Many organisations have policies, procedures and guidance in place about hybrid work. As a manager you should familiarise yourself with any relevant existing company guidance and training on hybrid working. You should share any learnt information with your team.

The effectiveness of hybrid working can increase through regular team discussions about ways of working. 

It is helpful to talk to team members about their personal preferences for working patterns. Although it may not be possible to meet all employee preferences, when people are able to work within their preferred style, this can help productivity and increase engagement. 

Regular dialogue could focus on some of the following points: 

• What is working well about our approach to hybrid work?
• What challenges do we experience when working in a hybrid way, and how can we overcome them?
• How effective is our balance of time in the office versus remote work? Are we meeting the needs of our stakeholders, colleagues or customers?
• When we work in a hybrid way, how can we ensure that we are inclusive, fair and work with wellbeing in mind?
• Is there anything we can do to continue to improve our ways of working? 

How hybrid working is managed will vary according to the type of work being undertaken. It is important to engage in ongoing conversations with your team and adapt your approach as you learn.

When you have listened and fed back to team members, it is important to set guidelines about how much time the team needs to spend co-located working. This might be one day per quarter or four days a week. The approach will depend on the team and the way that work is coordinated. 

When recruiting new team members be sure to provide information on hybrid work opportunities and how hybrid working operates in your team. 

Strong communication can be achieved through planning.

Good communication is a team's responsibility. Consider some of the following:

• Decide upon key communication channels. There are many ways to communicate – but too many can be overwhelming. It can be helpful to agree primary channels for certain purposes. Check that all team members know how to use the selected channels. 
• Define a process for sharing working arrangements and locations. Agree a mechanism for sharing who is working where and when.
• Consider when and how different forms of communication should take place. Is a meeting the right format for a status update, or should the communications be delivered via email? Separate which communications should take place in 'real time', and which can be shared in a way that people can consume the information at their convenience. 

When it comes to team members’ roles and performance indicators, it is easy for misunderstandings to arise. Take time to check that each person has understood what you are expecting of them – and what they can expect of you.

Remind your team about the big picture and how their work fits into it. Review goals regularly and ensure that desired work outcomes are clearly communicated – this is especially important when employees work some of their time remotely. Talk about performance on a regular basis, providing clear feedback.  Schedule regular meetings to discuss progress. It is important to find out what will motivate each team member and work with them on this.  

The CIPD has more information on effective performance management here.

Be clear about mutual expectations and trust your team to get on without micromanaging. Focus on results and outcomes rather than activity and face-time.

As well as empowering your team, they also need to know that they can call on you for support when needed – let people know how best to do this. This could be in the development of skills such as time management, self-motivation and flexibility. This may be particularly relevant if someone joins your team who has not worked in a hybrid way before.

Meetings maintain a sense of structure and continuity. It will help to foster relationships and support effective communication. Think about the following:

• How often does the team need to meet, and for what purpose?
• When should meetings be online, and when should they be face-to-face?
• What other ways are there to communicate other than meetings?

Depending on the type of work you could consider a virtual daily huddle. This can be essential for keeping connected as a team. Huddles allow a space to check in on each other’s wellbeing and keep workflow on track. It needn’t be long, but regularity is key. 

Keep databases, file stores and project management apps up to date, and agree how to label files so that everyone can find information.

Without physical “water-cooler conversations” on remote working days, opportunities to pick up information in passing are more limited. Share appropriate updates or learnings from other meetings and projects and invite your team to do the same. 

As hybrid work is still relatively new for many teams, it is important to keep ways of working under review and adapt them where necessary to support success. Make a point to talk to your team about how they feel hybrid working is working for them, and seek feedback on areas for improvement. Areas for discussion could include technology, communication, meetings and collaboration. If you need to make changes be sure to communicate them to everyone.  

