the work that we do?
Brad Bell: I'm not sure that there's necessarily new types of conflict that emerge in hybrid settings. I think to Peter's, you know, question, I think the bigger challenge is how to deal with that. And I think the first thing you need to think about as a leader is what type of conflict are we talking about, right?
Brad Bell: Because there's good conflict and there's bad conflict. Good conflict is task conflict. We are having disagreements about the work, about things that we're doing, ideas, et cetera. That's actually productive. You know, if we create a psychologically safe environment, our team, we want challenge and debate, that's key to team learning and creativity and innovation.
Brad Bell: What's bad is relationship conflict. When that conflict spills over into the interpersonal. And that's again, where I think using the wrong technologies to try to deal with that's where you start getting these people misinterpret language, they misinterpret things in email because these are not rich communication mediums.
Brad Bell: That's why I think it's critical when that interpersonal conflict arises to deal with it in person. Manager might need to get involved to really help kind of mediate that, but I think that is where the use of technology really needs to be aligned to the challenge the team is facing.
Chris Wofford: Yeah, right. You need to have what's equivalent to the the office talk once in a while with somebody, right?
Chris Wofford: Sure. Shouldn't have done that on Slack. Let's figure this out.
Brad Bell: And I would also say to Peter's question, the best thing you can do is to try to prevent or avoid conflict in the first place. And that's why setting that really strong foundation, have a strong team identity, setting a clear course for the team where everybody is kind of moving in the same direction, not to say that conflict isn't gonna pop up from time to time.
Brad Bell: It always does. But by having that foundation, you can probably reign it in much more quickly because you have clear kind of norms and expectations and values established in the team.
Chris Wofford: So in your Hybrid Work certificate program that you've recently updated, how do you structure teaching this kind of stuff?
Chris Wofford: You and I met earlier this week and you talked about the different courses within it and some of the themes that you cover in much more depth than what we're doing here today. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Cause I think that's instructive for our audience. Whether they take the certificate or not to think about some of the things that you're just going to tell us about in a moment.
Brad Bell: Yeah, I was really excited to work on this certificate because it was myself and two of our other faculty Donna and Theomary. Donna is in Applied Economics and Management. Theomary is in the Johnson School. And so the way we set it up is the first course really kind of gives a lay of the land, a common language to think about hybrid work.
Brad Bell: You know, here's the different ways it can exist. Here are some issues and challenges that we might face. Donna then really digs into the team dynamics piece. So how do you set up and kind of monitor and evaluate effective team process and performance in this environment? I then get into leading and managing these types of teams. And Theomary is an expert in communication.
Brad Bell: So she did, you know, pertinent to our discussion we we're just having how do you communicate? What types of tools should be you be using in different situations? And so I think it really covers the full span, but nicely also builds in these projects and applications throughout so you can assess your own teams.
Brad Bell: You can figure out where challenges may lie and a ton of tools and frameworks that have you kind of dig in and resolve those challenges in your teams.
Chris Wofford: Hey, I've been asked to provide some clarity for Jessica and Richard who missed the third V. Oh yeah. So we had, we had variety and volatility. What was the third one?
Brad Bell: Yeah. I don't think we got to the third one. We didn't. I think you asked me to follow up and we, we didn't get to it. But the third one is volition. So we talked about variety. We talked about volatility. Third one is volition. By that we mean control or choice. And what we find is in in hybrid teams, there's often some people that have a lot of control over determining their work arrangement than others by the nature of their jobs, maybe based on the nature of their tenure with the organization don't have that choice.
Brad Bell: And our research suggests that when you have these differences in volition or choice or control across a hybrid team, that's problematic because what that does is it creates perceptions of unfairness, creates perceptions of inequity within the team. Sometimes that can't be avoided. You know, sometimes people just need to be on site given the nature of their jobs.
Brad Bell: What's key for a leader or an organization is to communicate. Here's why you have to be there, right? Here's, you know, we're saying you need to be on site, and here's why. Giving that rationale, making sure that explanation is transparent, because if you don't do that, people make up their own explanations, which often.
Brad Bell: Oh, it's because of favoritism. It's because of other things like that, that are non job relevant and lead to those perceptions of unfairness.
Chris Wofford: Early on in the conversation you had suggested, and we were thinking big picture stuff, trends observed over the last four years, the way things are. I haven't heard anybody say the new normal in quite some time.
Chris Wofford: So that was a little, that was a little triggering to hear that. But so hybrid is here, right? David has something that we touched on a little bit, which is thoughts on how to encourage in person engagement. So, you know, for the Philadelphia mayor who made what sounds like a pretty misguided move, maybe it'll prove to be uh, it'll work or, or not.
Chris Wofford: How do you approach this kind of thing when, you feel like your organization works better when there's more people in person?
Brad Bell: Yeah, I think, you know, I mentioned earlier what we've seen among a lot of organizations is I think in the early days of the pandemic, as we were implementing hybrid work, it was somewhat of a free for all, we were going to let each team, each manager kind of dictate what they wanted to do.
Brad Bell: We were going to let people decide which days they wanted to work from home or in the office, and it was all over the place. And that made it really hard to get employees back in the office at all because a lot of employees what they found where I'm going to go into the office today and none of my team is here.
Brad Bell: I'm interacting with everybody at the interact with through zoom. Why am I in the office today? And what we're seeing is a lot of organizations now specifying those anchor days, or at least teams specifying those anchor days and set days so that there is more of a value proposition for employees to be back in the office.
Brad Bell: The other key kind of enticement that I would give to employees. One thing that research has shown pretty clearly. If there's a downside to remote or virtual work it's career advancement. People that work more virtually tend to progress in their careers at a slower rate, out of sight, out of mind.
Brad Bell: They don't get the prime assignments, just proximity to their leaders. So I would say if people care about advancement if they care about, you know, kind of moving forward and getting those choice assignments that having some of that in person engagement and interaction beyond just how it's going to benefit the team and its ability to do certain types of work, I think, is a good argument to put in place.
Brad Bell: And I'm hearing more and more companies, particularly for more junior talent, kind of conveying that message, you know, that it's best for you to be in the office, at least sometimes.
Chris Wofford: I didn't know how I was going to make you say it, but when I was driving in, I knew that we were going to talk about how important optics were.
Chris Wofford: And in this case, absolutely.
Brad Bell: Absolutely. I mean, I think it's just, I don't think it's a conscious effect often. I think it's often unconscious, but we know proximity matters. We know that unfortunately, I still think you know, being visible and putting in the hours, so to speak uh, of above and beyond what you're actually producing from a tangible output.
Brad Bell: I hope we get to the day where people can be totally evaluated on what they're producing and their outcomes, but we're still at a point where a lot of it's face time. That's just unfortunately the way a lot of our evaluation occurs still within organizations today.
Chris Wofford: You know, perfectly useful for employees and employers.
Chris Wofford: Brad Bell, always a pleasure to have you. Thanks, Chris. A lot of fun. Yeah, you bet. See you, everybody. We'll see you at the next Keynote. Thank you.
Chris Wofford: Thanks for listening to Cornell Keynotes and check out the episode notes for information on the online hybrid work strategy certificate, which is faculty authored by our guest, Brad Bell. Thanks again, friends, and subscribe to stay in touch.