In hybrid work, the importance of agile working methods is emphasized in addition to communication and collaboration skills. Read our tips for better interaction in a distributed team.

As hybrid work has become more common, it has brought many advantages, such as increased productivity, flexibility, and work-life balance. However, it also poses challenges, such as maintaining effective communication, collaboration, and coordination among distributed team members.

How can you successfully interact in a hybrid work environment and utilize agile working methods to manage your work? These tips can help you thrive in a mixed work environment and achieve your professional and personal goals.

1. Communicate clearly and regularly

In a hybrid work environment, the importance of communication in operating a successful team is emphasized even more. Communicating clearly and often with your colleagues, supervisors, and customers using different channels and tools helps you and others stay informed about the progress of the work.

In distributed teams, team members from different locations may never interact face-to-face or in real-time. Communication helps build trust, relationships, and cooperation between team members and shares information, feedback, and ideas.

For example, you can share information, updates, feedback, and questions using email, chat, phone, video conferencing, and project management software. Commonly agreed, straightforward operating methods for using different communication channels also help manage interruptions better without worrying about digital overload.

Regular team meetings, for example, via video calls, also help build a strong sense of community and trust. Reading and interpreting each other’s body language, tone of voice, direction of gaze, and facial expressions is an essential part of interaction, which helps us act and make good decisions. In remote work, this dimension of communication is missing unless we see each other from time to time through video calls.

2. Promote collaboration with transparency

In addition to communication, collaboration is another essential skill in hybrid work. You must work with others to achieve common goals, solve problems, and generate ideas.

Take advantage of Microsoft 365 programs for effective collaboration, such as tools for commenting and co-editing documents. Teams channels for different projects or work phases help centralize information, documents, and communication in their places, making working on different things clearer.

In a distributed team, transparency is essential to what others and you do. Maintaining common situational awareness inevitably results in joint coordination, which promotes the building of shared understanding. A good and functional tool is, for example, the Kanban board in Microsoft’s Planner, where the work queue of each team member can be seen visually.

3. Implement agile working methods

Agile working methods are operating methods and structures that help teams deliver value to customers quickly and flexibly. Within them, individuals can act flexibly and autonomously. Agile working methods can help you manage your work in a hybrid environment by promoting adaptability, transparency, and accountability.

Agile frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, or Lean help organize work into short, iterative cycles. Quick versioning enables the presentation of the work, which can be discussed together.

The central idea of the Kanban method I mentioned earlier is to divide a project or other work entity into small parts, typically into “not done,” “work in progress,” and “done” phases. Visualizing work tasks helps to prioritize and optimize work and limit the amount of work in progress.

Scrum systematically divides complex projects and tasks into smaller parts that are easier to solve. In Scrum, the team tries to find a way to achieve a common goal by working together. The method consists of different roles, tools, and meetings that help achieve results moving towards the goal. The team works on certain, predefined tasks of the sub-projects of the entire project in development cycles, or sprints, typically lasting about 2–4 weeks.

Lean is a philosophy and practice that aims to eliminate waste and maximize value in any process. Lean work methods can help distributed teams, among other things, optimize their work and produce added value for customers. They can also improve productivity and performance by streamlining workflows, reducing errors, and increasing collaboration.

4. Maintain a healthy work-life balance

Work-life balance is balancing your professional and personal responsibilities and interests. However, achieving or maintaining a balance can be challenging in a hybrid work environment as you may face overwork, isolation, or burnout.

You should take care of your physical and mental health and make your well-being a priority. For example, you can set a regular and realistic schedule, take breaks, exercise, meditate, socialize, and pursue your interests. You must also respect your own and other people’s working time and leave work aside when you are done.

5. Enhance the skills needed in hybrid working with micro-learning

Hybrid work offers many opportunities and benefits. However, it also requires skills and strategies to function effectively in a diverse and dynamic work environment.

With Academy of Brain’s micro-courses, which last less than 10 minutes, you can develop the skills necessary for hybrid working, such as high-quality interaction, collaboration, agile working methods, and self-management.

The ready-made package of 80 courses offers training, available on the Intranet or in the Viva Learning application, to develop the most essential human skills, such as collaboration and interaction, trust and safety, leadership, growth mindset, and mental well-being.

Read more:

• More results and less stress with time management
• Build trust and success in virtual teams
• How to manage interruptions and stay focused

Contact us, and let’s talk more about how you can use Microsoft 365 tools to make your work more efficient in a hybrid environment and a distributed team!

Marko Koskela
Chief Commercial Officer