To maintain networking and inter-team relationships, try:

• Identifying which teams you need to interact informally with and roster the overlap of days in the workplace – maybe once a quarter, maybe several days a week, depending on need. 
• Encouraging those who spend a lot of time homeworking to maintain their personal and inter-team networks over the long term. They will need to be more deliberate in seeking out networking opportunities.
• Suggesting that long-term homeworkers join company-wide steering groups, projects or special interest networks to maintain their connections across the organisation.
• Helping new teams network and build relationships can be an important part of ensuring effective ways of working. If a team is newly formed, such as a project team for a specific piece of work, put extra effort into facilitating the networking and spending time together.
• Maximise in-person time – when people come into the office encourage them to focus on spending time with others rather than focusing on tasks they could do independently when working remotely. Think about how you can support this through team activities or events. 

Informal learning is an important part of an employer’s offering, and it may even be managed better in a hybrid world. To help your team establish and maintain informal learning:

• Recognise the points when more informal learning is needed, for example when joining the organisation (at any level), after a promotion, when taking on a new task or area of responsibility, or when switching project team. Research suggests that onboarding can be supported by in-person time – so be sure to have an effective balance of office and remote work in learning plans for new starters. 
• Organise a wider formal support network instead of a single buddy at points of intense learning.
• Create more formal documentation of information, to meet learning needs, and ensure it is organised in an accessible way and kept up to date.
• In project-based work, mix people up on consecutive projects to create greater opportunities for sharing knowledge.
• When a new person joins the team, rota colleagues’ time in the workplace, to avoid a new starter feeling unsupported by remote-working colleagues.
• Long-term homeworkers will need to be more deliberate about seeking out opportunities for learning and development. Discuss their needs and be proactive about approaching people they can learn from. Share out learning tasks with everyone, not just those you are co-located with. 

To maintain good health and wellbeing, it is important for you and your team to create boundaries. As a manager, you should model this behaviour. You may want to encourage conversations, or create policies, on the following: 

• Encourage your teams to embrace boundary-setting and the use of routines to create appropriate start and finish times. Build in breaks to the working day. Make time in team meetings for sharing boundary-setting strategies. 
• Share your availability with colleagues if you’re working at home and encourage your team to do the same. If you don’t have a system that shows people’s availability on screen, keep open calendars and agree how to indicate availability, so that nobody feels reluctant to contact you when you’re working at home – and everyone knows when not to contact you.  
• Lead by example. If it suits you to do your emails late at night, add a note on your email footer to make it clear that you don’t expect others to do so. If you take time out during the working day for personal reasons, be open about your non-work commitments. 
• Make sure you have good measurements of output in place so you can trust your team to deliver. Check on workload as part of regular one-to-ones.
• Be clear about expectations of hours as well as outputs. If you just rely on measuring outputs, people can end up working longer hours. 
• If you notice someone regularly starting early or working late, check out what’s going on. Be aware of how someone is using their former commute time so you can be sure they’re not overworking.  
• Set a rule that team video calls will end five minutes before the hour or half-hour, so that people can take five minutes before their next call or meeting. 
• Discourage presenteeism. In the example of a homeworker (as with any team member) being unwell, encourage them to take time off and handover on urgent work. As a manager, you should model this behaviour yourself. 

For your behaviour to come across as authentic and supportive, you will need to have an attitude of genuine care and concern for the team’s wellbeing.

Not being in the same room means you don't have extra information from body language or tone to get the sense of what people are thinking or feeling, particularly in more difficult conversations.

Make time for social conversations. This increases rapport and eases communication between people who may not meet often. It also reduces feelings of isolation. Try face-to-face ‘keeping in touch’ events or days with no work purpose, purely for social relationships and team building.

It is important to take a consistent approach to management when overseeing a hybrid team. Empower people, build trust and ensure that all communications are clear. 

When working remotely there is an increased risk of misunderstanding of messages and the potential for conflict. It is important that you prevent this where possible, by:

• establishing good communication systems
• being alert to the early signs of conflict
• having clear, agreed approaches for managing conflict
• dealing with any conflicts as early as possible, impartially and supportively.

It is possible that issues will arise in relation to hybrid work and managers will need to address conflict. If conflict does arise, address it early, effectively and in an impartial manner. Include a follow up on any conflict as appropriate. Refer to the guide on managing conflict for more information.